A contract in which AI is not a writer
The Writers Guild of America strike, which began in May 2023, ended on 27 September; the term of the new minimum basic agreement starts on 25 September 2023 and it was ratified on 9 October. The agreement says that neither traditional nor generative AI is a writer, so no text either produces is literary material or source material.
Why it matters
This is the first place where the boundary of generative systems was drawn not by a statute or a court but by a collective agreement. It does not forbid using a model: it strips the model's output of the legal status that money and credits depend on. If machine text is not source material, then a writer handed it remains the first writer of the screenplay rather than a rewriter.
Four provisions, as the Guild's own summary states them: AI cannot write or rewrite literary material, and AI-generated material is not source material, so it cannot be used to undermine credit or separated rights; a writer may choose to use AI with the company's consent, but the company cannot require it; the company must disclose whether material given to a writer was generated by or incorporates AI; and the Guild reserves the right to assert that exploiting writers' material to train AI is prohibited by the agreement or other law. What the record does not claim. No day is given for the start of the strike: the studio annual report used to check the dates says only in May. The Guild's summary itself notes that where it differs from the Memorandum of Agreement the memorandum controls, and the memorandum was not read here. The summary page has since been removed from the Guild's site, so the source is an archived copy of 17 October 2023.