TOM EATON | Writers Guild has clearly read the AI writing on the wall

In a 2012 episode of the great sitcom 30 Rock, main character Liz Lemon sadly pauses in front of a movie poster advertising Transformers 5, which proudly announces the movie is “written by no-one”.

It’s a low point for Liz: she and her team of writers and performances at a nightly variety show have been put on indefinite leave by the network and they’re staring unemployment in the face.

The joke therefore has two punchlines. On one level, it’s a pleasingly snobby dig at those blockbuster action franchises that don’t seem to have involved scriptwriters so much as a special effects team and a marketing department. On a deeper, darker level, it’s also a reminder that a total absence of writing ability is ultimately not a serious hindrance to studios making movies.

A decade later, however, that joke has developed a third punchline, one that Liz couldn’t have imagined in 2012. Because this week, Hollywood writers are going on strike to prevent films and television shows from being literally written by no-one.

At the heart of the strike by the Writers Guild of America (WGA) is the onrushing reality of generative artificial intelligence, a technology able to cobble together rough first drafts of films and TV episodes without the input of anyone even vaguely resembling a writer.

Writers tend to be readers and the WGA has clearly read the AI writing on the wall. Still, there are lines it can draw in the sand and its two demands seem fairly sensible.

The first is that AI, which one WGA negotiator calls a “plagiarism machine”, should not be allowed to feed off existing scripts to learn how to replicate them — a clear case of theft of existing intellectual property.

The second is studios stop using AI to cobble together “garbled” first drafts and then using — and underpaying — human writers to fix them. As former Law & Order: SVU show runner and producer Warren Leight told Reuters this week: “Instead of hiring you to do a first draft, [studios] hire you to do a second draft, which pays less.”

I understand if this strike on the other side of the world doesn’t seem particularly newsworthy. I also understand if you’re struggling to muster much sympathy with screenwriters in general, given how many films and TV shows are barely sentient mulch anyway.

Writers would also be the first to admit a lot of the creative process involves helping yourself to material that already exists and rearranging it according to current tastes. People got so tired of the creaky British boarding school novel (think Enid Blyton and Mallory Towers) that it had been more or less abandoned in the 1960s, so when JK Rowling exhumed it and crossed it with Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy about a boy wizard, Harry Potter was hailed as something refreshingly new.

Star Wars, likewise, helped itself so liberally to Dune (published 12 years earlier) that I’m sure a few lawyers pricked up their ears as they watched intergalactic empires threatened by a young chosen one on a desert planet who can harness an ancient religious power called “The Voice” — sorry, “The Force” — and who uses a sword rather than widely available blasters and leads a ragtag rebellion of free thinkers against a nasty man in black and his jackbooted stormtroopers.

The bots are there purely to serve Mammon ... They can only obey, and what they will obey will be the basest, crudest, most populist instincts.

The difference, however, is I don’t believe Rowling or Lucas created Harry Potter or Star Wars purely to give shareholders their pound of flesh. Few writers are entirely cynical or opportunistic. Most, in my experience, want to make something artistically or aesthetically sound — something they can stand by.

Which is partly why the AI bots are so dangerous, not just to writers but to human culture as a whole — because the bots are there purely to serve Mammon. They can’t push back against studios. They can’t throw their papers in the air and storm out. They can’t keep ideas safe from the suits, waiting for a producer who understands their vision. They can only obey, and what they will obey will be the basest, crudest, most populist instincts.

In short, once the most widely circulated storytelling and mythmaking vehicles are in the hands of cynical accountants and their amoral, obedient content generators, we’ll stop getting those essential and memorial outliers that change society.

We won’t get the original Star Trek series, showing women in positions of authority, or love across a rigid colour bar. We won’t get Will & Grace, normalising LGBTQ+ relationships, or The Office, redefining what comedy can be, or The Wire or BoJack Horseman or any of the other shows that peel back the façade of anaesthetised corporate calm to show the hard, messy human condition underneath.

All we’ll get is an average of an average: a homogenised, texture-less porridge endlessly eaten and regurgitated to us by the AI writers’ room — a thought-free goop carefully calculated to provide accessible, cheaply produced entertainment to the largest audience possible, guaranteed never to upset them by challenging their beliefs or assumption or confronting them with the shock of the new that art has always provided.

Of course, it won’t all be audiovisual wallpaper like Emily In Paris or Firefly Lane. There is now a gigantic audience of young people, raised by the wolves of YouTube, who are happy to spend hours being bloviated at by glib young men with dazzling smiles, easy solutions and a new line of energy drinks. Twenty years from now, an AI-written script might simply read: “Welcome to another six hours with your host and best friend — hell, your only friend ... Skeezy Q! Over to you, Skeez!”

I know I sound like the driver of a hansom cab in 1902 fretting about these demonic new car thingies they’re making. Perhaps the AI hustlers are right and it’ll usher in a new utopia. But for now, I’m behind the WGA. I’ll be happy to eat my words somewhere down the line, but the fact remains: writers eat food, not words.