In 2023 the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA, the union representing screen actors, both went on strike against the major studios, and for the first time generative AI was not a side issue but a core demand. The result was a pair of contracts that turned AI protections from corporate promises into negotiated, enforceable terms - the first time the technology’s use was written directly into major collective-bargaining agreements.
The WGA’s settlement, summarized on the Guild’s own “Artificial Intelligence” rights page and set out in the 2023 Memorandum of Agreement, established that neither traditional AI nor generative AI “is a writer,” so material produced by AI cannot be treated as the kind of literary material a writer is credited and paid for. The terms bar studios from forcing a writer to use AI, let a writer use it only with the company’s agreement, and require the companies to disclose to the Guild when they give a writer AI-generated material. The effect is to protect writers’ credit and compensation from being eroded by tools that can produce passable prose on demand.
SAG-AFTRA’s 2023 TV/Theatrical contract, described on the union’s own AI resources page, addressed a different threat: digital replicas of performers. The agreement requires informed consent and compensation before a performer’s likeness can be scanned, recreated, or licensed, distinguishes between replicas created during employment and those created independently, and obliges producers to give performers a “reasonably specific description” of how a replica will be used. It also adds a definition of generative AI to the basic agreement and records the producers’ acknowledgment of “the importance of human performance” when a synthetic performer might be used in a human role.
The significance of 2023 is that it produced primary documents - union contracts and their summaries - rather than op-eds about what AI might do to creative work. The questions that “Heart on My Sleeve” and the Sky-voice controversy raised in the abstract were here answered concretely for hundreds of thousands of workers: consent, disclosure, and compensation became contractual requirements. It set a template that other industries facing the same anxieties have looked to, and it marked the moment AI labor protections moved from principle to contract language.