To Save Itself, Hollywood Must Build Its Own ChatGPT

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) is striking against studios in pursuit of a new contract that lets writers participate more fully in the industry. The central disagreements are about economics, but the issue that has captured the most public attention is the threat posed by so-called artificial intelligence--products like ChatGPT--to the livelihood of creative professionals, including writers. ChatGPT is a generative AI program that has been trained on a massive corpus of text to predict the word or words that should follow a text prompt or word string. It is not intelligent, though its user interface has been designed to create that illusion. Studios perceive that generative AI is a tool they can use against writers.