The Writers Guild of America (WGA) has called on Hollywood studios and Netflix to take legal action against tech companies accused of using its members' work to train artificial intelligence (AI) systems. In a letter shared with the press on December 12, the guild referenced a recent report by The Atlantic alleging that companies like Apple, Anthropic, Meta, Nvidia, Salesforce, and Bloomberg utilized an AI training dataset containing dialogue from over 53,000 films and 85,000 television episodes.
Addressed to the CEOs of Warner Bros. Discovery, Disney, Paramount Global, NBCUniversal, Sony, Netflix, and Amazon MGM Studios, the letter emphasized that the collective bargaining agreement reached in 2023 obligates studios to protect writers' copyrights. “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,” stated the letter. “Having amassed billions in capital on this foundation of wholesale theft, these tech companies now seek to sell back to the studios highly-priced services that plagiarize stolen works created by WGA members and Hollywood labor.” The WGA added that the studios, as copyright holders of works written by WGA members, “have done nothing to stop this theft.”
This move marks a potential escalation in the ongoing debate over AI, a contentious issue that became a central focus of the union’s contract negotiations last year.