The new WGA contract will change the way Hollywood operates

(disclosure: the edge The editorial staff also joins the Writers Guild of America East.)

The WGA dropped a summary of the contract tonight and It’s historical. The WGA’s most notable gains relate to wage increases and artificial intelligence. Pay increases are significant across the board, with notable increases in “high-budget video on demand subscriptions” (such as Netflix) and streaming movies.

The WGA says creators of streaming features should see a minimum compensation increase of 18 percent, provided the film’s budget is at least $30 million, plus a 26 percent increase in the remaining base.

On the AI ​​side, the WGA basically got what it demanded from the beginning. According to the contract summary, AI will not be able to write or rewrite literary materials, and it will not be possible to use AI-generated materials as source materials. So, the CEO won’t be able to ask ChatGPT to do a story and have writers turn it into text that the CEO owns.

The WGA also reserves “the right to assert that exploitation of the book’s materials for AI training is prohibited under MBA or other law.” This means that if laws change or AI training reaches a point of contention among guild members, the WGA will be able to call that exploit. This is likely related to proposed laws in California regulating the use of materials to train artificial intelligence.

But “AI is the flashy thing. And the data is the game-changer,” says Katherine Trendacosta, director of policy and advocacy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a reporter covering the strike. Deputy And dissident, Tell me.

I tend to agree. as Los Angeles Times male Earlier this week, the data flow was a black hole. This means that no one working on projects in Hollywood knows how well those projects will perform, which creates a problem because payment for projects is directly linked to performance.

Now, the studios will have to provide the WGA with the actual data. Specifically, “the total number of broadcast hours, domestically and internationally, of high-budget, self-produced broadcast programming.” That means Netflix, Disney Plus, Amazon and other streaming companies won’t be able to invent weird metrics or meaningless self-referenced rankings to submit to the WGA. The numbers provided by studios may be subject to nondisclosure agreements, so the rest of us won’t necessarily have access to those metrics. However, the WGA will still be able to release data in aggregate, giving us a more accurate and revealing view of the broadcast business than anything we’ve had before.

Once the actual numbers start rolling out, it will be very difficult for streamers to claim success when no one you know has ever heard of it or say the show was canceled due to lack of interest when the numbers suggest a different story.

The streaming industry has thrived on data opacity, allowing an industry powered by fiction to twist the story as it sees fit with carefully crafted data. Now, there will be real, actual, hard data available to WGA members, and once the genie is out of the bottle, it will be very difficult to crush it again.