WGA tells studios to sue AI trainers
December 13, 2024
The Writers Guild of America (WGA) is calling on Hollywood studios to take a stand on the use of their members’ works as AI training data. Leaders of the WGA West and East demanded that producers take “immediate legal action” against any firms that have used writers’ work to train AI models.
A letter sent to the heads of Warner Bros Discovery, Disney, Paramount Global, NBCUniversal, Sony, Netflix and Amazon MGM Studios stated: “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 letter cited an article in The Atlantic that claimed Apple, Meta, Anthropic, Salesforce, Nvidia and others trained off of film and television writers’ work. Rather than using scripts, reporter Alex Reisner said the data set ingested information from a website called OpenSubtitles.org — which included dialogue from projects like Breaking Bad, Twin Peaks and even Academy Awards telecasts.
The union claims tech companies have looted the studios’ intellectual property. The union alleges that now, having wrested this information, tech companies are attempting to “sell back to the studios highly-priced services that plagiarise stolen works created by WGA members and Hollywood labour.”
Meanwhile, an influential US cross-media industry body has warned of the chilling effect on investment and activity in the UK if the government weakens copyright rules to allow AI companies to scrape their content.
The Copyright Alliance, which represents some of the largest US media groups such as Disney, Fox, Paramount, Universal Music and Getty, told UK ministers of its “strong opposition to the introduction of AI exceptions” to copyright rules.
The move comes as the government is expected to launch a consultation into AI and creative industries. Industry executives are concerned the government will consult on a scheme that would allow AI companies to mine the internet freely to train algorithms on content from publishers and artists unless they “opt out”.
Government officials have said the consultation has changed in recent weeks to be more of an open debate about the issue, in the hope of alleviating an angry backlash from the sector.