![]() Neither I nor my company ever made a cent from our investment in Sudowrite, and never incorporated any of their stuff into the apps we sell. As far as I know, none of my books or scripts have been used in any of its training. I haven’t hyped it up or used it beyond those initial few weeks. I’m listed as an advisor to Sudowrite, but that overstates my involvement. They would be a better fit for the tool as it stood. The world is full of folks who write fiction, especially fan fiction. As a person who sells an app that formats it, it’s a small and specialized market. They were focused on prose fiction, which made sense. ![]() ![]() My company made a small investment in Amit’s company and started talking about ways actual writers might use this technology. (Indeed, most of the early competitors focused on writing ad copy and SEO-optimized websites.) I wasn’t ensorcelled I recognized that if Sudowrite could do this, other companies could as well, including companies with no qualms about replacing writers. How do you make sure this is a tool used by writers, like spellcheck and Wikipedia, and not a tool used to replace writers? And right after that, a corollary feeling of “wait, this could be really bad if used for evil.” This was more than a year before ChatGPT, but it provided the similar level of “wait, is this actually possible?” intrigue. It was primitive, but it felt like magic. You could click buttons and have it rewrite the text you provided, or expand upon it. The app was just a web page with a text box. He described as “Photoshop for text.” That’s a cool pitch. In August 2021, a friend introduced me to Amit Gupta, who was starting a company called Sudowrite. One cool thing about working in software is that you meet other people in tech. We make Weekend Read and Highland, which is maybe the third most popular screenwriting app. In addition to my day job writing movies, I run a tiny software company. ChatGPT had only just been announced, and very few people had experimented with it.īut I’d had an early preview of similar technologies, and a sense that we needed to be thinking about AI issues now. Indeed, when it was first proposed as an addition to our pattern of demands back in November, some members of the committee wondered if it was too early. 1Īmid the list of other urgent concerns about compensation and working conditions, the Guild’s AI proposal might seem like an outlier. Getting this language in our contract protects writers from having AI write or rewrite us, and ensures that the things we write isn’t fed into the algorithm to generate “new” versions of our work. Specifically, the proposal would ensure that AI-generated material is not considered “literary material” or “source material” - two terms with specific and important meaning in our contract. As part of the WGA’s negotiating committee, I’ve done a lot of work (and press) on behalf of the Guild’s proposal regarding AI, which seeks to regulate the use of AI on MBA-covered projects.
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