WGA Tells Studios to Stop Letting AI Companies ‘Plunder Entire Libraries’ of Hollywood Writing

After spending months on strike against the movie and TV studios in terms of how they might use artificial intelligence, the Writers Guild of America is now calling on those studios to wake up and take action against how tech companies have been using AI.

The WGA East and West sent a joint letter on Wednesday, December 11 to top Hollywood CEOs at Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount Global, Disney, NBCUniversal, Sony, Netflix, and Amazon MGM Studios demanding that the studios take “immediate legal action” against any tech company that is using WGA members’ work in order to train its AI models.

The Writers Guild is equating what AI companies are doing to piracy and saying that while Hollywood has spent billions working to prevent that kind of theft, it has done nothing against this new kind.

“It’s time for the studios to come off the sidelines,” the letter, obtained by IndieWire, reads. “After this industry has spent decades fighting piracy, it cannot stand idly by while tech companies steal full libraries of content for their own financial gain. The studios should take immediate legal action against any company that has used our members’ works to train AI systems.”

The letter cites a November 18 article published in The Atlantic titled “There’s No Longer Any Doubt That Hollywood Writing is Powering AI.” The article investigated that a database that has powered AI-training data sets for companies like Apple, Anthropic, Meta, Nvidia, Salesforce, Bloomberg, and more had comprised over 53,000 movies and 85,000 TV episodes. The article said that included hundreds of episodes of “The Simpsons,” “Seinfeld,” “Twin Peaks,” “The Wire,” “The Sopranos,” “Breaking Bad,” and every Best Picture nominee between 1950 and 2016.

The article made the case that the technology in chatbots and text-to-video generators creates striking facsimiles of speech and visuals in part because they’re directly trained on Hollywood materials. Tech companies have posited that their material is open sourced and comes from publicly accessible data, but the dialogue that powers some of the models is often drawn from closed captions on YouTube videos and other sources rather than the original source material directly.

So the WGA’s response, rather than shout at studios to simply ban AI in films and TV altogether, is to make the case that this is greatly hurting the business of the studios themselves, with AI companies stealing the intellectual property they own and plagiarize it in order to create their models. They believe the studios shouldn’t be silent on the issue any longer.

Read the full letter, which was signed by the WGAW Board of Directors and the WGAE Council, below:

The November 18 Atlantic article “There’s No Longer Any Doubt That Hollywood Writing is Powering AI” confirms what was already clear to so many: tech companies have looted the studios’ intellectual property—a vast reserve of works created by generations of union labor—to train their artificial intelligence systems. Having amassed billions in capital on this foundation of wholesale theft, these tech companies now seek to sell back to the studios highly-priced services that plagiarize stolen works created by WGA members and Hollywood labor. 

The studios, as copyright holders of works written by WGA members, have done nothing to stop this theft. They have allowed tech companies to plunder entire libraries without permission or compensation. The studios’ inaction has harmed WGA members. 

The Guild’s collective bargaining agreement—the MBA—expressly requires the studios to defend their copyrights on behalf of writers. MBA Article 50 provides that the studios hold “in trust” rights reserved to certain writers of original works. Writers who have separated rights in those works under Article 16.B retain all other rights in the material, including the right to use the works to train AI systems. As holders of those rights in trust, the studios have a fiduciary obligation to protect against the unauthorized use of the works for AI training purposes.

It’s time for the studios to come off the sidelines. After this industry has spent decades fighting piracy, it cannot stand idly by while tech companies steal full libraries of content for their own financial gain. The studios should take immediate legal action against any company that has used our members’ works to train AI systems. 

Read more about the WGA’s policy advocacy against the theft and exploitation of writers’ works by AI models.

In solidarity,