WGA East Strikes Deal With Cloak to Safeguard Screenplays from AI Scraping

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The Writers Guild of America East has struck a partnership with the AI shielding tool Cloak, a service that aims to help writers safeguard their work from training AI models.

The partnership will provide WGAE members with free access to Cloak, while non-WGAE members can pay $10 for Cloak once they register their script with the guild. Cloak’s software makes a script resistant to scraping by most AI models while preserving its formatting, making it harder for those models to train on writers’ work.

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The effort responds to years of training from those models on screenplays without explicit permission, which has sparked questions over the legality of using those scripts without permission. The union has maintained that using scripts to train AI models does not constitute fair use.

“The WGAE partnership with Cloak expands our efforts to protect members’ work and fight back against AI companies exploiting writers and other creative workers,” WGAE president Tom Fontana said in a statement. “We’re excited about the partnership with Cloak because it means members don’t need to worry that their work will be used to train AI models after they send it to producers or agents – or simply that the product of weeks, months, or years of work will be reduced to an AI-generated summary of an email attachment.”

“For the past 3 years, the assumption was that anything you put out onto the internet is at risk of being ingested by AI, so I developed Cloak as a way to give agency back to writers to protect against unwanted AI training, AI notes, and analysis,” Cloak founder Rishi Ambavanekar added. “Until now, there hasn’t been a real technically-sound way to fight back against AI and determine how the content you create actually interacts with it. I hope Cloak can keep creative writing in the hands of people and not as data being processed by machines. I want to thank the WGAE and look forward to seeing writers have more confidence in sharing their work far and wide.”

The deal came as part of the WGAE’s AI efforts, which include an AI task force. Larry J. Cohen, the co-chair of the task force, said the deal represented a “natural and necessary extension of our fight to protect our members’ creative rights and the integrity of their work.”

““Generative AI models are often falsely advertised on the promise that they will make our work obsolete, but the truth is, the creative process is human and always will be,” Cohen added. “That’s why the Guild is advocating for better protections against and awareness of the risks posed by AI – not just through our contracts, but through legislation and member education.”

The WGAE has been broadly resistant to the incorporation of AI into the filmmaking process. The guild ended its 12-year partnership with Urbanworld, the BIPOC-focused film festival, in July over the festival’s decision to introduce a programming lane for AI-generated films and shorts. It also launched an #AINeedsHumans campaign to mobilize its members around the technology’s improper use, and it made AI a pillar of its negotiations with Hollywood studios during its 148-day strike in 2023.