This week, our Chair, Jennifer Davidson, is at UNESCO representing the International Affiliation of Writers Guilds at the Conference of Parties to the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. 

Today, she delivered the following intervention on behalf of screenwriters worldwide, urging the conference to adopt a protocol that will protect our copyright and incomes from the wholesale theft by generative AI that we are currently experiencing. Tomorrow, Thursday, she will speak further on this important matter.

“On behalf of our 14 members, I wish to commend the Secretariat for its many important accomplishments and thank all the parties to the 2005 Convention for your commitment to supporting and improving the professional lives of screenwriters and all creative workers. 

In this the 20th year of the convention, we are at a pivotal moment in history. You are faced with the choice to act to protect culture and creative workers for decades to come or to allow malign influences to use technology to undermine social cohesion and shared reality, to promote the reading of machine generated summaries over actual books, and treat human cultural expression as an extractive resource. We strongly urge you to adopt the additional protocol in order to protect both art and artists in an era when we need it most.”

Photo by Güner Deliağa Şahiner