The Writers Guild of America strike is putting the spotlight on key issues that are important to ensuring a future for writers, Succession creator Jesse Armstrong and colleagues told The Hollywood Reporter on Wednesday in central London where they participated in a show of support for the WGA strike on a “Global Day of Solidarity” that used the moniker and hashtag Screenwriters Everywhere.
Armstrong discussed such core hot-button issues in the labor dispute as pay, writers rooms and AI.
“Writers rooms need lots of different perspectives,” he told THR. And if you can’t make a living as a writer, we won’t get young people joining the industry.”
AI affects every area of life these days. “Anyone who works right now is thinking how they could be replaced by AI,” Armstrong explains. “For writers, there’s a particular concern that work that previous writers have done, or [we have done] ourselves, could be used to train AIs that then makes a certain kind of writing unpaid.”
His conclusion: “There needs to be compensation for where that work is coming from, because computers aren’t inventing it, they are taking it from stuff that other human beings have written at some point. So there needs to be a chain of money that goes back to keep the people alive for that hard work that happened at some point.”
Despite a heat wave in London, Armstrong and Succession writers Jamie Carragher and Francesca Girardi joined an estimated more than 200 members of writers and other guilds, including such big-name writers as Russell T Davies (Doctor Who, It’s a Sin, A Very English Scandal, Queer as Folk), Jack Thorne (His Dark Materials), Charlie Brooker (Black Mirror), Dennis Kelly (Utopia, Spooks) and Alice Nutter and Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty), for a protest at a statue of William Shakespeare in London’s Leicester Square.
Among the signs that the protesters brought: “Try filming blank pages,” “Fair pay now,” “AI can’t write the big picture,” “The U.K. ONLY has minirooms. It sucks. WGA, don’t give in,” “We are the TV you love,” “Nobody can do their jobs until the writers do theirs,” “solidarity,” “In the beginning was the word,” and “Leave AI to scifi.” Among the chants filling the square were “fair pay now,” solidarity,” and “writers strong!”
The event was organized by the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain (WGGB) with the goal of standing “in support of the 11,500 members of Writers Guild of America West and Writers Guild of America East” who have been on strike since May 2. WGGB chair Lisa Holdsworth said in a speech that the WGA’s strike “is our fight.”
Asked by THR at Leicester Square if AI could create some of the “holy hell” moments in a show like Succession, Armstrong said that those “often (come up) in writers room, which AI can’t replicate right now.”
Added Carragher: “I also just like the idea of watching art that’s being created by people like a community that you get from watching a great TV show or a film. It feels good knowing that the individuals that made it are real people. Art is meant to reflect on life. And if it’s made by some sort of weird algorithm washing machine, I’m not so interested.”
