If the writer is completely opposed to AI, they can omit its use, or if they want, they can use the way they see fit, incl. turning it up to 11.
If the writer's quality decreases because of excessive AI use, it's the writer's problem. They need to regulate their use. If the writer can use it to hone their skills, they can profit from it.
From my personal perspective, as a person who doesn't use xGPT or other models because of unethical training from my perspective, this makes sense.
Which is how Hollywood has always worked? You can’t do as much as move a light or push “Record” on a film set without being a union member.
The VFX industry has been an exception. But frankly the deteriorating working conditions, rampant outsourcing to semi-shady companies, and just the overall downwards spiral of the quality of VFX in Hollywood movies suggests that maybe it’s not a model to emulate.
I think this will have 0 effect. Writers that use AI will push some of the writers that don't use AI out of the market.
What exact scenario have they prevented?
At the extreme end, which won't happen but which would be possible under these rules, there could be a single writer who is basically just prompt engineering and reviewing what the AI spits out, for hundreds of shows.
That a studio would use AI to generate a script without the involvement of a single writer? That wasn't going to happen anyways.
So what was the point of this? Is there something I am missing?
well yeah it always is about protectionism and barrier to entry
I find it interesting tho that they are not worried about competition between writers within the association, they will have members that decide for using assisted writing and being a lot more productive than others.
The point is that they can decide for themselves if using AI would benefit them and choose to use it or not
Personally, I wonder how useful AI is going to be in terms of output over the long term. AI will endlessly regurgitate a mash up of what it was trained on in various flavors, but the output will all seem pretty samey after a while since it lacks actual originality. "This reads like something AI wrote" is something I see a lot of already. I'm sure there'll be writers who find it useful, but I don't see it being used for the bulk of their output. At least, I hope they don't just churn out scripts with AI, spend 5 minutes tweaking them, then call it day. I can't imagine that making great material.
You're making the same mistake AI people do. You can create stuff that's like what came before all day, but it won't create anything new. Literary analysis, like these plots and the more common monomyth, is about what already exists, and lags far behind. It's the same deal with music theory. People will spend years in music school learning all kinds of stuff about music, but then they have no idea how to make anything anyone wants to listen to. Music theory as taught in schools is just catching up to jazz, rock, and rap, and there's a lot of resistance.
An AI could probably do some solid analysis, like producing a beat sheet from a novel. That might be helpful. I could pants a draft, then have an AI make the outline for the second draft.
The fear was, studio's would use AI to generate a garbage script then pay a writer far less to effectively completely rewrite it to make it usable.