Writer’s Guild Kicks the Can to DGA and SAG on AI Negotiations

By Roger Paradiso

The Writers Guild of America recently surprised the industry with a new tentative minimum bargaining agreement with the studios, or the AMPTP. As of April 8, the guild detailed its full MBA tentative deal with the studios that writers will work under for the next three… er, scratch that, four years! – Indie News

The WGA entered this negotiation with an 800-pound gorilla on its back. The writers’ health and pension plans were going broke. They had no choice but to accept the streamers and producers generous offer of $321 million funding the plans over the course of this contract. Here’s the catch ─ the writers wanted to keep the standard three-year contract and the streamers wanted five years. They settled on four which sent a warning out to the rest of the film world. Christopher Nolan, head of the DGA, had said that a deal longer than three years would never happen. “If we had agreed to a five-year contract in March of 2020, where would we be now? We are living in an industry where things are shifting very, very fast in terms of how they choose to run their businesses, and there are no assurances they’d be able to give us on … what that path would be,” the Oppenheimer director told Deadline.

It’s time now to move off the WGA’s surrender and gather the troops for a contentious DGA negotiating period beginning May 11. SAG has likely positioned itself to ally with the DGA but they have not announced when they would restart talks. The contract expires on June 30 for both DGA and SAG.

The writers did not tackle much of AI and accepted standard pay increases. Elon Musk thinks that AI will take over everything in five years. That is a bold statement ─ I hate to admit this ─ but he may be correct.

“I warned you guys,” says Hollywood director James Cameron. More than 40 years since the first Terminator film was released, Cameron says the future it depicted is now here. “We are literally living out the precipice of what was science fiction back when I did it in the eighties,” he told ABC.net.

There is a well-known quote that “Journalists don’t go to the noise. They go to the silence” for their stories. Me, I have gone to Instagram where I have seen AI porn beginning its hideous attempted takeover of… us.

Did you see the beautiful robot speaking to a rugged male at some sort of AI robot convention? He feels her face and she indicates that she is a robot before they move close together for a kiss. I almost threw up my lunch. Similar Instagrams show sexual behavior linking human males with female robots who look gorgeous until you see the metal and plastic body. There is also the cable ad with cheap AI muzak and lyrics that effectively say, “We are humans and we help each other.” I’m sorry but the bot is not human and the song is a Class D Barry Manilow rip.

As a DGA member, I am happy with Chris Nolan who is leading a sharp negotiating team. The battle for the DGA is always about creative control for the director, a safe working environment, and standard rate hikes. But the streamers will try to seduce the directors about control and then flip the script by continuing to do what they are doing now ─ flooding the U.S. market with global films that are non-union and generally violent and sexual.

There are terrific foreign films that manage to get done with union labor, however, the streamers cannot be allowed to bring productions to foreign lands where the DGA director is not in control. These offshore productions will hire a non-union director and crew in some country with no respect for copyright and creative control. The game will be for all the unions, especially the labor unions, to push the Congress and states for increased subsidies to keep productions in the U.S. ─ and to keep union labor working. That is what Nolan and the DGA members are fighting against.

And then there’s the “Tilly tax.” It is a proposed fee that studios would be required to pay the union whenever they use an AI actor instead of a human performer. This demand is a direct response to Tilly Norwood, the industry’s first “AI or synthetic actor.” She has yet to book any real roles, but SAG is prepared for that eventuality.

– nofilmschool news

I have no doubt that Tilly or another synthetic actor is already working in bad foreign movies ─ mostly science fiction flicks. The SAG team is trying to save their image and likeness clause for their actors. They will be fighting against people who don’t care about copyright or creative rights. They care about money.

As James Cameron says in an Instagram post, “I think we need to put massive guardrails on this new technology. I think it needs to be done by Hollywood internally. I think government regulation would be just too much of a blunt instrument.”

“You can create characters right now that are photographically plausible. So where are we going to be in four years, five years, 10 years? It may be possible to make finished shots for a movie without sets, without camera people, basically without artists.”

America will be a place with massive union unemployment. And with an economic system or political system which we didn’t ask for or vote for. We need to fight back.