The Ledger · Entry 086 · Creation
Writing a screenplay for production
ContestedSince 2023Criterion practiceLast reviewed 2026-08-17
Event
The Writers Guild of America minimum basic agreement, ratified on 9 October 2023 after a strike of 148 days, states that material produced by a generative system is not literary material and cannot be used as source material.
The clause is narrow and precise, which is what makes it useful. A company may not require a writer to use these tools, has to disclose material that came from them, and cannot count generated pages as source material, which is the mechanism that would otherwise erode credit and separated rights. A writer is free to use them if the company agrees. Nothing in the contract says the pages are bad, only that they carry no authorship, and the guild expressly reserved its position on the training of models on members' work. What is still done by a person is deciding what the story is for, and being in the room to answer for it when the answer costs something.