Guild Contracts Cannot Protect What They Cannot Reach
The 2023 Hollywood strikes were among the most consequential labor actions in American entertainment in decades. The Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA won significant protections against the use of AI in productions covered by their agreements. Studios would be required to disclose when AI tools were used in writing. Performers’ digital replicas could not be used without explicit consent and compensation. These were genuine victories. They also have a jurisdictional boundary.
John Chachas, the veteran media banker who has spent decades watching the economics of American broadcasting evolve, argues in the Los Angeles Wire that the guild contracts protect exactly the territory they were negotiated to protect, and that territory represents a shrinking portion of the content landscape. A growing category of video content is being produced entirely outside signatory companies, by creators who do not employ guild members, on platforms whose recommendation algorithms reward engagement regardless of how the content was made.
Non-Player Combat, the four-part AI-generated reality show that premiered on YouTube last December, was produced for approximately $28,000 in under two months. It has real viewers. It has thumbnails tuned for the YouTube algorithm. It is, in every functional sense, a television show, produced without a single human performer, director, or writer. The SAG-AFTRA contract specifies that a performer’s digital replica cannot be used without consent and compensation. The WGA agreement specifies that AI-generated content cannot be credited as a writer. Both provisions apply to signatory producers. They do not apply to a solo creator with a GPU and a YouTube channel.
“The amount of stuff now on the airwaves, available online, available on these platforms, that is being produced largely by one person sitting behind a computer using AI tools is astonishingly large,” Chachas says. Algorithmic recommendation surfaces on YouTube, TikTok, and Meta’s reels product do not differentiate between human-made and AI-generated content in their ranking signals. What they reward is watch-time, completion rate, and engagement density. A synthetic clip that holds a viewer scores identically to a human-made one.
The economic consequence Chachas describes follows directly: if AI produces content at dramatically lower cost, the price any individual piece of human-authored content can command in the market compresses. Writers, showrunners, cinematographers, and performers find that their labor is valued against a baseline rapidly approaching zero marginal cost.
Copyright provides an additional complication. Under U.S. Copyright Office guidance published in January 2025, content created without meaningful human authorship cannot be registered as copyrighted. AI-generated video on YouTube can be copied and re-uploaded without legal consequence, making investment in that content a different kind of bet than investment in human-authored work.
The future of AI content and creative labor is being determined by market forces moving faster than the regulatory and contractual frameworks designed to govern them. The guild agreements Hollywood won in 2023 represent real protections. They just do not cover the field where the competition is already happening.
