There have been plenty of creatives in Hollywood shouting from the rooftops about the dangers of artificial intelligence impacting the work of humans, and Tony Gilroy of the “Star Wars” streaming series “Andor” is going one step further by refusing to release the scripts from “Andor” online to prevent that work from being used to train A.I. on scripts from the entertainment sector.
While speaking with Collider and explaining why he didn’t release the first season scripts of “Andor,” Gilroy said, “I wanted to do it. We put it together. It’s really cool. I’ve seen it, I loved it. A.I. is the reason we’re not. In the end, it would be 1,500 pages that came directly off this desk. I mean, terribly sadly, it’s just too much of an X-ray and too easily absorbed. Why help the f**king robots anymore than you can? So, it was an ego thing. It was vanity that makes you want to do it, and the downside is real. So, vanity loses.”
Refusing to unleash scripts online for anyone to grab up is certainly a way to prevent A.I. from stealing and plagiarizing copyrighted work.
Interestingly enough, the U.S. courts have previously deemed that artwork generated by artificial intelligence can’t be granted copyright protections, so the smart thing might be keeping the digital footprint of written work limited to prevent unscrupulous companies (many refusing to comment on whether they’ve been lifting copyrighted source material from the internet) from exploiting and mining human art (commercial or otherwise) without consent and compensation.
Gilroy’s point of view has been a mostly popular one as filmmakers such as Guillermo del Toro (“The Shape of Water”) have echoed the dark side of studios favoring A.I. by removing human emotion and artistry while chatting with BFI last year.
“Andor” makes a return to Disney+ on April 22 and will be the final season of the show as it will lead into the events of “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.”