The Writer’s Strike Is Not About A.I.

A.I. is a powerful tool that needs to be regulated. In the current strike, it’s a scare tactic hiding bigger problems.

There is not one person working on a film set who feels they are appropriately valued, paid, or credited. Most people working in film and TV do so because they love their job – the art, the chaos, the camaraderie, and the joy of being associated with something bigger than themselves. This includes us screenwriters. Strikes are not entered lightly – pay is erratic at best, and jobs hard to get, so when writers take to the picket line, it’s because something momentous is at stake. Today, nearly 12,000 writers are fighting for their rights in a new landscape, and the outcome will have meaningful implications for the whole business.

Old Media Contracts In A New Media World

The last writer’s strike in 2007 was a response to what everyone could see looming on the horizon – the internet, and what it might mean to traditional film and television making. That strike lasted for 100 days. In the end, writers received safeguards to what were predictions about how this new beast would behave. The most important elements in the new agreement were:

• The web became a formal jurisdiction for the union, and writers creating original content would be covered under a union contract

• Writers would be paid residuals for programs streamed online

• Writers would be paid for shows streaming on advertising-supported websites.

The strike was considered a success – the internet was zoned a formal creative space and residuals - a core part of writer earnings, protected. ‘New Media’ had been quantified and dealt with, Netflix was still shipping out DVDs in little red envelopes, and no one could predict that advertising would play a much, much smaller role in traditional viewing.

Residuals

Residuals are a big deal. It is estimated that the cast of Friends make approximately $20m a year in residual payments, even now. Seinfeld creator Jerry Seinfeld earns $400m a year. Take those eye-watering numbers and scale down across hundreds of shows and films that are successful but not seismic, and you can see very real cash dollars going to us middle class creators, who represent the bulk of writers.

When Netflix entered the streaming world and offered subscribers ad-free content, they effectively did away with residuals because they no longer had any advertising revenue stream, undermining the contract clauses the WGA had installed in 2007. Fast-forward a decade, and the big studios have quickly followed suit with similar business models, with new smaller streamers popping up every other day. Streaming is the primary way we consume content.

Streaming does not work the same way as a TV network. Traditionally, the revenue generated by advertisers is what pays residuals – if the show is airing, and advertisers are paying for airtime, the show generates money. The more popular the show, the more advertisers pay, the more money made. Because there are no advertisers in the world of streaming, there are no residuals. Netflix and the like are also incredibly opaque about their performance metrics, keeping creatives in the dark about the true popularity and value of their content, making it impossible to leverage during negotiations.

Despite this missing revenue, Netflix is still making coin. According to this article on VPlayed, Almost 90% of all its revenue ($32bUSD in 2022) comes from subscriptions and partnerships while ~10% of it comes from advertising. This is the argument studios are currently using – there is simply no advertising ‘pool’ to draw residuals from.

Squid Game Vs Seinfeld

To fully understand just how much things have changed in a relatively short space of time, let’s look at how much money Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk was paid for his massive global success. Netflix paid the creator/writer/director a one off fixed ‘base fee’ to make Squid Game, in the form of the show’s $21.4mUSD budget. That’s about $2mUSD to make each episode. The original contract likely included a pre-established budget for season 2 – so the fact that the brilliant Korean drama is Netflix’s biggest hit and considered responsible for drawing in 4.4 million new subscribers and driving an uptick in share price, won’t help negotiate a higher budget for it’s second season. So, for a $21m purchase price, how much did Netflix net from Squid Game? About $1bUSD dollars. What a bargain. More so, considering there’s no residuals or ongoing payments to be paid. Long story short, if Friends or Seinfeld were to debut on Netflix today, that yearly $20m and $400m would disappear while significant amounts of money are generated through other channels across partnerships and subscription fees, heading into the studio’s pocket.

While it may seem unfair to use some of the most popular shows ever made as examples, big numbers help explain the new world creatives live in. 

I received my first residual check last year, it covered three feature films and a 12-part television show, for which I was credited head writer, story editor for the season, and writer for six episodes. Those credits combined landed me annual residuals of less than $400.00. All these projects have a home on streaming services of some kind. They are being watched by millions of people, reviewed, and sold on to other partnerships - retaining a value to the platforms around the world who own them.

Upfront And Minimums Fees

With this reduction in residuals, upfront fees have become even more important, but they too have shrunk. Traditionally, movies with theatrical releases paid more because they made additional money through ticket sales. Nowadays, streamers want the same big budget product for less, with the justification that they no longer have access to ticket revenue. However, not showing in a cinema has a metered impact on the product – a writer doesn’t have an easier job because the film may or may not be shown in cinemas. This reduction in payment has reduced writer income across the industry.

The Rise of the ‘Mini Room’

In TV land, writer’s room are getting increasingly smaller and employment terms increasingly shorter, while workload remains consistent. The sudden rise of mini rooms are a major concern, more so than A.I.

Mini rooms are a growing trend, and are small writer’s rooms running for a shorter length of time to generate a season. Traditionally, writer’s rooms consisted of about eight writers, staying on for the length of production to write, amend and deliver scripts throughout the shoot. Mini rooms have two-four writers who push out scripts for the showrunner/head writer, and are often wrapped before the shoot is complete, leaving the showrunner/head writer to finish the job alone – a task often intended for multiple writers. The knock-on effect of this is significant. Not only are writers increasingly hitting burnout with the extra workload (Hwang Dong-hyuk lost six teeth, my work in a head writer role cost me chunks of my hair), but the writers sent home early miss out on highly valuable and important production experience, not to mention a pay packet. To combat this, writers are asking for higher upfront and minimum payments, and minimum writer employment durations.

But What About A.I.?

ChatGPT can pump out content. That content is not great, but it is free, so it doesn’t have to be great. It will become very good as it evolves. However, all great writing is driven by purpose. A.I. doesn’t have an innate sense of purpose, so while it can write, say, ‘an action film in the style of Die Hard’, it cannot create a new kind of action hero – John McClane is sarcastic, wily, and deeply human – he’s vulnerable – his bare feet are full of glass for a good chunk of the film, his high-powered wife wants to leave him, he feels pain, and in 1988, he is new; a wildly different hero compared to Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Jean-Claude Van Damme – unnaturally muscular, invulnerable characters who previously dominated the box office. Audiences adored this new action hero, and still do.

Die Hard is also based upon a book – Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorp. Screenwriter Jeb Stuart was working out how to make the protagonist in his adapted script more relatable (in the novel, the daughter of the John McClane character falls to her death), when he had an argument with his wife, left the house to cool off, and narrowly avoided a car accident.

“I pulled over to the side of the road and thought [the story] isn’t about a 65-year-old man who drops his 40-year-old daughter off a building, it’s actually about a 30-year-old guy who should have said sorry to his wife then something really bad happens.” – Jeb Stuart, Interview with Screen Craft, 2021.

In the novel, an ambiguous ending leaves the reader uncertain whether the hero will succumb to his injuries. This vulnerability, actor Bruce Willis said in this interview, was a driving motivator for the vulnerability contained in his performance, an element that makes John McClane so deeply relatable.

A.I. doesn’t tend to argue with its partner and then nearly kill itself because of road debris, nor does it write an action novel based on a vivid dream, as Roderick Thorp did, nor does it provide complex source material to inspire deeper dimension to a titular character. A.I. does not feel real things, it mimics them. Like chicken potato chips mimics roast chicken. A.I. might have the data to populate a character with tears if something 'sad’ occurs. It does not have an irrepressible, internal drive to express that feeling through plot and character and dialogue, informed by life experience and empathy. The difference is nuance, which is what gives story emotional resonance, and makes it a success.   

Good story, action film or otherwise, has layers of nuanced writing at its heart. The simpler it looks, the better the craftsman. I know this. Actors know this. Directors know this. Producers know this too. It’s why they need you to work through the night, 7 days a week, to get their projects across the line.

A.I. is a powerful tool, but a creative still needs to drive it.

Good Old-Fashioned Greed and Fear

Writers are clearly looking for more assurances and put simply, updated terms to meet updated business models and new tech. As the ad-based revenue generation streams disappeared, so did the leverage actors, directors, and writers once had against studios – gone are the days when the Friend’s cast could negotiate their record-breaking $1m per episode, and that’s how the studios would like it to stay. There is a reason why the AMPTP has met many of the WGA’s proposals with rejections and point-blank refusals to counter, or implied A.I. can do the job – it's a scare tactic. 

Scare tactics and strategies in major negotiations are not new. During the 2007 writers’ strike, the AMPTP sent out breach of contract notices to showrunners and suspended many without pay. The AMPTP also hired public relations services from Chris Lehane and Mark Fabiani – the ‘Masters Of Disaster’ who previously worked for Bill Clinton to manage fall out over the Lewinsky Affair and other scandals, to undermine the WGA and inspire resentment in membership by blaming Guild leadership for an unnecessary strike.

Was HBO Max’s new credit display really an oversight? When suddenly all writer and director credits were collapsed into a generic ‘creatives’ category? Many took it as the studio driving home a message - soon we’ll have A.I. writing everything and we won’t need a writer/director credit section, you should feel lucky we haven’t done it already. It would certainly be in line with AMPTP President Carol Lombardini’s comment when asked about term minimums for writer employment… “Writers are lucky to have term employment.”

The current situation is not born out of terrifying new tech, it’s a manifestation of the disdain that has always existed, and the motivator that has remained consistent since the dawn of the industry - hundreds of millions of dollars studios would rather keep. The profits generated from subscriber fees and partnerships aren’t being shared out, and neither is the pain of reduced revenue streams, and reduced profits in streaming overall. Which leads us to the big scary thing.

The Big Scary Thing – The Current Streaming Model Doesn’t Really Work

This is the underlying fear on all sides of the filmmaking fence. Streamers have grown wildly, attracting significant investment, and spending big to generate extensive content libraries to attract millions of subscribers and outperform growing competition (nowadays, there are 200+ streaming services in the United States). This rollercoaster ride of growth-at-any-cost delays profitability, and Wall Street is no longer excited. 

Streamers disrupted the market, and the pandemic added a major boost. Come 2023, we are all allowed outside again and the market is utterly, utterly saturated with content. In 2022, for the first time, Netflix lost subscribers and their market cap dropped $54b, they cut 300 staff. Disney+ is still not profitable, losing an estimated $400m last year. NBCUniversal’s streaming service Peacock, lost $704m, and ParamountPlus lost $575m. In 2022, Amazon Studios fired 100 employees. This year, Warner Brothers Discovery laid off 26% of their staff, Disney cut thousands. If the studios, who have established secondary markets, are being holistically cautious, where does that leave the streamers?

Continued exhaustive growth is not fiscally viable and the things that made Netflix so attractive to viewers - the big swings and niche shows free from advertising, are also the things that are increasingly unsustainable. So too, is the reality that quantity is not what breaks through to audiences, it’s quality. Quality that you cannot achieve if your creative labour can’t afford to work.  

This is what the writer’s strike is unintentionally shining a spotlight on. A model that is about to fall over. 

None of This Is Good For TV Or Film

There are a plethora of brilliant shows out there at the moment, and a plethora of…not brilliant ones. A lot of current content is just that, content. It’s been a quantity game that churns out rushed content, with shows and films that could have been great had they the resources they deserved. With writer’s rooms shrinking and writers working well into burnout to keep the lights on, it makes sense. This is also the reason seasons are shorter than they used to be (22 episodes were considered a full season by networks, a half season 13 episodes. Streamer seasons are more like 8-12). From the experienced vantage-point of veteran screenwriters, the situation is dire; the next generation of showrunners and leading screenwriters aren’t getting the vital production experience they need to create brilliant content in the future, and that’s bad for everybody.

And It's Just The Beginning

The actors guild SAG and directors guild AFRA are currently in negotiations with the AMPTP, and they have many of the same complaints and concerns as the WGA, and what boils down to a need for sustainable creative practices across filmmaking. What we are all indirectly demanding is a decision to be made about an industry-wide unstable business model, and industry leadership to define the place of A.I. in the arts, in lieu of government regulation. It’s a big ask.

Mismanaged A.I. (or generative A.I., as it should be more accurately referred) is a threat to people everywhere. In so many ways, A.I.’s place in the world is bigger than the writer’s strike. Actor, Director, and Computer Scientist Justine Bateman has a comprehensive twitter thread about how she believes it will displace all creatives across the industry, and how studios will likely seek to use it, but ultimately, it’s a much larger conversation that requires government input, or more than just us creatives will be out of a job. There is a line that must be drawn in the current writer negotiations, but government legislation/regulation is needed, desperately, to protect everyone – and not just for the economy’s sake. Tech industry experts, including A.I. pioneer Dr. Geoffery Hinton, quit his role at Google over his concerns, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently spoke to US Congress about the importance of independent bodies working to regulate the use of A.I. Think misinformation, bureaucracy and phishing scams are bad now? Just you wait.

The streaming landscape is about to undergo a colossal change, and it’s likely not all streaming platforms are going to survive it. When it comes to unsustainable rates of erratic growth, exhaustive audience consumption, and the societal impact of unregulated A.I., writers are just the canary in the coal mine.