Hollywood’s Deal With Screenwriters Just Rewrote the Rules Around A.I.

The tentative deal announced this week by the Writers Guild of America includes many industry-specific aspects, such as the size of writers’ rooms and improved residuals for streaming. But everyone from autoworkers to white-collar middle managers should be paying very close attention to how this deal was achieved — because it sets a monumental precedent for labor relations in a digital future.

Unlike bread-and-butter issues like wages, benefits and the terms and conditions of employment — topics over which management, according to labor law, must negotiate “in good faith” — technology, like business strategy, constitutes managerial prerogative. This means that the use of technology, such as artificial intelligence, exists in a bargaining gray area. If workers bring it up, employers can either open a negotiation or reply with a simple “No, thanks.” But the W.G.A. deal put A.I. squarely on the table.

In the past, management would often make nearly all technology-related decisions before negotiations even began. Workers and their unions were excluded from early conversations about technology — including ones that could open up a range of issues around use and deployment that would benefit both workers and employers. The only mandated negotiations were around the technologies’ impact on terms and conditions such as wages. This dynamic may help explain why, at the beginning of the W.G.A. negotiations, many believed, or at least publicly stated, that securing any constraints at all on the use of A.I. was a pipe dream.

It wasn’t. The W.G.A. contract establishes a precedent that an employer’s use of A.I. can be a central subject of bargaining. It further establishes the precedent that workers can and should have a say in when and how they use artificial intelligence at work.

It may come as a surprise to some that the W.G.A. apparently never wanted, nor sought, an outright ban on the use of tools like ChatGPT. Instead, it aimed for a more important assurance: that if A.I. raises writers’ productivity or the quality of their output, guild members should snare an equitable share of the performance gains. And the W.G.A. got it.

How did it achieve this? In this case, the parties agreed that A.I. is not a writer. The studios cannot use A.I. in place of a credited and paid guild member. Studios can rely on A.I. to generate a first draft, but the writers to whom they deliver it get the credit. These writers receive the same minimum pay they would have had they written the piece from scratch. Likewise, writers can elect to use A.I. on their own, when a studio allows it. However, no studio can require a guild member to use A.I.