I and 12,000 of my fellow Writers Guild of America colleagues went on strike this week against the conglomerates that make and control much of the “content” consumed by global audiences. Late night comedy-variety shows have gone dark; untold numbers of productions have been disrupted and are in the process of shutting down; studio gates and corporate offices are being besieged by thousands of picketers.
Our last strike, back in 2007, caused more than $3bn of economic damage in Los Angeles alone. This strike could be even more costly.
We didn’t want this strike. It’s already causing genuine suffering to many of our union members, and to many support staff and other workers whose livelihoods are being immediately affected. But that suffering is nothing compared with the pain and degradation that the conglomerates have openly proclaimed they plan to inflict on us. Our collective action is the only thing that can stop them.
As a member of the Guild negotiating committee, I’ve had a front-row seat the past couple of months to the conglomerates’ tactics and strategies. They haven’t been subtle about their intentions. We’ve heard industry leaders (some of whom just this past month announced annual salaries of $50m and more) tell us that they can weather a strike because they have plenty of international programming produced far outside the Guild’s jurisdiction. The globalization of our industry, which in many positive ways has de-centered Hollywood’s parochial dominance (think of the success of shows such as Squid Game) is now being used as a cudgel against workers, a tactic familiar to industrial and service workers who have seen their jobs “offshored”.
But an unintended – at least for the conglomerates – side-effect of this globalization has been a remarkable increase in international solidarity. The International Affiliation of Writers Guilds, which started in 1986 as a loose grouping of unions from English-speaking countries, now represents guilds whose 50,000 members span the globe, from India to Spain to South Africa. And they are sending a powerful message to their members – or, rather, their members are sending a powerful message through them: don’t write on Guild-covered projects, don’t be a scab.
Along with the unprecedented solidarity writers are getting from sister unions here in the US and Canada – already many Teamsters are parking their trucks, taking the keys, and refusing to cross picket lines – that message is resonating loudly. If the conglomerates thought they could replace us with cheaper, non-union writers from distant shores, they’ve got another think coming.
Of course, our bosses are also dreaming of replacing us another way: with generative AI software. One of the most startling moments in our negotiations came when the conglomerates flat-out refused to even counter our proposals about AI, instead offering an “annual meeting to discuss advancements in technology”. I don’t think even an AI chatbot could have come up with a more absurd response.
The fact is that AI is here and it’s going to transform our lives and work in unimaginable ways. I, like many of my fellow writers, am both nervous and excited about the prospect of how AI as a tool will be used in our storytelling, and I don’t think of it as a kind of binary on/off switch that will simply shut off our jobs and replace us.
But that just makes the conglomerates’ position even more insidious. Because while we don’t know how AI will function as a writer, we already know how our bosses intend to use it as managers; part of their jobs, after all, is to make sure the power of capital can use every tool at its disposal to disempower workers as they transform what used to be jobs into endless, frantic scrambles for gigs.
To understand the future – and by that I mean the present, immediate future – that the conglomerates are preparing for the people who imagine and create the shows and movies you watch, let me sketch out for you the kind of push notifications our bosses will, if they get their way, soon be receiving every morning. They’ll go like this:
Hi. Your writer, James (4.92 stars) is arriving now at the virtual TV writers’ room. He will wait for five minutes before his day rate will begin to apply, though feel free to dismiss him at any time without cause.
Using his WriteOnSightTM software (the license for which he has paid for himself) he will this morning occupy himself with filling in dialogue and making copy edits on the studio’s AI-generated outline for next week’s episode of the hit series Sand Point Dad, the new action-dramedy starring Kevin Sorbo as himself, part of the expanding Real Moms of Liberty cinematic TV universe. After one hour, his WriteOnSightTM virtual executive mentor will provide him, as well as, of course, the studio executives in charge of the show who are monitoring his progress on their dashboards, with his first Let’sShootIt!TM rating, which will indicate the probability that his work will be used by the studio.
A rating of over 75% will award him the first of his much-sought-after Golden Quill TM tokens, 10 of which will give him a 5% premium on his daily rate, though only pro-rated to those hours consecutively worked at high probability, with the understanding that Golden Quill TM tokens cannot be carried over from one episode to another.
Or some such. You get the idea. The bosses won’t immediately be replacing us all with AI, but they have every intention to use it to place us deeper and deeper in indentured servitude, under the guise of liberating us, as they have ride-share drivers, into a state of eternal, job-seeking, “free” agency. We’re seeing the logical unfolding of a process by which all of us already, as consumers of hyper-financialized dataveillance entertainment “content”, are served up our amusements by algorithmically conditioned streaming feeds. Now, in a mirror image of that consumptive process, that very “content’ will be produced under similar conditions of dataveillance and data extraction.
It’s easy to see this simply as a story of machines taking over human agency and control. But that is also more than a bit of a feint. Because all of these new technologies, no matter how opaque and automated they are and appear, sit atop a mountain of often hidden and unacknowledged human labor – labor that is overwhelmingly immiserated and exploited.
Take ChatGPT, for example. Like all generative AI, it only “knows” or can act upon what is available to it digitally; unless it is trained otherwise, a great deal of what it will probably encounter on the internet comes from the vast sea of bile and hate that algorithmically goosed “engagement” with fury-inducing monetizable distractions provokes in us.
Who trains ChatGPT and other AI engines to avoid all that? Workers in Africa, many of whom make less than $2 a day. They digitally handle the worst that online humanity has to offer as they train our magical AI engines to ignore it. It’s traumatizing and difficult work, as well as, perhaps, a losing battle. And it is work – like the work writers do when they co-create new forms of empathy and imagination – that only humans can do.
Which is why I am prouder than ever of my fellow Writers Guild members for taking the risk to go out on strike – but even, perhaps, more excited to hail the creation, just this week, of the world’s newest union, the African Content Moderators Union, founded in Nairobi, with 150 founding members. The risks those workers are taking in forming their union are extraordinary, but so is the inspiration they bring.
Our strike, and their struggle, are joined together, and that struggle is not a battle between humans and machines, but rather a battle between humanity and capital. This round, I’m betting on humanity.
James Schamus is a writer, producer, director, and professor of film at Columbia University, and the former CEO of Focus Features, which he co-founded