The Writers Guild of America has sent an open letter to the CEOs of the top studios in Hollywood calling on them to take “immediate legal action” against artificial intelligence companies that have used archives of decades worth of films and TV shows to train their software.
The open letter comes in response to a Nov. 18 story published by The Atlantic revealing the existence of a data set called OpenSubtitles, which pulled subtitles from every Best Picture Oscar-winning film from 1950 to 2016, as well as thousands of episodes of acclaimed TV shows such as “The Sopranos,” “The Simpsons,” “Breaking Bad” and “Seinfeld,” among others.