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      Why Care About Hollywood Strikes? We’re All Background Actors.

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      Why should you care about the strikes in Hollywood? Because they are much more than a revolt of the privileged.In Hollywood, the cool kids have joined the picket line.I mean no offense, as a writer, to the screenwriters who have been on strike against film and TV studios for over two months. But writers know the score. We’re the words, not the faces. The cleverest picket sign joke is no match for the attention-focusing power of Margot Robbie or Matt Damon.SAG-AFTRA, the union representing TV and film actors, joined the writers in a walkout over how Hollywood divvies up the cash in the streaming era and how humans can thrive in the artificial-intelligence era. With that star power comes an easy cheap shot: Why should anybody care about a bunch of privileged elites whining about a dream job?But for all the focus that a few boldface names will get in this strike, I invite you to consider a term that has come up a lot in the current negotiations: “Background actors.”You probably don’t think much about background actors. You’re not meant to, hence the name. They’re the nonspeaking figures who populate the screen’s margins, making Gotham City or King’s Landing or the beaches of Normandy feel real, full and lived-in.And you might have more in common with them than you think.The lower-paid actors who make up the vast bulk of the profession are facing simple dollars-and-cents threats to their livelihoods. They’re trying to maintain their income amid the vanishing of residual payments, as streaming has shortened TV seasons and decimated the syndication model. They’re seeking guardrails against A.I. encroaching on their jobs.There’s also a particular, chilling question on the table: Who owns a performer’s face? Background actors are seeking protections and better compensation in the practice of scanning their images for digital reuse.Background actors fill out the worlds of shows like “Game of Thrones.”Macall B. Polay/HBOIn a news conference about the strike, a union negotiator said that the studios were seeking the rights to scan and use an actor’s image “for the rest of eternity” in exchange for one day’s pay. The studios argue that they are offering “groundbreaking” protections against the misuse of actors’ images, and counter that their proposal would only allow a company to use the “digital replica” on the specific project a background actor was hired for.Still, the long-term “Black Mirror” implications — the practice was the actual premise of a recent episode — are unignorable. If a digital replica of you — without your bothersome need for money and the time to lead a life — can do the job, who needs you?You could, I guess, make the argument that if someone is insignificant enough to be replaced by software, then they’re in the wrong business. But background work and small roles are precisely the routes to someday promoting your blockbuster on the red carpet. And many talented artists build entire careers around a series of small jobs. (Pamela Adlon’s series “Better Things” is a great portrait of the life of ordinary working actors.)In the end, Hollywood’s fight isn’t far removed from the threats to many of us in today’s economy. “We are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines,” Fran Drescher, the actors’ guild president, said in announcing the strike.You and I may be the protagonists of our own narratives, but in the grand scheme most of us are background players. We face the same risk — that every time a technological or cultural shift happens, companies will rewrite the terms of employment to their advantage, citing financial pressures while paying their top executives tens and hundreds of millions.Annie Murphy in a recent episode of “Black Mirror,” in which an actor’s likeness was used by unscrupulous streaming executives.Nick Wall/NetflixMaybe it’s unfair that exploitation gets more attention when it involves a union that Meryl Streep belongs to. (If the looming UPS strike materializes, it might grab the spotlight for blue-collar labor.) And there’s certainly a legitimate critique of white-collar workers who were blasé about automation until A.I. threatened their own jobs.But work is work, and some dynamics are universal. As the entertainment reporter and critic Maureen Ryan writes in “Burn It Down,” her investigation of workplace abuses throughout Hollywood, “It is not the inclination nor the habit of the most important entities in the commercial entertainment industry to value the people who make their products.”If you don’t believe Ryan, listen to the anonymous studio executive, speaking of the writers’ strike, who told the trade publication Deadline, “The endgame is to allow things to drag out until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.”You may think of Hollywood creatives as a privileged class, but if their employers think about them like this, are you sure yours thinks any differently of you? Most of us, in Hollywood or outside it, are facing a common question: Can we have a working world in which you can survive without being a star?You may never notice background actors if they’re doing their jobs well. Yet they’re the difference between a sterile scene and a living one. They create the impression that, beyond the close focus on the beautiful leads, there is a full, complete universe, whether it’s the galaxy of the “Star Wars” franchise or the mundane reality that you and I live in.They are there to say that we, too, are out here, that we make the world a world, that we at least deserve our tiny places in the corner of the screen. More

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      Striking Actors Join Writers on Picket Lines in LA and NYC

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      In Los Angeles and New York, actors and screenwriters braved the heat to admonish the major studios and demand a new deal.It was 10 a.m., adoring union members had already more or less mobbed their president, Fran Drescher, and the crowd was growing by the minute.Outside Netflix offices in Hollywood, a festive, buoyant mood had taken over the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Van Ness Avenue. It was a workers’ strike, to be sure. But as smiling protesters eagerly joined in chants and high-fived their picket signs, it felt a little like a summer Friday street party. One with a few famous guests.“We’re told that we should just be so grateful to get to do what we love to do — but not being compensated, not being protected while they are profiting off of our work,” said Amanda Crew from HBO’s “Silicon Valley,” who walked the picket line with Dustin Milligan from “Schitt’s Creek.”“That’s the myth of the actor: You’re doing art so you should just be so grateful because you’re living your dream. Why? Do we do that to doctors? We bring so much joy to people by entertaining them,” Crew added.It was the first of what could be many days of marching for actors, who picketed at locations across the country. They chanted, “Actors and writers unite!” as they marched along a short block in Times Square where Paramount conducts business; they passed out bottles of cold water and cans of La Croix outside 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Midtown Manhattan; and they bounced their picket signs to the sounds of Jay-Z’s “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” as it blared from a speaker in Hollywood.A day earlier, the Hollywood actors’ union, known as SAG-AFTRA, approved a strike for the first time in 43 years, joining forces with writers, who walked out in May.“There’s a renewed sense of excitement and solidarity,” said Alicia Carroll, a strike captain for the Writers Guild of America. “Writers have been out here for upwards of 70 days. It’s been a while and it’s hot. People are tired. So this is a confidence boost that we’re not alone in the industry in terms of issues.”The actors Bill Irwin and Susan Sarandon picketed in New York on Friday.Andres Kudacki for The New York TimesThe actors and writers have been unable to agree to new contracts with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents major studios and streamers. Pay is a central issue, but the negotiations around compensation have been complicated by the emergence of streaming services and the rise of artificial intelligence.Actors, including Ms. Drescher, the president of their union, have cast the moment as an inflection point, arguing that the entire business model for the $134 billion American movie and television business has changed. They say their new contract needs to account for those changes with various guardrails and protections, including increased residual payments (a type of royalty) from streaming services. They are also worried about how A.I. could be used to replicate their work: scripts in the case of writers and digital replicas of their likenesses for actors.Hollywood companies have insisted that they worked in good faith to reach a reasonable deal at what has also been a difficult time for an industry that has been upended by streaming and is still dealing with the lingering effects of the pandemic.“The union has regrettably chosen a path that will lead to financial hardship for countless thousands of people who depend on the industry,” the studio alliance said in a statement after SAG-AFTRA announced the strike.On Friday, writers said they were heartened to be joined on the picket lines by actors, many of whom have been marching with them for months in the black-and-yellow T-shirts that have become something of a uniform. It is the first time since 1960 that actors and screenwriters have been on strike at the same time.WGA leaders have shared picket line advice: Bring plenty of sunscreen and set a timer to reapply, watch out for traffic. But some actors were already veterans.The actor Greg Germann being interviewed at Netflix’s office in Los Angeles on Friday.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York Times“I have not been to a picket without SAG-AFTRA members there. Sometimes they have even outnumbered us here in the east,” said Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, a vice president of the Writers Guild of America, East. “They have been our stalwart supporters and comrades, and we intend to reciprocate.”“Suddenly,” she added, “the sleeping giant has awakened.”Indeed, some of the union’s most prominent members took to the streets Friday and drew notice as the afternoon wore on. Jason Sudeikis showed up at 30 Rock; Susan Sarandon went to the Flatiron neighborhood, where picketers targeted Warner Bros. Discovery; and Sean Astin marched outside the Netflix offices in Los Angeles.“Our careers have been turned into gig work,” Mr. Astin said over a chorus of frenetic honks of support from passing cars. “It’s not just that we’re not going to take it anymore — we actually can’t take it anymore.”An animated Ms. Drescher had arrived at the same location earlier in the day and was met with an exuberant crowd that wrapped itself around her.“This strike and this negotiation is going to impact everybody, and if we don’t take control of this situation from these greedy megalomaniacs, we are all going to be in threat of losing our livelihoods,” Ms. Drescher said.“I’m not really here for me as much as the 99.9 percent of the membership who are working people who are just trying to make a living to put food on the table, pay rent and get their kids off to school,” she added. “They are the ones that are being squeezed out of their livelihood, and it’s just pathetic.”Shara Ashley Zeiger, an actor, brought her 2-year-old, Lily, to the picket in front of NBC’s offices in New York. A sign protruded from her daughter’s stroller. Lily played with her food — and a tambourine.“The effects of this deal directly affect my daughter and my family,” Ms. Zeiger said.She added: “I had had a role on a project that was on a streamer, and their deal was they didn’t have to pay me residuals for two years. And it was in the middle of the pandemic.”Thousands of miles west in Los Angeles, Evan Shafran, an actor who had taken it upon himself to put together an hourslong playlist for the strike, wondered whether he might eventually need to apply for Medi-Cal, the state’s medical assistance program. He was able to string together enough work to pay for health insurance this year, but he could not be sure how things would pan out in the future.And last week, Mr. Shafran said, his car was stolen. But he took an Uber from his home in the San Fernando Valley to the Netflix offices anyway.“I spent $100 to come protest today even though I’m out of work,” he said. “I need to be out here.” More

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      Popcast (Deluxe): A.I. Pop Stars and Luke Combs’s ‘Fast Car’

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on:The recent wave of generative A.I. music, including songs “by” Taylor Swift and Harry Styles, Drake and the Weeknd, Kanye West, Jay-Z, Michael Jackson and othersLuke Combs’s cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” which is now No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100, topping the original’s 1988 peak of No. 6Viewer questions about band reunions and pop star protestsNew songs from Doe Boy and Nia ArchivesSnack of the weekConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. More

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      Paul McCartney Says A.I. Helped Complete ‘Last’ Beatles Song

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      The song was made using a demo with John Lennon’s voice and will be released later this year, McCartney said.More than 50 years after the Beatles broke up, Paul McCartney said artificial intelligence helped create one last Beatles song that will be released later this year.The song was made using a demo with John Lennon’s voice, McCartney said in an interview with BBC Radio 4 that was released on Tuesday. He did not give the title of the song or offer any clues about its lyrics.“When we came to make what will be the last Beatles record, it was a demo that John had, that we worked on,” McCartney said. “We were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this A.I., so then we could mix the record, as you would normally do.”Holly Tessler, a senior lecturer on the Beatles at the University of Liverpool, said in an interview on Tuesday there was speculation that the song might be “Now and Then,” a song Lennon composed and recorded as a demo in the late 1970s.Lennon was fatally shot outside his New York apartment building in December 1980. His widow, Yoko Ono, gave the tape to McCartney as he, Ringo Starr and George Harrison, who died in 2001, were working on “The Beatles Anthology,” a career-retrospective documentary, record and book series.Two other songs on that tape, “Free As a Bird” and “Real Love,” were later completed by the three surviving Beatles using Lennon’s original voice recording and were officially released in 1995 and 1996.It is unclear exactly how McCartney was using the latest demo and whether any new lyrics would be incorporated.The use of A.I. technology to create music with the voices of established artists has raised a number of ethical and legal questions around authorship and ownership in recent months.This spring, an A.I.-produced song called “Heart on My Sleeve,” which claimed to use the voices of Drake and the Weeknd, became popular on social media before it was flagged by Universal Music Group. Similarly created tracks, including one using A.I. versions of Rihanna to cover a Beyoncé song and another using A.I vocals from Kanye West to cover the song “Hey There Delilah,” continue to rack up plays on social media.Other artists are embracing the technology. Grimes, the producer and pop singer, put out a call in April for anyone to make an A.I.-generated song using her voice. The results were mixed.Proponents of the technology say it has the power to disrupt the music business in the ways that synthesizers, sampling, and file-sharing services did.McCartney’s use of A.I. technology may recruit new fans, but it may also alienate older fans and Beatles purists, Tessler said.“We have absolutely no way of knowing, creatively, if John were alive, what he’d want to do with these or what he’d want his contribution to be,” she said, adding that it creates an ethical gray area.Over McCartney’s career, he has been quick to engage with new creative technologies, whether talking about synthesizers or samplers, she said.“I think he’s just curious to see what it can do,” Ms. Tessler said of McCartney. “I mean, it gives us some insight into his mind and what his creative priorities are, that given how much of the music industry is at his fingertips, that what he chooses to do is finish a demo with John Lennon. In a way, it’s very poignant.” More

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      What Happens When A.I. Enters the Concert Hall

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      Artificial intelligence is not new to classical music. But its recent, rapid developments have composers worried, and intrigued.When the composer and vocalist Jen Wang took the stage at the Monk Space in Los Angeles to perform Alvin Lucier’s “The Duke of York” (1971) earlier this year, she sang with a digital rendition of her voice, synthesized by artificial intelligence.It was the first time she had done that. “I thought it was going to be really disorienting,” Wang said in an interview, “but it felt like I was collaborating with this instrument that was me and was not me.”Isaac Io Schankler, a composer and music professor at Cal Poly Pomona, conceived the performance and joined Wang onstage to monitor and manipulate Realtime Audio Variational autoEncoder, or R.A.V.E., the neural audio synthesis algorithm that modeled Wang’s voice.R.A.V.E. is an example of machine learning, a specific category of artificial intelligence technology that musicians have experimented with since the 1990s — but that now is defined by rapid development, the arrival of publicly available, A.I.-powered music tools and the dominating influence of high-profile initiatives by large tech companies.Dr. Schankler ultimately used R.A.V.E in that performance of “The Duke Of York,” though, because its ability to augment an individual performer’s sound, they said, “seemed thematically resonant with the piece.” For it to work, the duo needed to train it on a personalized corpus of recordings. “I sang and spoke for three hours straight,” Wang recalled. “I sang every song I could think of.”Antoine Caillon developed R.A.V.E. in 2021, during his graduate studies at IRCAM, the institute founded by the composer Pierre Boulez in Paris. “R.A.V.E.’s goal is to reconstruct its input,” he said. “The model compresses the audio signal it receives and tries to extract the sound’s salient features in order to resynthesize it properly.”Wang felt comfortable performing with the software because, no matter the sounds it produced in the moment, she could hear herself in R.A.V.E.’s synthesized voice. “The gestures were surprising, and the textures were surprising,” she said, “but the timbre was incredibly familiar.” And, because R.A.V.E. is compatible with common electronic music software, Dr. Schankler was able to adjust the program in real time, they said, to “create this halo of other versions of Jen’s voice around her.”Tina Tallon, a composer and professor of A.I. and the arts at the University of Florida, said that musicians have used various A.I.-related technologies since the mid-20th century.“There are rule-based systems, which is what artificial intelligence used to be in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s,” she said, “and then there is machine learning, which became more popular and more practical in the ’90s, and involves ingesting large amounts of data to infer how a system functions.”Today, developments in A.I. that were once contained to specialized applications impinge on virtually every corner of life, and already impact the way people make music. Dr. Caillon, in addition to developing R.A.V.E., has contributed to the Google-led projects SingSong, which generates accompaniments for recorded vocal melodies, and MusicLM, another text-to-music generator. Innovations in other areas are driving new music technologies, too: WavTool, a recently released, A.I.-powered music production platform, fully integrates OpenAI’s GPT-4 to enable users to create music via text prompts.For Dr. Tallon, the difference in scale between individual composers’ customized use of A.I. and these new, broad-reaching technologies represents a cause for concern.“We are looking at different types of datasets that are compiled for different reasons,” she said. “Tools like MusicLM are trained on datasets that are compiled by pulling from thousands of hours of labeled audio from YouTube and other places on the internet.”“When I design a tool for my own personal use,” Dr. Tallon continued, “I’m looking at data related to my sonic priorities. But public-facing technologies use datasets that focus on, for instance, aesthetic ideals that align more closely with Western classical systems of organizing pitches and rhythms.”Concerns over bias in music-related A.I. tools do not stop at aesthetics. Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, a music professor at Brown University, also worries about how these technologies can reproduce social hierarchies.“There is a very specific racial discourse that I’m very concerned about,” she said. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that hip-hop artistry is forming the testing ground for understanding how A.I. affects artists and their artistry given the centuries-long story of co-optation and theft of Black expressive forms by those in power.”The popularity of recent A.I.-generated songs that mimicked artists like Drake, the Weeknd, Travis Scott and others have animated Dr. Lumumba-Kasongo’s fears. “What I’m most concerned about with A.I. Drake and A.I. Travis Scott is that their music is highly listenable,” she said, “and calls into question any need for an artist once they’ve articulated a distinct ‘voice.’”For Dr. Schankler, there are key differences between using R.A.V.E. to synthesize new versions of a collaborator’s voice and using A.I. to anonymously imitate a living musician. “I don’t find it super interesting to copy someone’s voice exactly, because that person already exists,” they said. “I’m more interested in the new sonic possibilities of this technology. And what I like about R.A.V.E. is that I can work with a small dataset that is created by one person who gives their permission and participates in the process.”The composer Robert Laidlow also uses A.I. in his work to contemplate the technology’s fraught implications. “Silicon,” which premiered last October with the BBC Philharmonic under Vimbayi Kaziboni, employs multiple tools to explore themes drawn from the technology’s transformative and disruptive potential.Laidlow described “Silicon” as “about technology as much as it uses technology,” adding: “The overriding aesthetic of each movement of this piece are the questions, ‘What does it mean for an orchestra to use this technology?’ and ‘What would be the point of an orchestra if we had a technology that can emulate it in every way?’”The work’s entirely acoustic first movement features a mixture of Laidlow’s original music and ideas he adapted from the output, he said, of a “symbolic, generative A.I. that was trained on notated material from composers all throughout history.” The second movement features an A.I.-powered digital instrument, performed by the orchestra’s pianist, that, “sometimes mimics the orchestra and sometimes makes uncanny, weird sounds.”In the last movement, the orchestra is accompanied with sounds generated by a neural synthesis program called PRiSM-SampleRNN, which is akin to R.A.V.E. and was trained on a large archive of BBC Philharmonic radio broadcasts. Laidlow describes the resulting audio as, “featuring synthesized orchestral music, voices of phantom presenters and the sounds the artificial intelligence has learned from audiences.”The size of “Silicon” contrasts with the intimacy of Dr. Schankler and Wang’s performance of “The Duke of York.” But both instances illustrate A.I.’s potential to expand musical practices and human expression. And, importantly, by employing small, curated datasets tailored to individual collaborators, these projects attempt to obviate ethical concerns many have identified in larger-scale technologies.George E. Lewis, a music professor at Columbia University, has designed and performed alongside interactive A.I. music programs for four decades, focusing primarily on the technology’s capacity to participate in live performance. “I keep talking about real-time dialogue,” he said. “Music is so communal, it’s so personal, it’s so dialogic, it’s communitarian.”He is hopeful that people will continue to explore interactivity and spontaneity. “It seems the current generation of A.I. music programs have been designed for a culturally specific way of thinking about music,” Lewis said. “Imagine if the culture favored improvisation.”As a composer, Lewis is continuing to explore this topic, including his recent work “Forager,” for chamber ensemble and A.I., which was created during a 2022 residency at PRiSM. The piece marks the latest update to “Voyager,” a piece that he developed in 1985 and described as a, “virtual improvising pianist.” “Forager” enhances the software’s responsiveness to its human co-performers with new programming that enables what he called, “a more holistic recognition” of musical materials.The differences among Dr. Schankler’s use of R.A.V.E., Robert Laidlow’s orchestral work “Silicon” and Lewis’s interactive “Forager” underscore the nuances with which composers and experimental musicians are approaching A.I. This culture celebrates technology as means to customize musical ideas and computer-generated sounds to suit specific performers and a given moment. Still, these artistic aims stand at odds with the foreboding prompted by others like Dr. Tallon and Dr. Lumumba-Kasongo.Individual musicians can do their part to counter those worries by using A.I. ethically and generatively. But even so, as Laidlow observed, being truly individual — which is to say independent — is difficult.“There is a fundamental problem of resources in this field,” Laidlow said. “It is almost impossible to create something computationally powerful without the assistance of a huge, technologically advanced institute or corporation.” More

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      Popcast Mailbag! Frank Ocean, Peso Pluma, A.I. Grimes and More

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThe Popcast crew assembles for a semiannual mailbag episode, touching on many of the pressing pop music issues of the moment, including the controversy surrounding Frank Ocean’s Coachella set; the challenges faced by even the biggest pop stars (Sam Smith, Miley Cyrus) trying to follow massive singles; the sudden arrival of artificial intelligence in pop music and evolving notions of authorship; the startling recent growth in the popularity and visibility of música Mexicana and corridos tumbados, with stars like Grupo Frontera and Peso Pluma; and how the framework of genre continues to have meaning even in a universal-jukebox universe.Guests:Jon Pareles, The New York Time’s chief pop music criticJoe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterLindsay Zoladz, The New York Times’s pop music criticCaryn Ganz, The New York Times’s pop music editorConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      Hollywood Directors Reach Deal With Studios as Writers’ Strike Continues

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      The tentative agreement includes improvements in wages and guardrails around artificial intelligence.The union that represents thousands of movie and television directors reached a tentative agreement with the Hollywood studios on a three-year contract early Sunday morning, a deal that ensures labor peace with one major guild as the writers’ strike enters its sixth week.The Directors Guild of America announced in a statement overnight that it had made “unprecedented gains,” including improvements in wages and streaming residuals (a type of royalty), as well as guardrails around artificial intelligence.“We have concluded a truly historic deal,” Jon Avnet, the chair of the D.G.A.’s negotiating committee, said in the statement. “It provides significant improvements for every director, assistant director, unit production manager, associate director and stage manager in our guild.”The deal prevents the doomsday Hollywood scenario of three major unions striking simultaneously. On Wednesday, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of the studios, will begin negotiations for a new contract with SAG-AFTRA, the guild that represents actors; their current agreement expires on June 30. SAG-AFTRA is in the process of collecting a strike authorization vote.The entertainment industry will be looking closely at what the directors’ deal — and the actors’ negotiations — will mean for the Writers Guild of America, the union that represents the writers. More than 11,000 writers went on strike in early May, bringing many Hollywood productions to a halt.Over the last month, the writers have enjoyed a wave of solidarity from other unions that W.G.A. leaders have said they have not seen in generations. Whether a directors’ deal — or a possible actors’ deal later this month — undercuts that solidarity is now an open question.W.G.A. leaders had been signaling to writers late last week that a deal with the directors could be in the offing, a strategy that it said was part of the studio “playbook” to “divide and conquer.” The writers and the studios left the bargaining table on May 1 very far apart on the major issues, and have not resumed negotiations.“They pretended they couldn’t negotiate with the W.G.A. in May because of negotiations with the D.G.A.,” the W.G.A. negotiating committee told writers in an email on Thursday. “That’s a lie. It’s a choice they made in hope of breathing life into the divide and conquer strategy. The essence of the strategy is to make deals with some unions and tell the rest that’s all there is. It’s gaslighting, and it only works if unions are divided.“Our position is clear: To resolve the strike, the companies will have to negotiate with the W.G.A. on our full agenda,” the email continued.Representatives for the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers declined to comment.The writers and the directors shared some priorities, including wages, streaming residuals and concerns about artificial intelligence. W.G.A. leaders had said that the studios had offered little more than “annual meetings to discuss” artificial intelligence, and that they refused to bargain over guardrails. The D.G.A. said Sunday that it received a “groundbreaking agreement confirming that A.I. is not a person and that generative A.I. cannot replace the duties performed by members.”Some of the writers’ demands, however, are more complex than those of the directors. W.G.A. leaders have described the dispute in urgent terms, calling this moment “existential,” and saying that the studios “are seemingly intent on continuing their efforts to destroy the profession of writing.”Despite the explosion of television production over the last decade, writers have said that their wages have stagnated, and their working conditions have deteriorated. In addition to improvements on compensation, the writers are seeking greater job security, as well as staffing minimums in writers’ rooms.The W.G.A. has vowed to fight on. The writers, who last went on strike 15 years ago for 100 days, have historically been united.“We are girded by an alliance with our sister guilds and unions,” Chris Keyser, a chair of the W.G.A. bargaining committee, said in a video message to writers last week. “They give us strength. But we are strong enough. We have always been strong enough to get the deal we need using writer power alone.” More

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      Striking Writers Are Worried About A.I. Viewers Should Be, Too.

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      A.I. screenwriting, a point of contention in the Writers Guild strike, may not yet be ready for prime time. But streaming algorithms and derivative programming have prepared the way for it.Television loves a good sentient-machine story, from “Battlestar Galactica” to “Westworld” to “Mrs. Davis.” With the Writers Guild of America strike, that premise has broken the fourth wall. The robots are here, and the humans are racing to defend against them, or to ally with them.Among the many issues in the strike is the union’s aim to “regulate use of material produced using artificial intelligence or similar technologies,” at a time when the ability of chatbots to auto-generate all manner of writing is growing exponentially.In essence, writers are asking the studios for guardrails against being replaced by A.I., having their work used to train A.I. or being hired to punch up A.I.-generated scripts at a fraction of their former pay rates.The big-ticket items in the strike involve, broadly, how the streaming model has disrupted the ways TV writers have made a living. But it’s the A.I. question that has captured imaginations, understandably so. Hollywood loves robot stories because they make us confront what distinguishes us as human. And when it comes to distinguishing features, the ability to conjure imaginary worlds is simply sexier than the opposable thumb.So the prospect of A.I. screenwriting has become potent, both as threat and rallying cry. Detractors of the striking writers taunted them on social media that software was going to horse-and-buggy their livelihoods. Striking WGA members workshopped A.I. jokes on their picket signs, like “ChatGPT doesn’t have childhood trauma.” (Well, it doesn’t have its own. It has Sylvia Plath’s, and that of any other former unhappy child whose writing survives in machine-readable form.)But it shouldn’t surprise anyone if the TV business wants to leave open the option of relying on machine-generated entertainment. In a way, it already does.Not in the way the WGA fears — not yet. Even the most by-the-numbers scripted drama you watch today was not written by a computer program. But it might have been recommended to you by one.Algorithms, the force behind your streaming-TV “For You” menu, are in the business of noticing what you like and matching you with acceptable-enough versions of it. To many, this is indeed acceptable enough: More than 80 percent of viewing on Netflix is driven by the recommendation engine.In order to make those matches, the algorithm needs a lot of content. Not necessarily brilliant, unique, nothing-like-it content, but familiar, reliable, plenty-of-things-like-it content. Which, as it happens, is what A.I. is best at.The debate over A.I. in screenwriting is often simplified as, “Could a chatbot write the next ‘Twin Peaks’?” No, at least for now. Nor would anyone necessarily want it to. The bulk of TV production has no interest in generating the next “Twin Peaks” — that is, a wild, confounding creative risk. It is interested in more reboots, more procedurals, more things similar to what you just watched.TV has always relied on formula, not necessarily in a bad way. It iterates, it churns out slight variations on a theme, it provides comfort. That’s what has long made strictly formatted shows like “Law & Order” such reliable, relaxing prime-time companions. That’s also what could make them among the first candidates for A.I. screenwriting.Large language models like ChatGPT work by digesting vast quantities of existing text, identifying patterns and responding to prompts by mimicking what they’ve learned. The more done-to-death a TV idea is, the greater the corpus of text available on it.And, well, there are a lot of “Law & Order” scripts, a lot of superhero plots, a lot of dystopian thrillers. How many writers-contract cycles before you can simply drop the “Harry Potter” novels into the Scriptonator 3000 and let it spit out a multiseason series?In the perceptive words of “Mrs. Davis,” the wildly human comedic thriller about an all-powerful A.I., “Algorithms love clichés.” And there’s a direct line between the unoriginality of the business — things TV critics complain about, like reboots and intellectual-property adaptations and plain old derivative stories — and the ease with which entertainment could become bloated by machine-generated mediocrity.After all, if studios treat writers like machines, asking for more remakes and clones — and if viewers are satisfied with that — it’s easy to imagine the bean counters wanting to skip the middle-human and simply use a program that never dreamed of becoming the next Phoebe Waller-Bridge.And one could reasonably ask, why not? Why not leave the formulas to machines and rely on people only for more innovative work? Beyond the human cost of unemployment, though, there’s an entire ecosystem in which writers come up, often through precisely those workmanlike shows, to learn the ropes.Highly formatted shows like “Law & Order” could be among the early candidates for A.I.-generated scripts. NBCThose same writers may be able to use A.I. tools productively; the WGA is calling for guardrails, not a ban. And the immediate threat of A.I. to writers’ careers may be overstated, as you know if you’ve ever tried to get ChatGPT to tell you a joke. (It’s a big fan of cornball “Why did the …” and “What do you call a …” constructions.) Some speculations, like the director Joe Russo’s musing that A.I. some day might be able to whip up a rom-com starring your avatar and Marilyn Monroe’s, feel like science fiction.But science fiction has a way of becoming science fact. A year ago, ChatGPT wasn’t even available to the public. The last time the writers went on strike, in 2007, one of the sticking points involved streaming media, then a niche business involving things like iTunes downloads. Today, streaming has swallowed the industry.The potential rise of A.I. has workplace implications for writers, but it’s not only a labor issue. We, too, have a stake in the war with the storybots. A culture that is fed entirely by regurgitating existing ideas is a stagnant one. We need invention, experimentation and, yes, failure, in order to advance and evolve. The logical conclusion of an algorithmicized, “more like what you just watched” entertainment industry is a popular culture that just … stops.Maybe someday A.I. will be capable of genuine invention. It’s also possible that what “invention” means for advanced A.I. will be different from anything we’re used to — it might be wondrous or weird or incomprehensible. At that point, there’s a whole discussion we can have about what “creativity” actually means and whether it is by definition limited to humans.But what we do know is that, in this timeline, it is a human skill to create a story that surprises, challenges, frustrates, discovers ideas that did not exist before. Whether we care about that — whether we value it over an unlimited supply of reliable, good-enough menu options — is, for now, still our choice. More