This is, at best, a wildly misleading headline, as the WGA would in most cases NOT allow it. This was the official WGA statement on AI-generated writing:
“The WGA’s proposal to regulate use of material produced using artificial intelligence or similar technologies ensures the Companies can’t use AI to undermine writers’ working standards including compensation, residuals, separated rights and credits. AI can’t be used as source material, to create MBA-covered writing or rewrite MBA-covered work, and AI-generated text cannot be considered in determining writing credits.
“Our proposal is that writers may not be assigned AI-generated material to adapt, nor may AI software generate covered literary material. In the same way that a studio may point to a Wikipedia article, or other research material, and ask the writer to refer to it, they can make the writer aware of AI-generated content. But, like all research material, it has no role in guild-covered work, nor in the chain of title in the intellectual property.
“It is important to note that AI software does not create anything. It generates a regurgitation of what it's fed. If it's been fed both copyright-protected and public domain content, it cannot distinguish between the two. Its output is not eligible for copyright protection, nor can an AI software program sign a certificate of authorship. To the contrary, plagiarism is a feature of the AI process.”
It seems they are trying to avoid ChatGPT doing to their union members what machine translation has already done to professional (human) translators. As far as I understand it, it's common practice for translation companies to automatically generate "alignments" (a sort of pre-translation of sentences between text in two languages) and then ask the translator to make a full translation based on the alignments- and only pay them for the time the company decides is needed for that task, which is of course less than the time to do a full translation from scratch.
Which sucks badly because the automatically generated pre-translations are often prtty bad and the translator must, in practice, do the full work anyway, and only get paid for less than that.
My source is a bunch of friends and acquaintances who are professional translators; somehow I happen to know at least three distinct groups of them. Also, they're all Greek so the situation may be different for translators between language pairs where automatic translation works better than, e.g. English and Greek.
“The WGA’s proposal to regulate use of material produced using artificial intelligence or similar technologies ensures the Companies can’t use AI to undermine writers’ working standards including compensation, residuals, separated rights and credits. AI can’t be used as source material, to create MBA-covered writing or rewrite MBA-covered work, and AI-generated text cannot be considered in determining writing credits.
“Our proposal is that writers may not be assigned AI-generated material to adapt, nor may AI software generate covered literary material. In the same way that a studio may point to a Wikipedia article, or other research material, and ask the writer to refer to it, they can make the writer aware of AI-generated content. But, like all research material, it has no role in guild-covered work, nor in the chain of title in the intellectual property.
“It is important to note that AI software does not create anything. It generates a regurgitation of what it's fed. If it's been fed both copyright-protected and public domain content, it cannot distinguish between the two. Its output is not eligible for copyright protection, nor can an AI software program sign a certificate of authorship. To the contrary, plagiarism is a feature of the AI process.”