The screenwriters' contract set limits on what AI can write

The process wall

A screenwriter's draft has always been the unit that determines credit and residuals. During the 2023 strike, the wall the Writers Guild of America hit was a specific one: could a studio hand a writer a machine-written draft and call the writer's rewrite a polish rather than an original script. Members ratified a new Minimum Basic Agreement on 9 October 2023, and its own summary, published by the guild's negotiating campaign, sets out a numbered artificial intelligence section alongside the pay and streaming terms. The section does not ban writers from touching AI tools. It draws a narrower line around what counts as source material and who controls that choice.

What the documents show

The MBA summary states plainly that AI 'can't write or rewrite literary material' and that AI-generated material 'will not be considered source material under the MBA,' language chosen specifically so a studio cannot use a chatbot draft to strip a writer of credit or separated rights. A writer may choose to use AI while performing services only if the company consents, but the company cannot require the writer to use software such as a named commercial tool. The guild's own Know Your Rights page on artificial intelligence, a living document last updated in December 2025, confirms the same regulations remain the operative reference for members and adds that the guild continues policy work beyond the contract text.

Authorship and limitation

The mechanism here is a definitional one: the contract does not attempt to police what a model can generate, it polices what a generated draft is allowed to count as inside a credit determination. That keeps human authorship as the test for a Writers Guild of America screen credit, regardless of what assistance a writer privately used. What the agreement leaves open is training. The summary records that the guild 'reserves the right to assert' that using members' material to train AI is prohibited by the agreement or other law, which is a reservation of a legal argument, not a settled restriction, and it says nothing about a specific model or dataset.

What survives

A writer keeps the right to decline AI tools, the right to be told when delivered material is AI-generated or incorporates it, and a credit process that a machine draft cannot pre-empt. Whether a given production honours disclosure is, editorially, a matter for a writer to check against the delivered materials themselves.

• Ask whether any 'temp' or outline material handed over before assignment was disclosed as AI-generated.
• Check a contract for the separately signed consent language the summary describes before using an AI tool on assignment.
• Compare a credit dispute against the source-material definition rather than against how polished the delivered draft reads.

The 2023 MBA is a labour contract, not a copyright ruling, and its AI section binds signatory companies rather than settling what a court would call authorship. Read against that limit, it is still the first place a working screenwriter can point to a negotiated definition of what a machine's output is not allowed to become.