Technology often has a tangible impact on our lives and the work we do to contribute to society—like the combustion engine, personal computer and other technologies. 
 
Recently, one of the creative cores of our modern society had to contend with the role that artificial intelligence (AI) would play in its work moving forward. 

Some would argue that the Writers Guild of America (WGA), responsible for writing many of the TV shows and movies that we all watch, sees the writing on the wall as to how generative AI is making progress in its ability to think and write prose.  

Generative AI is a class of artificial intelligence that can generate new works of writing, arts and music by sampling existing works of human writers, artists and musicians. 
 
For example, the ability to reason and to write coherent essays allowed Open AI‘s GPT-4 to pass the rigorous Uniform Bar Exam with a score of 297(270 is passing in North Carolina), which includes essay writing. 
 
In its WGA contract negotiation with media studios, the union has placed AI as one of the pillars of concern. 

On September 27, 2023, the WGA reached an agreement with the major media studios to end their five-month strike. The studios gave these concessions to the use of AI:

• Studios cannot use AI to write scripts for TV shows and movies 
• Studios cannot rewrite scripts using AI for TV shows and movies 

The WGA gave up the following concessions: 

• Allow studios to create source material using AI 
• Allow studios to train AI models using writers’ work 

On the day of the tentative contract agreement, Ellen Stutzman, chief negotiator for the WGA, shared with NPR’s Ailsa Chang: “It guarantees to writers that artificial intelligence will not be used to replace them. It can’t rewrite them. It doesn’t affect their credits, and it doesn’t affect their compensation. So it’s some sort of research material that can be given to a writer, but they are the ones writing the script, and they will be the ones paid and credited for it.” 

The big question for Hollywood now is how it will use this new technology, generative AI, to enhance the work instead of being replaced by it.