Business
Hollywood writers say AI is ripping off their work. They want studios to sue
When the Writers Guild of America approved a contract with major studios in 2023, ending a 148-day strike, the union became the first bargaining group to gain significant guardrails around artificial intelligence in Hollywood.
But as AI innovation continues to advance, writers say they need more protection from studios. Now, they’re urging entertainment companies to take legal action against AI firms that they allege are using writers’ work to train AI models without their permission.
John Rogers, a 58-year-old screenwriter in L.A., has spent years co-creating the world of TV drama series “Leverage.” After experimenting with ChatGPT, Rogers said he and the show’s creative team suspected that 77 episodes of the series — or five years’ worth of work — had been ripped off and used to fuel AI.
Rogers said that in 2023, after generative AI took off as a mainstream business, he asked ChatGPT to suggest an episode plot for “Leverage,” a modern day Robin Hood story about a former insurance investigator who works with a team of criminals that steals from unscrupulous rich people and compensates those they have hurt.
Without Rogers prompting the chatbot with character names, ChatGPT suggested a plot idea about taking down a corrupt CEO using characters from the show on its own, Rogers said.
Then he found out that scripts for “Leverage,” along with other shows Rogers was involved with, including 2007’s “Transformers” and the TNT series “The Librarians,” were included in a database that was used to train AI models. That data set had subtitles from OpenSubtitles.org, a website that provides subtitles to movies and TV shows in different languages, according to a November story from the Atlantic.
“I’m angry at the absolute arrogance of these companies,” Rogers said. “These companies have gotten hundreds of billions of dollars of value that would not exist if not for our work.”
The guild sent a letter in December to leaders at major studios, including Netflix, Amazon MGM Studios, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Paramount Global, NBCUniversal, Walt Disney Co. and Warner Bros. Discovery. When reached by The Times, those studios either declined or did not respond to a request for comment on the guild’s letter.
So far, no major studio has filed a lawsuit against any of the big AI companies, despite the writers’ complaints. There have been no publicly announced content licensing deals with AI companies, but some major studios have held discussions with AI firms about the technology, causing concerns among Hollywood talent that more of their jobs will be automated to save money.
“The studios own the copyrights to our material that’s being stolen, so they have grounds for legal action, and that’s why we wrote the letter,” Meredith Stiehm, president of the WGA West, said in an interview. “Frankly, they’ve been negligent. They have not protested the theft of this copyrighted material by the AI companies, and it’s a capitulation on their part to still be on the sidelines.”
The tensions come as the contract between the guild and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers is set to expire in May 2026. Intellectual property rights and AI will surely be an important element in the upcoming negotiations, said David Smith, a professor of economics at the Pepperdine Graziadio Business School.
“They’re highlighting that it’s going to be a central concern, a key issue that is going to determine how negotiations go,” Smith said regarding the WGA’s letter.
Many writers, including Rogers, Stiehm, “The Killing” creator Veena Sud and “Grey’s Anatomy” co-creator Shonda Rhimes, were listed in a database that the Atlantic created to show what subtitles were used to train AI models from companies, including Facebook owner Meta and Anthropic.
“I’m stunned, disgusted, horrified at what is essentially straight-up plagiarism,” Sud said in a statement. “These AI developers will keep stealing my and other writers’ words until a court finds it illegal, until the studios take action against this theft, and/or until policymakers require developers to negotiate and pay artists for use of our material. It’s a pretty basic concept: Pay the worker for their work.”
The tech industry has said that it should be able to train its AI models with content available online under the “fair use” doctrine, which allows for the limited reproduction of material without permission from the copyright holder.
“We respect intellectual property rights and believe our use of information to train AI models is consistent with existing law,” Meta said in a statement.
Anthropic did not return a request for comment.
“We build our AI models using publicly available data, in a manner protected by fair use and related principles, and supported by long-standing and widely accepted legal precedents,” OpenAI said in a statement. “We view this principle as fair to creators, necessary for innovators, and critical for US competitiveness.”
The problem is what constitutes “publicly available” and how that material becomes accessible to the AI models.
When a writer sells their work to a studio, the studio owns the copyright to that material. Lisa Callif, a partner with Los Angeles law firm Donaldson Callif Perez, said she believes that studios would have legal standing to sue the AI companies.
“The tricky part is whether or not the studios agree that the works have to be defended,” Callif said. “The studios have a vested interest in these AI platforms being developed and being useful to them.”
The current contract between the WGA and AMPTP contains language to ensure that there is a human writer behind every script. Writers must be notified if they are given research or intellectual property that uses AI, and a writer cannot be made to use AI in their work if they don’t want to, the contract says. But there is nothing in the agreement that addresses compensation when a writer’s work is used to train AI models.
“We didn’t get everything we wanted on training, and that’s why we so urge the studios to do something about this scraping of our material,” Stiehm said.
The AMPTP declined to comment for this story.
Some studios are working with AI companies as they look for ways to cut costs. For example, “Hunger Games” studio Lionsgate has a partnership with New York AI company Runway to create a new model for Lionsgate to help with behind-the-scenes processes such as storyboarding.
Tech giants like Amazon (which operates the Prime Video streaming service and MGM Studios) and YouTube parent company Google have invested billions of dollars in Anthropic. YouTube last year unveiled a feature for its video creators to help them brainstorm ideas.
Companies want to use artificial intelligence but are also wary about upsetting Hollywood talent.
OpenAI has been in exploratory talks with studios about how they could use its text-to-video tool Sora, according to an OpenAI partnerships lead who wanted to speak anonymously because the discussions are ongoing. Sora has been used to make music videos, commercials and short films. The discussions have not involved licensing whole libraries of content, this person said.
OpenAI has met with Warner Bros. Discovery and Disney, according to several other people familiar with the matter who declined to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.
Suing the AI giants would be expensive and time consuming. Countries around the world have different rules for copyright holders, making the legal landscape challenging.
Nonetheless, AI companies are facing several copyright lawsuits from publishers such as the New York Times and music giants, including Universal Music Group.
The results of the pending cases will help guide other entertainment companies’ next moves, experts said.
“It has massive implications in the industry,” said media lawyer Kailin Che at entertainment law firm Feig/Finkel. “I think everyone’s gonna wait and see what happens there.”
On Tuesday, a judge ruled in favor of Thomson Reuters in its lawsuit against AI startup Ross Intelligence, which it accused of reproducing work from its research firm Westlaw, according to reports. The judge rejected Ross’ possible defenses, including on “fair use.”
John Lopez, a 44-year-old writer who has worked on drama series “The Terminal List” and “Strange Angel,” said he’s worried that up and coming writers will have a harder time breaking in, adding that the technology also devalues the work and artistry of screenwriting.
“This was blood, sweat and tears and work and love, and it was transformed into just value for them,” Rogers said.
Early in April, Ruben Hallali got an unusual alert on his phone: The evening temperature at Paris Charles de Gaulle International Airport had jumped about 6 degrees Fahrenheit in seconds.
Mr. Hallali, the chief executive of the weather risk company Sereno, had set up notifications for extreme weather swings. Then, nine days later, it happened again.
“It was an isolated jump, at one single station, early in the evening,” said Mr. Hallali, who added that he noticed another strange coincidence about the spikes: The timing was just right for somebody to reap a windfall on the betting site Polymarket.
He wasn’t the only one who sensed a problem. Météo-France, the country’s national meteorological service, filed a complaint last week with the police and local prosecutors, saying it had evidence that a weather sensor at Charles de Gaulle, the country’s largest airport, may have been tampered with.
The temperature swings, experts said, coincided with a period of unusual activity on Polymarket, one of the leading online prediction markets, which allow users to wager on the outcome of virtually anything.
One increasingly popular area is weather betting, where speculators can make real-time wagers on temperature readings, rainfall totals, the number of Atlantic hurricanes in a year and much more — with payouts in the thousands of dollars and higher.
As the stakes rise, so has the temptation to tamper with the instruments used to generate weather readings in hopes of engineering a lucrative outcome. Experts warn that this could have dangerous ripple effects, like degrading the information that underpins safe air travel.
Temperature data is used in a host of calculations at airports, helping determine correct takeoff distance, climb rate and whether crews need to apply frost treatment to planes. It’s crucial to airport safety, Mr. Hallali said.
“The Charles de Gaulle incident is not an isolated curiosity,” Mr. Hallali said. “It is what happens when financial incentives meet fragile data infrastructure.”
On April 6, the temperature reading at Charles de Gaulle jumped from 64 degrees Fahrenheit to 70 degrees at 7 p.m., before slowly falling over the next hour, according to data from Météo-France.
On April 15, the recorded temperature climbed even more sharply, from 61 degrees at 9 p.m. to 72 at 9:30 p.m., then dropping back to 61 a half-hour later.
In both instances, the spikes set the high temperature for the day, the metric on which some Polymarket wagers rest.
Laurent Becler, a spokesman for Météo-France, said the service contacted the police after noticing the discrepancies in temperature data. He declined to comment further on the case, saying it was under investigation.
Mr. Hallali said that after the first instance, experts and commenters on the French weather forum Infoclimat began to search answers. Theories were floated, including user error. But after the second spike, commenters zeroed in on the unusual Polymarket wagers, which totaled nearly $1.4 million over the two days, according to the company’s data.
The sums bet on April 6 and 15 were hundreds of thousands of dollars higher than on typical days this month.
It is not the first time that strange bets on prediction markets have raised accusations of insider trading.
On Thursday, a U.S. Army special forces soldier who helped capture President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela in January was charged with using classified information to bet on outcomes related to Venezuela, making more than $400,000 on Polymarket. Late last year, another trader on the site made roughly $300,000 betting on last-minute pardons from President Joseph R. Biden Jr. before he left office.
Polymarket did not immediately respond to a request for comment. While the site used to tie some bets to temperature readings at Charles de Gaulle, this week, after Météo-France filed its complaint, the platform began using temperatures taken at another airport near the city, Paris-Le Bourget, according to recent bets on the site.
Representatives for Charles de Gaulle airport declined to comment beyond saying that the case was under investigation. The airport police also declined to comment. The Bobigny Public Prosecutor’s Office, which is handling the case, declined to answer questions about the investigation but said that no complaint had been filed against Polymarket.
As to how the instruments could have been tampered with, a number of theories have been offered online, including by use of a hair dryer or a lighter. Mr. Hallali said that the precision of the spike on April 15 suggested the use of a calibrated portable heating device, although he declined to speculate about what kind.
“Markets are expanding into every domain where an outcome can be observed, measured, and settled,” he said. “As these markets multiply, so does the surface area for manipulation.”
As the war in Iran strangles the flow of oil around the globe, California’s jet fuel reservoirs are running low.
The state — which refines much of its own fuel in El Segundo and elsewhere but still relies on crude oil imports — has seen its jet fuel stock decline by more than 25% from last year’s peak to a level not seen since 2023, according to data from the California Energy Commission.
The supply is shrinking as a global shortage is already affecting travelers’ summer plans with canceled flights and higher fares. It could even affect plans for people coming to Los Angeles for the 2026 World Cup, which starts in June, said Mike Duignan, a hospitality expert and professor at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University.
“People don’t know exactly how this is going to escalate,” he said. “There’s a huge black cloud over the sea for the World Cup and the travel slump that we’re seeing is all linked to this oil shortage.”
As fuel supplies shrink, flight prices are rising. Airlines are adding baggage surcharges to cover fuel costs. Several routes leaving from smaller California hubs, including Sacramento and Burbank, have already been canceled.
Air Canada has suspended flights for this summer, cutting routes from JFK to Toronto and Montreal.
“Jet fuel prices have doubled since the start of the Iran conflict, affecting some lower profitability routes and flights which now are no longer economically feasible,” the airline said in a statement last week.
Europe had just more than a month’s supply of jet fuel left last week, the International Energy Agency said. In an effort to cut costs, the German airline Lufthansa slashed 20,000 flights from its summer schedule this week.
Without a fresh oil supply flowing through the Strait of Hormuz, the situation is unlikely to improve, experts said. The oil reserves countries and companies have in storage are helping fill shortfalls, but the squeezed supply chain could still wreak economic havoc.
“When there’s a shortage somewhere, everything is affected,” said Alan Fyall, an associate dean of the University of Central Florida Rosen College of Hospitality Management. “Airlines are being cautious, and I would say that is a very wise strategy at the moment.”
California’s jet fuel stock reached its lowest levels in two and a half years at 2.6 million barrels last week, down from a peak of more than 3.5 million barrels last year.
The California Energy Commission, which tracks fuel inventory, said the state’s current jet fuel stock is sill sufficient.
“Current production and inventory levels of jet fuel are within historical ranges,” a spokesperson said. “Although supply is tight, no structural deficit has emerged yet. The present tightness reflects short‑term global market stress. As long as refinery operations remain stable, California is positioned to meet regional jet fuel needs.”
Europe has been affected more directly because it relies on the Middle East for the vast majority of its crude oil and many refined products, experts said. California gets crude oil from the Middle East but also from Canada, Argentina and Guyana.
The state has the capacity to refine around 200,000 barrels of jet fuel per day, most of it from refineries in El Segundo and Richmond.
The amount of crude oil originating in the state has been declining since the early 2000s, as state regulations and drilling costs have led to more imports.
California has become particularly vulnerable to supply-chain shocks like the war in Iran, says Chevron, one of the companies that provides jet fuel in the state.
“The conflict in the Mideast Gulf has exposed the danger of California’s decision to offshore energy production,” said Ross Allen, a Chevron spokesperson. “Taxes, red tape and burdensome regulations cost the state nearly 18% of its refinery capacity in just the past year, and we urge policymakers to protect the remaining manufacturing capacity.”
In 2025, 61% of crude oil supply to California’s refineries came from foreign sources, according to the California Energy Commission. Around 23% came from inside the state, down from 35% five years ago.
The state’s refining capacity has also been declining, said Jesus David, senior vice president of Energy at IIR Energy. The West Coast region’s refining capacity has decreased from 2.9 million to 2.3 million barrels a day since 2019, he said.
“California’s had issues prior to the war,” David said. “Nothing new has been built over the past 30 years, and California has closed a lot of capacity.”
The result is higher prices for both gasoline and jet fuel in the state. Jet fuel at LAX costs close to $15 per gallon this week, compared with almost $10 at Denver International Airport and $11 at Newark International Airport.
Gasoline prices have also been hit hard by the global conflict. Average gas prices in California are close to $6 a gallon, around $2 higher than the national average.
The West Coast is a “fuel island” because it’s not connected by pipelines to the rest of the country, United Airlines chief executive Scott Kirby said in an interview last month. That means oil and refined products have to be brought in by ships.
“Fuel price is more susceptible to supply weakness on the West Coast than anywhere else in the country,” Kirby said.
Some airlines might not survive the turmoil if oil prices don’t level out soon, he said. Spirit Airlines, a budget carrier based in Florida, is reportedly facing imminent liquidation if it isn’t bailed out by the Trump administration.
Nike is cutting about 1,400 jobs in its operations division, mostly from its technology department, the company said Thursday.
In a note to employees, Venkatesh Alagirisamy, the chief operating officer of Nike, said that management was nearly done reorganizing the business for its turnaround plan, and that the goal was to operate with “more speed, simplicity and precision.”
“This is not a new direction,” Mr. Alagirisamy told employees. “It is the next phase of the work already underway.”
Nike, the world’s largest sportswear company, is trying to recover after missteps led to a prolonged sales slump, in which the brand leaned into lifestyle products and away from performance shoes and apparel. Elliott Hill, the chief executive, has worked to realign the company around sports and speed up product development to create more breakthrough innovations.
In March, Nike told investors that it expected sales to fall this year, with growth in North America offset by poor performance in Asia, where the brand is struggling to rejuvenate sales in China. Executives said at the time that more volatility brought on by the war in the Middle East and rising oil prices might continue to affect its business.
The reorganization has involved cuts across many parts of the organization, including at its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore. Nike slashed some corporate staff last year and eliminated nearly 800 jobs at distribution centers in January.
“You never want to have to go through any sort of layoffs, but to re-center the company, we’re doing some of that,” Mr. Hill said in an interview earlier this year.
Mr. Alagirisamy told employees that Nike was reshaping its technology team and centering employees at its headquarters and a tech center in Bengaluru, India. The layoffs will affect workers across North America, Europe and Asia.
The cuts will also affect staffing in Nike’s factories for Air, the company’s proprietary cushioning system. Employees who work on the supply chain for raw materials will also experience changes as staff is integrated into footwear and apparel teams.
Nike’s Converse brand, which has struggled for years to revive sales, will move some of its engineering resources closer to the factories they support, the company said.
Mr. Alagirisamy said the moves were necessary to optimize Nike’s supply chain, deploy technology faster and bolster relationships with suppliers.
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