Writers Guild East Inks Deal With AI-Shielding Software Company

The Writers Guild of America East is attempting to make it harder for AI models to scan their members’ work.

The union on Tuesday announced a partnership with Cloak, a software company that obfuscates documents to AI models but not human readers. As part of the deal, the union will offer Cloak to its members for free and to non-members who register their scripts with the union for an additional $10.

Cloak’s software, whose patent is pending, aims to scramble documents and make them illegible to most AI models in order to protect them from scanning. Meanwhile, they can still be read by the human eye. The WGA East says the software can provide writers with copies of their scripts to send out to talent representatives and potential buyers and give them peace of mind that their work won’t be read or ingested by AI tools.

In other words, agency lit department assistant, the writers’ union doesn’t want you using AI for script coverage. It also doesn’t want execs using AI to avoid doing the actual work of reading before they offer notes.

“The WGAE partnership with Cloak expands our efforts to protect members’ work and fight back against AI companies exploiting writers and other creative workers,” WGA East 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.”

Rishi Ambavanekar, the founder of Cloak, says he started the software to restore “agency” to writers who hadn’t authorized the use of AI on their work. “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, Ambavanekar added. “I hope Cloak can keep creative writing in the hands of people and not as data being processed by machines.”

The WGA East and West instituted their first protections for members against AI in their 2023 strike-ending contract. The WGA East has an AI task force that meets monthly, and it is currently supporting legislation in New York that, if signed into law by the governor, would require disclaimers on news stories created in large part or entirely by generative AI.