Tonight, the WGA released a summary of the historic contract. The WGA's biggest wins come in pay raises and artificial intelligence. The pay raises are significant, with significant increases for "high-budget subscription video on demand" (i.e. Netflix) and streaming movies. Starting at midnight, the Writers Guild of America will no longer picket. Instead, union members will pore over new details of the contract negotiated with the AMPTP and decide whether to vote to approve the new contract.


"Artificial intelligence is a flashy thing...data is the game changer."

The WGA said compensation for writers on streaming movies should increase by at least 18% if the film has a budget of at least $30 million, and the remaining base should increase by 26%.

In terms of artificial intelligence, the WGA basically got what it asked for from the beginning. According to the abstract of the contract, AI will not be able to write or rewrite literary material, nor will AI-generated material be used as a source material. Therefore, the executive will not be able to ask ChatGPT to come up with a story and ask the screenwriter to turn it into a script for which the executive owns the copyright.

The WGA also "reserves the right to assert that the use of screenwriting material to train artificial intelligence is prohibited by MBA or other laws." This means that if the law changes, or AI training becomes a point of contention among guild members, the WGA will be able to call it exploitation. This is likely related to a proposed law in California to regulate the use of materials to train artificial intelligence.

"But artificial intelligence is flashy stuff," said Katharine Trendacosta, director of policy and advocacy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a reporter for Vice and Defector magazines who covered the strike. "Data is the game changer."

As the Los Angeles Times pointed out earlier this week, streaming data is essentially a black hole. This means that no one working on projects in Hollywood has any idea how those projects are performing, which creates a problem since compensation for projects is directly tied to performance.

Now, studios must provide the WGA with actual data. Specifically, it is "the total broadcast time of self-produced high-budget streaming programs domestically and internationally." That means Netflix, Disney Plus, Amazon and other streaming companies won't be able to provide the WGA with weird metrics or meaningless self-talk rankings. Data provided by studios may be subject to nondisclosure agreements, so these metrics won't necessarily be available to the rest of us. However, the WGA will still be able to release comprehensive data that gives us a more nuanced and enlightening understanding of the streaming business than ever before.

Once the real, real-world data starts trickling in, it will be much harder for a streaming company to claim that a project was successful when no one you know has heard of it, or that a show was canceled due to lack of interest when the data tells a different story.

The streaming industry has thrived on a lack of data transparency, allowing an industry that thrives on fiction to skew the narrative through carefully crafted data. Now that WGA members have access to real, reliable data, once the genie is out of the bottle, it's even harder to put it back in.