Striking Hollywood scribes ponder AI in the writer’s room
Hollywood writers picket outside of Paramount Pictures this week.
Mandalit del Barco/NPR News
Hollywood writers are on their third week of a strike against major studios. Among their demands are higher wages, more residuals from the streaming platforms, and the regulation of artificial intelligence. Some writers are wondering what sort of AI they may be facing in the writer’s rooms of the future: a kind that makes them redundant, or one that serves them as a useful tool.
Writer/director Jacob Reed hired a plane with an anti-AI banner to circle over the Hollywood studios this week.
Mandalit del Barco/NPR News
This week, a small plane circled over the major Hollywood studios where writers were picketing. It flew a banner that read “Pay the writers, you AI-holes!” The stunt was organized by director/writer Jacob Reed, who paid for it with small donations from writers, actors, animators, talent agents, fans and others.
Down below, picketing outside Paramount Pictures, comedy writer Miranda Berman voiced a fear echoed by many others in her industry: that studio executives could eventually replace them with AI.
“This is only the beginning; if they take writer’s jobs, they’ll take everybody else’s jobs too,” said Berman. “And also in the movies, the robots kill everyone in the end.”
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