The Writers Guild of America’s negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers are set to commence on 16 March, with the current contract expiring on 1 May. The guild has given advance notice of its intentions on one specific front: writers whose scripts are used to train AI models should be paid for it.
John August, co-chair of the WGA Negotiating Committee, said the union will seek to affirm the principle that writers should be compensated for derivative uses of their work, including AI training. “There has to be some payment for training and AI outputs based on our work,” August said.
The demand builds on — and goes further than — the AI protections secured in 2023. That agreement prohibited AI from writing or rewriting literary material and gave writers the option to use AI with studio approval, but did not prohibit studios from training AI models on writers’ work. That omission is now the central target.
The Disney-Sora collaboration has sharpened the issue. August told The Hollywood Reporter that if studios are using guild members’ scripts to generate AI outputs, the writers get a share. “This is consistent with what we’ve always done in terms of reuse of our material. And so while it’s a new technology, it’s not a new concept.”
The overall mood heading into talks is notably less combative than 2023. Far fewer writers are working, and the union’s health fund is running eight-figure deficits. The WGA’s stated priority is making the career of a television and film writer economically sustainable again.
SAG-AFTRA is already mid-negotiation and has proposed a so-called “Tilly tax” — a fee studios would pay whenever they deploy a synthetic performer in place of a human one. The two guilds are pursuing the same underlying principle through different mechanisms: if the studios profit from AI outputs derived from union members’ work, the members want a cut.
Whether studios will move on training data compensation is genuinely open. In the 2023 round, the AMPTP refused to accept any limitations on the use of scripts to train AI, since the studios own the copyright on that material. The legal position hasn’t changed. The commercial pressure has.
