Posted in: ABC, streaming, TV | Tagged: ai, artificial intelligence

TV Writers Learning AI Training Included 139,000+ of Their Scripts

From Twin Peaks to Shonda Rhimes, Ryan Murphy, and many more - a lot of TV writers are learning that their scripts were used in AI training.

Published Tue, 26 Nov 2024 10:44:07 -0600

by Ray Flook

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Remember back during the SAG-AFTRA and WGA negotiations with AMPTP, when the AMPTP dragged their heels and brought the entertainment industry to nearly a dead stop for way longer than it should have ever gone? One of the biggest issues in play – and understandably so – was artificial intelligence (AI). Specifically, what protections would be in place for actors, writers, directors, and others so that AI doesn't end up putting a lot of folks out of work, and what protections would be in place to protect likenesses and existing creative work from being thrown into a generative AI blender without consent from the individuals whose likenesses are being used or whose work is being strip-mined. But based on what writer and programmer Alex Reisner had to share in The Atlantic, the threat of AI has now become all too real for a whole lot of scriptwriters for a whole lot of television shows – to the tune of more than 139,000 television and film scripts being used in a data set created to train AI.

"I can now say with absolute confidence that many AI systems have been trained on TV and film writers' work. Not just on 'The Godfather' and 'Alf,' but on more than 53,000 other movies and 85,000 other TV episodes: Dialogue from all of it is included in an AI-training data set that has been used by Apple, Anthropic, Meta, Nvidia, Salesforce, Bloomberg, and other companies," Reisner wrote in his piece, which also included access to search the database to see if your favorite writer/series was included. In terms of what's on there, Reisner noted that on the television side, there were 700+ episodes of Matt Groening's The Simpsons and Futurama, 150+ episodes of NBC's Seinfeld, 45 episodes of ABC's Twin Peaks, and full runs of HBO's The Wire, HBO's The Sopranos, and AMC's Breaking Bad. For Shonda Rhimes fans, you should know that there are 500+ scripts in her name – while Ryan Murphy's name is on well over 300 scripts. As you can imagine, there are a whole lot of writers not happy about this, with that number growing each day as more and more of them find their works being thrown into the AI mix. The question still remains if there is any legal recourse they can take or if the studios (generally speaking, the ones who own the copyrights to the scripts) would consider the courts as an option – assuming the studios aren't in favor of this (but that's a whole other discussion).