The Emmys Tried to Get a Handle on AI. The Writers Had Notes.

Should AI-Assisted Shows Be Eligible for Emmys?

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During the recently concluded Oscars season, stars didn’t always want to speak about politics. But at awards show after awards show they were eager to share their thoughts on another hot topic: AI.

Negative thoughts, mostly.

As One Battle After Another actress Shayna McHale colorfully put it at the Writers Guild Awards, “Ladies, if you know a tech bro trying to replace writers with AI, just say, ‘this pussy don’t pop for you,'” invoking her character Junglepussy’s memorable line from the film.

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With Emmys season looming, the TV Academy wants to pave a smoother path. Hoping to clarify what will be in and out of bounds for this year’s nominees, the group in January added a statement to the rules for the upcoming season: The Academy, it said, reserves the “right to inquire about the use of AI in submissions.”

But the organization undercut that vigilance with another line — “The core of our recognition remains centered on human storytelling, regardless of the tools used to bring it to life.” And so, far from clearing up confusion, the provisions have sparked criticism from numerous TV writers and producers, including Academy members, who think the guidelines leave far too much room for AI to have a meaningful role on writing, acting and other creative disciplines in Emmy nominees.

“If they’re going to make a statement about AI, which I think they should, it should be specific, and it should have some consequences,” says Stan Brooks, an Emmy-winning producer (Broken Trail) who votes on the Emmys. “The police can’t say, ‘Hey, I’d like to inquire about whether or not you robbed that bank.’ That’s not how it works,” added the Academy member, who believes an AI-aided script or performance should receive an automatic disqualification in writing and acting categories.

The friction comes as the technology continues to worry, on both spiritual and labor grounds, workers across Hollywood. Over the weekend the Writers Guild reached a tentative agreement with the studios that looks likely to maintain full consent privileges for writers, which means AI will likely not make it into the scripts of many but far from all Emmys contenders. Plenty of other realms remain unrestricted.

The controversy raises questions that go to the heart not just of awards but the very nature of art: Is it just achieved by human autonomy or can it also be achieved via a human being deploying an autonomous tool? And if so, can that art be judged by the same standards as art created solely by a human?

The Emmys, at least, seems to be holding the door open for AI. TV Academy CEO Maury McIntyre tells The Hollywood Reporter that the organization wants to be “non-committal” in any kind of prohibition on AI use. “We’re now realizing the power of AI as a fantastic tool. It can also be used to completely transform things,” he says, noting that the tech-friendly guidelines came out of discussions with the Academy’s AI task force, led by the head of AI studio FireBringer Media Group, Eric Shamlin, who currently sits on the board of governors for the Emmys. The Academy has also taken a proactive approach to AI with its membership, hosting multiple AI summits, including one last month, on how members might use the technology, and McIntyre in his role as Academy leader suggests that he believes a showrunner assisted by AI could win an Emmy. To actually be banned from an Emmy a production would have had to take a lot of control out of human hands — an extreme case like if “someone simply gave AI a prompt and said, ‘create an opening montage,’ and that was what got used” McIntyre says, or if “somebody submitted the first AI rom-com script and it was entirely written by AI.” That leaves a wide swath of seemingly eligible contenders featuring meaningful AI contributions. And some TV creatives are frustrated that the rules fail to ban such instances. “It’d be nice to define a clear line that people could agree on,” says veteran TV and film scribe Mark Heyman. “I think people would probably be okay saying scripts can’t be written by AI, full stop. Whether there will be people skirting that rule and not getting caught, it still would be meaningful to create the standard.”

Heyman says he feels the TV Academy should be rising to the moment. “Something like the Emmys, which is designed to reward excellence in these fields — who better to define what counts as human creativity?”

Victor Levin, who has written on past Emmy winners like Mad Men and Mad About You, says the Academy should begin requiring much more specific disclosures and then making decisions based on that. “To me, it’s like a food label. You have a right to know what you’re putting in your body, and you have a right to know what you’re putting in your brain. The more clarity there is, as far as I’m concerned, the better,” says Levin, who these days adds a “written by a human being” tag to his work.

And Savannah College of Art & Design professor Chris Auer — who wrote for As the World Turns, The Cosby Show and Big Brother Jake and is now training the next generation of (human) writers — like Levin supports the idea of the Academy making inquiries about AI usage but indicates the current framework leaves things too open to the recognition of AI-generated content, which he said they couldn’t vote for.

The skeptics look to a model of sorts from the Recording Academy, which in 2023 made additions to the Grammys rules stating that, while work with “elements of AI material” is eligible, “the human authorship component of the work submitted must be meaningful and more than de minimis.”

On the other hand, the Emmys’ approach to AI seems more in line with that of the Film Academy, which issued a similarly open-ended addition to its rules for the Oscars roughly a year ago, saying that “Generative Artificial Intelligence and other digital tools used in the making of the film … neither help nor harm the chances of achieving a nomination.” As with the Oscars, it’s worth noting that a number of Emmy contending-companies have a strong Silicon Valley background, including Netflix, Apple and Amazon.

McIntyre acknowledges more stringent regulations could be possible for the TV Academy in the future, pointing to how the group reviews its rules every year. “If something comes up in the industry that we think we need to respond to, then we’ll do that,” he said, but added, “I don’t see us making any drastic changes at this point.”

There has already been a test case: the 2023 Marvel series Secret Invasion, which drew backlash for its AI-centric opening sequence. Critics said it relied too heavily on the tech, but McIntyre demurs, saying “when you went and asked the designers, it’s like, ‘No, no, this was all driven by a human.’ They were just using AI, and they were giving it prompts, and then they were seeing what they were getting, and then they were deciding what they were going to use. They put together the sequence,” he adds, which would seemingly makes it eligible.

But this distinction lands awkwardly for some critics, who ask if it’s fair to put such concoctions in with the traditional nominees. “A human being assisted by Claude is up against the human being who wasn’t assisted by Claude,” says Heyman. “Who are you rewarding?”

One of the main fears around widespread use of AI for many entertainment industry workers is the threat of job losses. Visual effects and postproduction work are seen as most vulnerable to the technology, with one study in early 2024 of nearly 300 leaders across the industry estimating that more than 200,000 positions will be eliminated over the next three years.

In a meta turn, that issue will rear itself this Emmys season with the candidacy of HBO’s The Comeback, in which Lisa Kudrow’s Valerie Cherish character stars in a hit sitcom titled How’s That? whose figurehead showrunners are unceremoniously edged out in favor of AI. Voters will thus be asked to hand the human writers of the show nominations in a manner that contradicts of the very thesis of the show (or at least the show within a show).

Past Emmys efforts to define contenders on tech grounds haven’t always gone well. Brooks recalls that when he was a TV Academy governor in the early ’90s, Simpsons executive producer James L. Brooks (no relation) appealed to have the series moved from the animation category to the comedy series category, pointing out that the writers working on The Simpsons came from a sitcom background. Numerous governors, Stan Brooks says, felt that was a “slippery slope” that would “end up with an actress competing against Marge Simpson.” The appeal was voted down.

One solution now, as with animation, could be creating separate categories for AI content. But defining the boundaries could be slippery; how to account, for instance, for all the writers using ChatGPT in the early stages of script creation? (“I don’t know how you would award something that’s been assisted to some degree by AI,” Daily Show alum and Have I Got News for You host Roy Wood Jr. tells THR.)

And mixing AI categories in with non-AI ones could, some critics feel, make for an unfair comparison. “At least at this point it’s apples and oranges,” says Levin. “AI is making stuff by smashing what’s out there into molecules and then rearranging it according to probabilities. That’s not the same thing as walking through your backyard at three o’clock in the morning trying to think of an idea.”

One of this year’s likely big contenders, Bill Lawrence and Matt Tarses’ Rooster, on HBO, is a prime example of that backyard phenomenon: a distinctly Lawrence-ian blend of warmth and cutting comedy that couldn’t really be coaxed out of a machine. “I take great pride in…human storytelling by human writers” Lawrence tells THR, who says he’ll continue to pursue that “as long as my career goes.”

If AI shows do get created, some Academy members feel they should be part of a separate show entirely, like the Creative Arts Emmys, or perhaps even come from another organization entirely. “I don’t think we want to be having AI-created material competing against human-created material,” says Brooks.

He adds that a TV Academy rule should make clear what the group stands for. “I think it has to state that we are a human creative organization,” he adds “and we will continue to recognize human contributions, not AI. Who are they worried about offending, the computer?”