The WGA wants residuals for writers whose work is fed into AI slop machines

If the studios are committed to chewing up and spitting out the work of writers like this, the least they can do is pay for it. “Clearly, the companies own the copyrights on this material, but if they’re taking our scripts to make a movie or a show, and then they’re turning around and are using it to feed an AI model and they’re licensing it to an AI model, that goes back to the principles of the MBA. Which is that when our employers are monetizing our shows and our movies to create things derived from our work, the writers get a share of that,” August continues. “One of the goals in this negotiation is to stake a claim that if our employers are using material that Guild members wrote to enable AI-generated outputs, they must compensate us. And that’s why we’re laying down this as a foundation that there has to be some payment for training and AI outputs based on our work. This is consistent with what we’ve always done in terms of reuse of our material. And so while it’s a new technology, it’s not a new concept.” 

This attitude toward AI residuals is one that is gaining traction across the industry; just yesterday, YouTube said that it was exploring “opportunities” for people to profit from the use of their likeness on the platform. But this is just one of the issues the guild hopes to address in the negotiation, along with better residuals for streaming series and improvements to the guild’s health care. The three committee members who spoke with THR are also clear that they’re willing to strike again if they need to. “In 2023, none of the people on this call or in that negotiating committee wanted to strike, but the companies left us with no option because they wouldn’t negotiate,” says Stutzman. “[I]t took them 148 days to figure out, oops, they could, and did. And that’s why we are really hoping that they’ve retained that lesson when it comes to 2026.”