On May 2, a key gear of America’s entertainment industry ground to a halt as some 11,500 members of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) put down their pens and went on strike. The strike highlights growing concern in the creative community about Artificial Intelligence. What if content can be generated by AI, produced from a computational scrubbing of the internet that spits out an aggregate of other people’s stories, reformulated into something new? Is AI-generated entertainment original content? Who owns the copyright? Here, Stanford Law Professor Paul Goldstein, a leading copyright law scholar and author, discusses the WGA strike, the growing portent of AI-produced scripts, how AI is challenging the creative process, including in video game production, and how the law is developing in this nascent area.
Can you explain how AI is a threat to writers in the entertainment industry who are striking?
In part, the perceived threat is economic and is in this sense akin to the writers’ concerns over streaming services’ displacement of revenues from the more traditional broadcast, cable, theatrical, and DVD distribution of filmed content—writers’ rooms employing fewer writers over shorter periods, for example, and the decline of residual payments. In the case of generative AI, writers’ fear that the new technology will reduce their employment opportunities to the occasional rewrite of machine-produced scripts.
But I would be surprised if authorial self-esteem isn’t at work here as well. When movable type and the printing press first threatened the livelihood of fifteenth-century scriveners, I doubt they took it personally. But, and understandably, writers believe that their contributions to a work are unique and inimitable. The thought that their creative spark can be replaced by a few lines of computer code can be morally crushing.
How close is Hollywood to generating the script for a feature-length film through AI?
It will be a long time, if ever, before a film producer can visit an AI platform, type in “Write me a script for a superhero movie,” and get back a full-fledged, producible script. Even the m
