What the WGA Contract Tells Us About Workers Navigating AI

The AI provisions in the Writer’s Guild of America agreement demonstrate the potential of social choice in the application of technology, says Eryk Salvaggio, a Research Advisor for Emerging Technology at the Siegel Family Endowment. Members of Writers Guild of America and Screen Actors Guild rally on picket line at NBC Studios in New York on July 14, 2023. Lev Radin/Shutterstock This week, the Writer’s Guild of America announced it reached an agreement to end the nearly five month writers strike. The agreement included provisions around the use of artificial intelligence, which was one of the concerns of the union. While the ink is still drying, it’s a useful time to reflect on the ways the WGA strike challenged use cases of generative artificial intelligence. AI may not have been the key concern of the union when the strike started, but the timing offers a glimmer of optimism: generative AI is rising, but so is worker power. The result may be something that policymakers could not achieve on their own.  The tentative agreement addresses four key points about the use of AI in writer’s projects. Specifically, these terms apply to generative AI, defined as “a subset of artificial intelligence that learns patterns from data and produces content, including written material, based on those patterns, and may employ algorithmic methods (e.g., ChatGPT, Llama, MidJourney, Dall-E).” This carves out a specific suite of tools related to content generation, as opposed to algorithms for computer graphics. Taken directly from the WGA’s summary, the…What the WGA Contract Tells Us About Workers Navigating AI