“AI” Hype as Pretext for Labor Misclassification
Beware the risks of using shiny “AI” sleight-of-hand to simply re-define labor and pay it less.
Over the last year, I written several articles, like this one, in which I’ve argued that the AI threat to writers is not the actual ability for AI to write but rather what the suits who think this emerging technology can do. But this column by Adam Johnson presents another way AI can endanger Hollywood writers and their careers.
The risk that studio execs, news-outlet-owning hedge funds and other suits may try to use this tech is a separate, but equally urgent matter. I don’t think it’s worth ceding the point that “AI” can actually do high-level writing for the simple fact that (A) it’s not true, and truth matters and (B) I think it misunderstands the very real risk to labor presented by “AI” — which, I will argue in this post, is far more of an ontological trick than a real shift in technological capability.
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Simply redefine or misclassify the same work as something else to avoid convention and legal protections for certain forms of labor.
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The forces eating away at TV writers for the past decade are not coming from some mystical technology — they’re coming from a move from network to streaming that allowed these companies to strip away the industry norms and exploit labor classification gray areas to further a race to the bottom. Writers, getting hip to this race to the bottom, are finally saying enough is enough and demanding a reversal of this constant, relentless erosion of traditional protections — some formalized in union contracts, some not.
And this is where I think the threat of “AI” truly rests. A common rejoinder from AI pushers who conceded chatbots cannot, as they currently exist, write a screenplay of any quality at all, is that it can do a “first draft” that the writer then comes along and rewrites. But there’s another word for re-writing: It’s called “writing”.
As it stands today, or 100 years ago, a producer can hand a writer 130 pages of random words written by a monkey with a typewriter and ask them to “re-write” it, and insist that because it’s a “re-write,” that worker should make less money. But, if it were random monkey-generated words, we would all recognize this as a transparent attempt to simply redefine labor rather than actually save any. As it stands now, anyone being handed a ChatGPT prop output and told to “rewrite” it is effectively getting this exact same treatment. The content is so stale, witless, and incoherent, much of it has to be thrown out and written from scratch. And the extent to which some can be kept this requires more labor, in the same way integrating a pile of dog shit into a work of high abstract expressionism would require extra creative innovation.
Labor misclassification. We’re seeing this over the last decade or so in television. In the past, writers went to set and even participated in post-production because everything involved in making a TV episode involves what writers call … writing. More recently, the companies have separated what happens in the writers room (“That’s writing”) from being on set or thereafter (“That’s producing”).
I can totally see this happening with regard to AI. As Johnson describes, AI can deliver to a writer something which the suits call a first draft, thereby, making what the human writer does as rewriting. That means the companies don’t have to pay a human writer for a first draft and pay a reduced fee to the human writer because they’re not writing an original screenplay.
This underscores even more how the WGA needs to stand firm in negotiations about AI and whatever so-called “guardrails” the union and the AMPTP agree are actually specific enough to curtail slippery legal get-arounds and have teeth for actual enforcement.
To read the rest of Adam Johnson’s column, go here.
For the latest updates on the strike and news resources, go here.
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