AI and TV Writers
By 
The vast evil of artificial intelligence has led to fury among Hollywood creatives.
Whenever AI came up during last year’s WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, it was a contentious issue, but one that seemed to exist as an abstraction, fodder for pithy picket signs.
But last year’s theoretical fear became a real, deeply personal one with last week’s discovery by The Atlantic of more than 139,000 TV and film scripts in a data set being used to train AI. It set writer group chats aflame, and apparently no one was safe from having their work hoovered up by AI, with the search function built by The Atlantic revealing that AI had used 508 scripts credited to Shonda Rhimes, 346 from Ryan Murphy and 742 of Matt Groening’s episodes of Futurama and The Simpsons. (Showrunners and writers spent much of this past week frantically typing in their name into the search field, coming back horrified.)
The training data isn’t uploaded scripts but rather subtitles from those TV episodes and movies, sourced from a site called OpenSubtitles.org. If you’re wondering if your show or film’s script is floating around in this data set, search here.
“I’m livid. I’m completely outraged. It’s disgusting,” Teen Titans’ David Slack tells me after discovering 42 of his credited scripts in the database, including ones for Person of Interest, Lie to Me and In Plain Sight. “It’s a huge amount of my work . . . These are things that I poured my heart and soul into.”
I didn’t listen to the podcast this leads to because I don’t waste my time listening to my podcasts. But the issue for labor in many industries is very real.