Beginning May 2, the Writers Guild of America (WGA), a West and East region labor union representing thousands of writers behind various beloved television series, news programs and films, went on strike in Los Angeles and New York, demanding higher compensation, increased job security, larger writers’ rooms and a limited presence of artificial intelligence (AI) in the writing process, according to the WGA proposals.
Every three years, the WGA negotiates a new contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) to increase pay and expand the size and duration of writers’ rooms. Similar to the last negotiation in 2017, the union voted in favor of a strike authorization vote, giving members of the guild the ability to strike if a fair contract was not reached by May 1, the expiration date of the previously made deal.
STRIKE HISTORY
Still ongoing and inching toward the two-month mark, the 2023 strike is the seventh Writers Guild strike. The previous and last strike before this year took place in 2007–2008, which stemmed from the anticipation of the growth of streaming services. In 1960, the very first WGA strike, writers received the right to profits when films were aired on TV, in 1973, they won guaranteed revenue in light of pay TV, cable TV and cassettes, and the strikes in the 1980s dealt with the emergence of home videos.
As new mediums and ways of distributing content are born, historically, writers have had to strike in order to be accurately and fairly compensated, and this year’s strike is no different. In this case, AI, or Artificial Intelligence, has become the new cause of concern for Hollywood writers.
AI is a machine’s ability to perform cognitive functions associated with those of humans, and despite the potential damage it can cause to the livelihoods of writers, the WGA looks to harness the technology as a tool rather than terminate it altogether.
Banning the technology, which has sparked the intrigue of many companies, wouldn’t work in favor of the guild, so instead, their membership assembled three proposals: regulate the use of artificial intelligence on MBA-covered projects: AI can’t write or rewrite literary material; it can’t be used as source material; and MBA-covered material can’t be used to train AI. The AMPTP has rejected these requests and, instead, offered annual meetings to discuss technological advances.
Not only has this WGA strike disrupted the lives of writers and consumers of media and streaming, but it is also highlighting the underrepresentation of Latino writers. As stated in the Latino Data Collaborative’s 2022 Latinos in Media report, Latinos only made up 6.9 percent of screenwriters and directors in the industry in 2021, and both dropped below a shocking 3 percent in 2022.
Photo credit : Jack Quillin/Shutterstock. Writers Guild of America Strike (Writers Strike) in front of Netflix Headquarters in Los Angeles on June 14, 2023.
Artificial Intelligence Development
And in regards to the progression of AI and who this might affect the most, Latinos are at the forefront. According to a Brookings 2017 Digitization and the American Workforce study, the workforces that are most populated by Latinos are construction, extraction, farming and maintenance – all labor-intensive and blue-collar industries that are vulnerable to technological growth.
While AI development will inevitably affect blue-collar jobs, it will also collide with white-collar jobs as tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, and someone who is heavily interested in the effects on both groups is Armando F. Sanchez, CEO of Armando F. Sanchez Production.
Having grown up traveling between Tijuana and San Diego until he was 12 years old, Sanchez is a graduate of California State University, Long Beach, with a bachelor of arts in political science and public administration and a master’s in public administration, as well as Claremont Graduate University with a Ph.D./ABD in political and public policy.
In 2010, Sanchez launched his own company, Armando F. Sanchez Production, which is focused on interviewing Latino and Latina leaders throughout the world and highlighting their backgrounds and successes. And as the relationship between the WGA strike and AI grows, he is delving into how the two intersect by speaking with Latinos and Latinas who are a part of the guild.
CALÓ NEWS sat down with Sanchez to talk about his own production company, his interest in the impacts of AI on white and blue-collar occupations, how Latinos might be affected and his predictions of the 2023 Writers Guild strike.
ARMANDO F. SANCHEZ, 71, OCEANSIDE, CEO OF ARMANDO F. SANCHEZ PRODUCTIONS, HE/HIM, MEXICAN-AMERICAN
WHAT IS YOUR COMPANY, ARMANDO F SANCHEZ PRODUCTION? WHAT DOES IT ENTAIL? ITS MISSION/GOAL?
Because of the network that I created over the years with television, I added radio to it, and I was constantly being asked to do shows, being interviewed like this on a variety of topics. I just created my own company and started doing my own production. I don’t do it for funds, I don’t do it for money. I don’t ask people for money, and I don’t want to waste time on that. I want to invest my time in interviewing people. I would say that I sort of fell in interviewing people who are authors, I think I’ve interviewed maybe about 200 authors and their books. They send me their books, and, half the time, I don’t know what the heck I’m talking about. I’m not a poet, but I get to meet people on every level of scale. They love talking about their books, so I get a whole lot of free books. I can’t read them all, but I found myself going very diverse. And, somehow, I ended up in poetry. I can’t write a poem worth a darn, but I must have interviewed 60, 70 poets by now. I love the learning curve aspects. My company is about somebody needing exposure, and all I make sure of is that they’re viable people and going to say viable things that will help other people. That’s the bottom line, and if I know they’re going to do that, I bring them on the show and interview them. I love it.
If you go to my YouTube channel, I think I have 400 videos. I used to do podcasting, but then the internet gave me Zoom, and I must have done 500-600 interviews with that. I just keep going. I don’t look back, and I just keep meeting new people.
YOU ARE INTERESTED IN HOW AI IMPACTS WHITE AND BLUE COLLAR OCCUPATIONS AMIDST THE WRITERS GUILD STRIKE, WHAT WILL HAPPEN AS WE INCREASE THE NUMBER OF UNEMPLOYED DUE TO TECHNOLOGICAL GROWTH, AND HOW AI WILL IMPACT LATINO/AS. HOW AND WHEN DID YOU BECOME INTERESTED IN THIS SUBJECT?
When I was a kid, when I was living in Tijuana, I was a middle-class Mexicano, but all around me was poverty. As a child, I had to ask the question, ‘Why am I living here, and people are living there?’ And day to day, you see more poverty in Mexico as a child than you did before. Now, in the present, you see it everywhere, but back then, I saw it more. I always scratched my head and said, ‘Why do we have all these divisions?’ To me, the question of economics started very early. I was very blessed. I never needed money, but I always saw the need and I saw what people did, to produce, whatever that may be. And having crossed the border every day, from first grade through seventh, I got the contrast every day. I thought, ‘Okay, what makes both worlds different? ’Unknown, to me, at least from a conscious point of view, I was learning a great deal about international economics. As I started to travel around the world, it just expanded. I’d have to say that my interest in where we are today came from there. Then, when AI got thrown into the package, it came up to a different level.
HOW DOES THE 2023 WRITERS GUILD STRIKE INTERSECT WITH TECHNOLOGICAL GROWTH AND THE CONTINUOUS DEVELOPMENT OF AI (ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE)?
The strike is a drop of water in a lake. It is another drop of water with the same problem, it’s just from a different angle. It’s more complicated because it’s public and because it impacts millions of people. But, the problem is still the same, it’s not any different. You can take any issue, and it’s always the same issue. It sounds different, but it’s not, it’s still the same issue. In the last two-thirds of my interview with Rick Najera, we started looking at it, not so much from the Writers Guild, but from how this is really part of the whole package. I think he says that ‘This is really part of something much greater than itself. This is not just about the strike.’ You can’t talk about anything without it coming back to the same topic, i.e. economics. Then, you add on the new state and the new levels of issues. You bring AI into it, and you just accelerated the problem. You just made it worse.
Everybody’s in trouble. This is from my perspective. First of all, what is business? Business around the world is the same thing everywhere. It’s three things: attract customers, decrease expenses and maximize profit. Basic economics, basic 101, but people forget that. What does that have to do with it? For the last 20, 30 years, we have been able to move companies anywhere in the world. In El Salvador, people make $365 a month. In Chile $513 a month. In Argentina, $200 a month. In Brazil, $618, and in Mexico, the basic minimum income is $7 a day. We’re talking $245 a month. Now, hear me out as a business owner, not a worker. As a business owner, on an international level, why would I want to put a company in LA and have to pay my workers $17 to $20 an hour, when I can go to Mexico and pay workers $2 a day? Make it $10 or $15 a day, why would I want that? We’re not even talking about AI yet, this is pre-AI.
Then, comes shipping containers. What does that mean? It means I can put anything inside a box and send it anywhere in the world. Moving stuff is easy. Then the internet comes along. Now, I can talk to anybody in the world practically for free and I can put the company anywhere in the world. I could be on my yacht looking at my phone, and I can do business with it. Internet AI has allowed me now to speak 1,000 languages out of 7,000 that exist on the planet. If I don’t speak Vietnamese, no big deal, I just get the system to translate for me, and I can move my company to Vietnam. This has been ongoing for years. This is nothing new, not overnight. Then automation comes around. What is automation? Slavery is against the law in most parts of the world, but keeping a robot as a slave is not. I don’t have to pay for it. Why would I not, as the owner, maximize my profits, move to another country, use containers and use the internet?
But then, it gets even better. Now, I’m figuring out how to make people work for free for me. Now people play secretaries for me, whether it be AI, or people who go to the store and they check themselves out, I don’t have to pay cashiers. Gasoline station attendants, what the hell is that? I buy my tickets for the theater on the Internet, so I don’t need them anymore. The list goes on and on and on. I paid my own bill at the restaurant the other day, I just went to the site and I paid for it. The bank’s got me doing that also. Now, you bring in AI. AI has brains now. Minimum, but it’s grown. Who needs people? Why would I hire a person, when I can hire a mechanical slave who doesn’t complain? We all have to get past this being scared, including me, and we’ve got to ask the question, which is why we’re having this discussion. What are we going to do about it? What are our options? That’s where we have to put our brains at.
YOU MENTIONED THAT IT’S PAST BEING SCARED AND MORE ABOUT THINKING ABOUT WHAT TO DO ABOUT THESE ISSUES. WHAT DO YOU THINK WE SHOULD DO?
People who want to stay as employees will be safe. My mindset is that I want to be a business owner. There’s no future for workers. They’re competing with AI, they’re in trouble. But, if they are comfortable at that level, so be it. Question number one is, ‘What occupations will survive longer in that world?’ In the world of business, that opens up a whole new package of questions and options. I prefer that one. I’m using my education to protect myself in that area.
There’s the employee side and the employer side. On the employee side, schools for children, that’s safe. People in the trades, plumbers, carpenters, all that, they have a future. They’re going to be charging more money, but those guys are safe. Latinos are very heavy in construction, they’re very safe. The health industry, regardless of how much AI they bring into it, is still person-to-person contact. Investigative journalists, yes. I’m gonna throw my two cents in about something that I have never read anywhere. My observation, from my travels, is that people who work with protecting the oceans are okay. I think anything dealing with the oceans worldwide and their protection. The oceans are something people don’t talk about, but it’s a big thing. These are the fields. From the business point of view, it’s practically any business that can help eliminate the workers. Because every time you fire a worker or don’t hire a worker, or you get machines to do it, your possibility of increasing your profit increases rapidly. You’re gonna make a great deal of money, but not as an employee.
HOW MIGHT THIS GROWTH IMPACT LATINO/AS SPECIFICALLY?
Some Latinos are not trying to learn how it’s going to impact our community. There are not enough people asking the question, ‘How will this impact us? What are our strengths and what are our weaknesses?’ As Latinos, I think we have a fantastic amount of resources to our advantage. I think one of them is that most of us have lived in low-income neighborhoods, I think that’s our advantage. Because like I said, a lot of people are self-doers. ‘You want construction?’ I’ll learn right away. They don’t think much of it and I think those trades cannot be substituted overnight. Latinos are great chismosos. We chismeamos about everything. I think that’s fantastic because that gives us the ability to communicate. There’s a benefit to watching 10,000 hours of novelas. There’s communication between people face to face, and they talk about emotions. I think it’s a great strength for us. I think the idea of knowing how to talk to each other, I think that’s a skill that a lot of cultures don’t have that we do. We do it because we rely on each other more because we don’t have all the resources. Communication is very high. But if we don’t invest in knowing our strengths, people will keep taking advantage of them or diminish them, and we will lose them.
I don’t want to answer the question; I want to keep the question in front of people. Teaching our kids ballet folklorico and Mexican philosophy as compared to U.S. philosophy that mindset is fantastic. I see it as a fantastic resource that, if we don’t protect it and we don’t value it, we’re gonna lose it.
YOU HAVE INTERVIEWED LATINO/AS IN THE WRITERS GUILD, SUCH AS RICK NAJERA. WHAT INFORMATION HAVE YOU GATHERED? WHAT WAS THAT EXPERIENCE LIKE?
The same problem exists there. It’s not only them, but it’s very common, where they’re so busy in their trade, they don’t see what’s going on. They’re writing about sci-fi, but they don’t see how they’re personally impacted. They’re like everyone else. They don’t need writers in the future. There are not enough people talking about the future. I’m pro-union, but it has no future, given the new scenarios. And the Writers Guild is part of the same problem. You’re trying to protect yourselves from AI. It’s not going to happen. You’re postponing the inevitable.
Writers have been so busy focusing on their details that they forgot the big picture and now they don’t know what to do about it. This is my opinion. They got themselves so comfortable that they were making their five, six-digit incomes and now that they’re getting pennies of residuals, instead of tens of thousands of dollars, they’re freaking out. They were the first people who should have known that this is what was coming down on them. They work for a very high-end, greedy institution called ‘movies and television,’ where they make a lot of money making people look stupid. The amount of money they’re making from reality shows is what taught them that they really don’t need the scriptwriters.
AS THE NUMBER OF UNEMPLOYED DUE TO TECHNOLOGICAL GROWTH INCREASES, WHAT DO YOU HOPE WILL HAPPEN, ESPECIALLY PERTAINING TO LATINO/AS? WHAT DO YOU PREDICT ABOUT THIS WRITERS GUILD STRIKE?
The writers’ strike is going to be lost. They’re going to give them pennies and nickels and they’re gonna give them some small things, but they’re trying to stop the inevitable. I shared with you the answer. I don’t have to produce anything inside the United States, I can send it to Canada, I can send it to Mexico, as long as I got a studio and some computers, I don’t need to do anything in the U.S. They’re fighting the wind, they can’t win. And they’re not going to win. And they know they can’t win. But they don’t know what to do about it. They can’t win. I can dub anything in any language I want, I can write an article right now and put it in 60 languages in less than an hour. They don’t have a future, that’s a writer’s skill. They all are going to have to come to some compromise, but long-term growth and going back to the good old days, no. They’re going to be writing for less money than ever before. I think they’re in a lot of trouble. AI will assure the beginning of the process of seeing a sunset and being a major moneymaker to be a writer for TV and radio or they’re just going to create more reality shows. Because people are diversifying, they don’t watch TV from eight to five in front of the screen. Novelas are all the same whether they be in Chinese or Korean and there are a lot more Korean novelas now being pushed on TV with the dubbing. I have familia that dubbed the Little Mermaid in Spanish.
Latinos, I shared some strengths that we have in our culture, and I think those will help us progress. I’m going to put my greatest amount of emphasis, again, on intercommunication skills. I think that gives us the ability to adapt very quickly to many different environments and occupations. I think the greater picture, on a social level, we need a universal basic income. I think we’re headed that way and I think Latinos need to start understanding what it is and emphasizing that they want to be on the standing line for it. I don’t know whether they are or not. I know the African American community is positioning themselves for it. Latinos need to think that way, need to think futuristic. All of us, including myself, get caught with our details and we don’t see the big picture. You’ll see a lot of Latinos asking the question, ‘What are we going to do as the unemployment numbers keep increasing?’ I don’t see people talking about it. I keep asking the question, but I don’t hear people answering the question.