The Screenwriter’s Association (SWA) in India supports the joint efforts of the Screenwriters’ Federation of Europe and the International Affiliation of Writers’ Guilds. They have published guidelines for ethical use of AI in screenwriting.
The resolution, which is based on five key principles, supports writers as creators of literary material. He advocates for transparency, consent and fair compensation for writers’ intellectual property. The FSE brings together 32 screenwriters’ organizations in 26 European countries, while the IAWG has 14 members from 12 countries.
These organizations advocate for fair contracts and protection for writers with over 65,000 members in India, including renowned writers and filmmakers like Raj Shekhar, Anjum Rajabali and others.
Talking about that, Zama Habib, Secretary General, SWAsaid, “SWA strongly supports the IAWG and FSE in advocating ethical standards for integrating AI into screenwriting. Only human creativity can create true works of screenwriting. We advocate for transparency, consent, and fair compensation to uphold writers’ rights in the ever-changing landscape of storytelling.»
Adding further, Carolin Otto, German screenwriter and president of the FSEsaid, “While we welcome the EU’s work to enact the AI Act, there remain unresolved issues regarding unauthorized use of our intellectual property for training large language models, as well as uncertainty as to authorship and copyright of automatically generated scripts. We intend to voice our concerns in national and global political arenas, as well as develop standard language that film and television writers can require in their contracts.»
Irish screenwriter and IAWG President, Jennifer Davidsonsaid, “IAWG members seek to build on the hard-won protections that our sister guilds in America, the WGAE and WGAW, were able to obtain during their strike: namely, that this should be a tool to improve our process of writing, not diminish the value of our work or replace us. Last year we campaigned at UNESCO and this year we will take a stand at WIPO, support each other in collective negotiations and invite representatives from the technology community to the 6th World Screenwriters Conference in Galway.»
A joint resolution adopted by the IAWG and FSE states that their member guilds:
- Affirm that only writers create literary material and that large language models (LLMs) or any other present or future forms of artificial intelligence (AI) cannot be used in place of writers;
- Work to create mandatory transparency and accountability mechanisms and ensure that writers are informed if AI-generated material is used to write, rewrite, polish, or perform additional writing services;
- Advocate for robust licensing mechanisms that require explicit, informed consent for the use of authors’ intellectual property in AI training data with the goal of ensuring that only intellectual property that has been licensed a license for such use is included in the datasets of commercialized LLMs, or any other present or future forms of AI;
- Ensure that only human beings are entitled to copyright and are recognized by copyright law in the context of machine-generated material;
- Advocate for fair compensation for the use of writers’ intellectual property in LLMs or any other present or future forms of AI.
