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This afternoon, I represented the WGA at a virtual roundtable organized by the Federal Trade Commission on the impact of AI on creative professions. It ended up being a great panel that brought together a range of disciplines from writing to music to visual arts.

In her opening remarks, FTC Chair Lina M. Khan called out the WGA’s recent wins in establishing AI protections, as did commissioners Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya.

The full video of the panel will be up at some point, but in the meantime, here are my opening remarks, prepared with our incredible Guild staff members Laura Blum-Smith, Erica Knox and Rachel Torres.

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I’m here on behalf of the Writers Guild of America West, a labor union representing thousands of writers of film, television and streaming series. Our members, and the members of Writers Guild of America East, have just concluded a 148-day strike where artificial intelligence was a key issue. Our fellow artists at SAG-AFTRA are still on strike, with AI as a core issue for them as well. But the fight for protection over our craft and livelihoods doesn’t stop at the bargaining table—while we have been able to achieve groundbreaking protections for writers, we need public policy solutions too. 


Obviously, copyright is an area of government scrutiny, both the copyrightability of AI-generated works, and the degree to which training AI models infringes on copyright. WGA writers do not hold copyright for the scripts we write; those are works made for hire, so the studios—our employers—hold the copyright. But through the power of our union, we have over the decades negotiated an assortment of contractual rights in the works we create, including the right to payment for reuse of our work. It’s a good reminder that while copyright is important, it’s not the end of the story when it comes to protecting artists.


The Guild’s new agreement offers helpful guidance in thinking about future public policy on AI. Our agreement defines that AI is not a writer and that the material it generates is not equivalent to human writing for the purposes of our contract. That means AI cannot rewrite us, nor can it compete with a human writer for credit and the associated financial benefit of that credit. Further, the studios now have to tell us if they are providing us with material generated by AI, and they cannot require us to use AI tools.

We won these protections because we’re a strong union that successfully carried off a nearly five-month strike. But we need to remember that most writers and most artists in this country don’t have unions to protect them. It’s best to think of writers and other artists as tiny businesses, each competing in the marketplace to sell their work. Writers and artists each develop a unique style, voice and brand in order to distinguish themselves. AI fundamentally disrupts that market in ways that could be devastating to the creative economy.


Large language models like the one that underpins ChatGPT have scraped massive volumes of data including our words, our unique perspective. This is theft, not fair use. Our works—protected by copyright and our own contractual rights—are being used entirely without our authorization, without any attribution or any compensation. Right now, you could ask ChatGPT to write something “in the style of” a particular writer, and it would try to do that—appropriate the unique voice of a writer, without that writer’s consent.

As FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya recently suggested, this could constitute an unfair method of competition. It is using stolen goods to undercut the price of a seller and create market confusion. And it’s not a hypothetical. Right now, authors are finding AI-generated knock-offs of their work published on Amazon. They’re having to fight to get those fakes taken down, and protect their brands.

This form of AI appropriation may also have consumer implications. From electronics to organic eggs, consumers expect to be told the origin of a product, and its authenticity. Consumers make choices based on that information. The same will likely be true with AI.

With this strike and this contract, the Writers Guild was able to win groundbreaking AI protections for writers. But it’s important to remember our deal only covers the film and television studios. Most of the real work in AI is being done by companies like Google, Facebook and OpenAI, with which the Guild has no contractual relationship. Public policy will play a crucial role in protecting our members.

In conclusion, AI has the potential to assist the creative community, but only with the consent of that community. Without guardrails, AI poses a profound threat to writers and the integrity of our creative work. AI and its use raises major questions of intellectual property, of transparency, of competition, all of which requires careful oversight to protect the creative economy.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak on behalf of film and television writers.