Mike Schur

COVID sort of accelerated that and the strikes were in response to that contraction.

And

The companies that make stuff are no different from any other company.

They're obsessed with efficiency.

They're obsessed with cost cutting and saving.

And that means that they were looking constantly for ways to do more with less, as The Wire season five would have said.

So we saw which way the wind was blowing, the unions did, and we said, look, we got to put in a floor here, especially in television.

We have to put in a floor for the minimum...

requirements for labor to make these shows because AI was starting to poke its ugly head into the mix here.

And we were imagining a world in which they would say like, all right, TV shows are written by one person and chat GPT.

And so we had to step in and declare, A, that writers are human beings.

That's actually part of the NBA now, which is an incredible thing to have to

have to actually legislate in a contract is that a writer is defined as a human being how hard was that to get agreed upon that specific language that's a sort of the the ai stuff is sort of a almost a separate category it's certainly related to the larger picture here but it's a little bit of a separate category because again ai was is one tool that we fear these companies are going to use in order to try to get out of essentially

you know paying labor for their work so the you know the ai language that was written to the contract and into sag's contract is is it was its own category of negotiation and it was a lot of lawyers going back and forth about how to define things and and how to declare things and anyway we did have to eventually say like you have to say that a writer is a person it's sort of like a bizarro uh mitt romney corporations or people kind of deal

Yeah, yes.

We actually talked about that.

It's funny.

It's like we're trying to essentially invert the argument made by certain folks that companies are people.

We were like, well, also people are people at some level, right?

Fundamentally.