The Writers Guild of America's East and West chapters sent a letter to Hollywood studios on December 12 criticizing them for not taking legal actions against AI companies for allegedly stealing subtitles and using them to "plagiarize stolen works."
In the letter, WGAE and WGAW mention that Hollywood Studios have "harmed" its members and violated the "minimum basic agreement" by not taking legal action against tech companies like Meta, Apple, and Salesforce.
The recipients of the letters include Jennifer Salke, head of Amazon MGM Studios, Disney's CEO Bob Iger, NBC Universal Studios & Entertainment chair Donna Langley; Netflix co-CEO and president, Ted Sarandos, Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Ravi Ahuja, Warner Bros. Discovery president/CEO David Zaslav, and Paramount Global co-CEOs, George Cheeks, Chris McCarthy, and Brian Robbins.
This move comes after a recent Atlantic article confirmed that many major tech company systems have used tens of thousands of films and TV episodes to create a data set to develop their artificial intelligence systems.
More about the contents of the letter by WGA
A December 12 letter by WAGE and WGAW, calls on Hollywood Studios to take action against mega tech companies for using intellectual property like subtitles from movies and TV episodes to train their AI systems. The letter quotes the recent November 18, Atlantic article saying,
"Tech companies have looted the studios' intellectual property - a vast reserve of works created by generations of union labor - to train their artificial intelligence systems."
The letter also noted,
"The studioes, as copyright holders of works written by WGA members have done nothing to stop this theft. They have allowed tech companies to plunder entire libraries without permission or compensation. The studios' inaction has harmed WGA members."
The letter concluded by asking the studios to take "immediate legal action" against any company that has "used our members work to train AI systems."
As per Deadline, Paramount Global and Warner Bros. Discovery have refused to comment on the matter.
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As per the November 18 story by Atlantic; Apple, Meta, Anthropic, Salesforce, Nvidia, and others have a data set that they use which is trained off of film and television scripts. Reporter Alex Reisner named OpenSubtitles.org, a website where the data was collected which includes dialogues from projects like Breaking Bad, Twin Peaks, and even Academy Award telecasts.
Reisner also noted that subtitles are a valuable source of information for these AI models since they contain the "rhythms and styles of spoken conversation" which allow AI to to expand their repertoire beyond "academic texts, journalism, and novels."
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