WGA ratifies contract with new guardrails on AI in screenwriting

Members of the Writers Guild of America voted to ratify the union’s new Minimum Basic Agreement, with 8,435 of 8,525 valid votes in favour — a 99% margin. The vote closed a strike that had begun in May 2023 and, at 148 days, was the longest in the guild’s history; the agreement itself had been reached with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers in late September, ending picketing while the ratification vote was organised.

Artificial intelligence was one of the strike’s defining issues alongside streaming residuals and staffing minimums, and the ratified contract set the first union-negotiated AI provisions in Hollywood. Under the deal, material generated by AI cannot be considered “literary material” — meaning a machine cannot receive writing credit — and AI-generated material provided to a writer does not count as source material for the purposes of pay or credit determinations. Studios cannot require a writer to use AI tools, though a writer may choose to with company consent, and any company that gives a writer AI-generated material has to disclose that it is AI-generated. The guild also reserved the right to argue, separately, that training AI systems on its members’ work without consent violates the agreement or other law — leaving the underlying training-data dispute unresolved rather than settled by the contract.

The deal was read at the time as a template rather than an endpoint: it constrained how AI could be used inside a production process without addressing the copyright status of the models themselves. SAG-AFTRA, still on strike over its own contract, reached and ratified a parallel agreement the following month, extending comparable consent requirements to performers’ digital likenesses.