Abstract
Recent discourse around generative artificial intelligence has characterized its implications for creative labor as wholly unprecedented. This article challenges that framing by situating generative A.I. within a longer history of technological change in Hollywood. We conduct a historical analysis of three cases in which an emerging technology promised to automate aspects of creative production: the spread of motorized film projectors in the early 1900s, the rise of computer-based editing software in the mid-1980s, and the introduction of screenwriting software in the late 1980s. Through a content analysis of newspaper and industry trade publications, this analysis finds that whether and how a technology is understood as "automating" by different sets of actors is not simply a technical determination but a culturally constructed one, shaped by competing narratives among workers, management, and the public. Each case is characterized by a different kind of narrative conflict: projectionists fought over the definition of professional skill; film editors confronted accelerated workflows and managerial interference; and screenwriters policed barriers to entry against would-be "hacks." In each of these narrative conflicts, we point to patterned similarities to and differences from contemporary conflicts over generative A.I. in Hollywood.
1 Introduction
In 2021, the artificial intelligence company Open AI released DALL-E, a generative text-to-image model; the next year, the company put out ChatGPT, a large language model (LLM) chatbot. Both tools immediately made headlines for their ability to generate images and texts, respectively, on a seemingly infinite number of subjects and in a wide range of visual and writing styles. Pundits rushed to articulate the profound, even existential, implications for creative production, prompting a wave of predictions that media-industry workers such as screenwriters, artists, and filmmakers were at imminent risk of being displaced by sophisticated A.I. tools (De Cremer et al. 2023; Clark 2022).
Generative A.I. may indeed occasion a reconfiguration of understandings about the uniquely human qualities of creative work and the meaning of professionalism in creative occupations. Yet this is not the first time technological changes have prompted confrontations between creative labor, management, and the public. This paper demonstrates that, in Hollywood,Footnote 1 questions of whether technologies will replace human labor, how they might do so, and what consequences will follow if they do have animated ongoing debate since the early 1900s. Collective bargaining agreements in cultural industries have frequently addressed emerging technologies (Fortmueller and Marzola 2025). While in past negotiations, the artifacts at issue typically impacted the distribution of cultural commodities (e.g., the popularization of the VHS tape and the home VCR in the 1980s) rather than the process of creation itself (Banks and Fortmueller 2026, p. 16), there are a select number of cases in which the autonomy and working conditions of creative labor were directly implicated by an emerging technology. In light of a public—and even, to some extent, scholarly—conversation that casts generative A.I.’s implications for creative work as entirely unprecedented, examining these historical cases affords unique perspective on the question of which aspects of the contemporary sociotechnical moment are actually novel, and which are anything but.
In this paper, we examine three such instances in which a technology promised to automate parts of the process of film production: (1) the spread of motorized film projection in the early 1900s, (2) the rise of computer-based film editing in the mid-1980s, and (3) the introduction of screenwriting software in the late 1980s. We analyze these case studies as moments in which cultural workers, industry executives, and the public were spurred by a novel technology to reimagine and contest changes in the social status and cultural meanings of creative professionals.
The paper poses three questions:
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How have introductions of technologies that promised automation occasioned conflicts, renegotiations, or reimagination of the work of cultural production?
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What role, if any, has organized labor played in these changes?
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What lessons may be drawn from these past events for the present negotiations around generative A.I.?
These research questions are premised on the notion that a technology’s social trajectory is not solely, or even primarily, determined by its technical capabilities. Rather, emerging tools are cast as characters in broader cultural narratives, which in turn are central to how the tools are implemented, contested, and negotiated over (Jasanoff and Kim 2009). The introduction of new technologies provides opportunities to observe changes in culture, as these shifts are moments when previously taken for granted patterns of social life “are reexamined, challenged, and defended” (Marvin 1990, p. 4). The way such tools are interpreted has implications for how we understand both the notion of work itself and which qualities and actions should be considered distinctively human. In particular, we argue that the implications of generative A.I. for creative labor can be seen more clearly through comparisons to previous episodes of technological and cultural change in media industries, when workers were making collective claims about the nature and meaning of creative work.
The paper proceeds as follows. First, we discuss the existing literature on the relationship between labor and technology in Hollywood, as well as more nascent scholarship that is emerging on narratives of generative A.I. and creative labor. Second, we provide an overview of the sources our findings draw on, and briefly situate the article in the context of our broader mixed-methods research project on generative A.I. and creative work. We then discuss each of our historical case studies roughly in chronological order. In each case, we demonstrate that the spread of an emerging technology, coupled with increasing labor precarity, gave rise to a narrative conflict regarding the nature and meaning of creative work. The spread of motorized projectors occasioned a conflict about the nature of skilled labor and creativity between theater owners and projectionists. The advent of computerized film editing provided a chance for management to argue for technological adoption to adapt to already-existing speedups in post-production timelines, and then justify further cuts as editors voiced perennial concerns over job quality. The introduction of screenwriting software occasioned a response from established screenwriters who sought to raise barriers to entry to their profession against new Hollywood hopefuls. In the discussion, we consider the implications of each case study for the contemporary case of generative A.I. and creative labor. We conclude by addressing some limitations of our research design and suggest directions for future research.
2 Labor and technology in Hollywood
Labor dynamics have not always been a major focus on historical work on Hollywood or the “culture industries” in the United States, yet movie studios’ management of creative work and the organized efforts of creative workers to shape their working conditions have been central to the industrialization of cultural production (Regev 2018). Hollywood labor is commonly divided into two categories: above-the-line, which is defined as “creative” work such as acting, directing, and screenwriting, and below-the-line, which is classified as “craft” or technical work and encompasses occupations like camera operators, editors, and gaffers (Banks and Fortmueller 2026; Fortmueller and Marzola 2025).
Both above- and below-the-line workers tend to be organized. Beginning in the early decades of the twentieth century, Hollywood established itself as a “highly unionized cultural center” (Fortmueller and Marzola 2025, p. 6). Motion picture workers are represented by more than a dozen unions—some, such as the Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) and the Writers Guild of America (WGA), have a relatively high profile and salary scales that are determined on a project-by-project basis, while others, such as the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners (UBC), are lesser known to the public and have union-set salaries (Fortmueller and Marzola 2025, p. 13). As Fortmueller and Marzola (2025) argue, Hollywood unions are notable not only for their longevity and strength, but also for the extent to which their workers interact: “In no other industry do so many different crafts and different unions come into contact—let alone collaborate—with each other” (p. 2).
Given that Hollywood has always been a heavily “technology-based industry,” it should come as no surprise that its labor disputes have often been occasioned by and centered around technological change (Marzola 2021, p. 5). While the technological evolution of film production and distribution systems is incremental and continuous, there have also been major inflection points that “transform not just the economics of the industry but also the nature of the work” (Banks 2025, p. 257). For example, as household television sets became widespread in the 1950s, screen actors successfully negotiated for “residuals” payments, such that they would be compensated each time their TV episodes were aired (SAG-AFTRA, n.d.). The advent of home video players and, later, DVDs, also prompted strikes (Banks and Fortmueller 2026, p. 16). As the following section will illustrate, generative A.I. represents another such sociotechnical inflection point.
3 A.I. and creative labor
Relative to many other occupational fields, creative and cultural industries have historically afforded workers substantial autonomy in their labor process, based on the notion that heavy-handed management, excessive standardization, and worker surveillance can diminish the quality—and thus, marketability—of creative products (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011; Mosco 2009; Ryan 1991). But with autonomy comes precarity: creative labor is also known for being highly contingent, characterized by irregularity, “flexible” short-term work arrangements, and generally low pay (Cantillon and Baker 2019; Gill and Pratt 2008; Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011; McRobbie 2016).
As generative A.I. has spread, concerns have mounted that by automating the production of creative products such as books, songs, movies, and visual art, A.I. threatens to degrade creative work and further precaritize creative workers. In Hollywood specifically, A.I. stands to alter work for creative workers both above and below the line—with applications in scriptwriting, film and audio editing, special effects, and the generation of digital replicas of actors’ bodies and voices—and is the subject of intensifying labor conflict. Some have argued that A.I. will worsen creative labor’s “objective” qualities, such as pay and job security, by shrinking creative labor markets and rendering them even more competitive (Petre and Ticona 2025a), as well as the “subjective” aspects of creative work, such as creative workers’ affective experience of their labor and their sense of meaning (Laaser and Karlsson 2022; Halperin and Rosner 2025). Other research has taken a more optimistic stance, exploring how generative A.I. might be fruitfully incorporated into creative jobs, reconfigure divisions of creative labor, and augment creativity (Atkinson and Barker 2023; Bender 2025; Clarke and Joffe 2025).
When considering whether A.I. will degrade or automate creative labor, much of the existing research has focused on the affordances of the available tools and the data on which they are trained. Yet the stories we tell about technologies—referred to in the literature as “imaginaries” or “folk theories”—can be just as impactful as the artifacts themselves. Explaining the ways everyday users understand algorithms, Bucher (2017) defines imaginaries as “ways of thinking about what [technologies] are, what they should be, how they function and what these imaginations in turn make possible” (p. 39–40). In this way, imaginaries can illuminate both folk understandings of technical information, as well as normative orientations that gesture toward possibilities for the future. But beyond being a useful indicator of users’ hopes and anxieties, technological imaginaries can also embed “shared understandings of forms of social life and social order” that come into conflict across different groups of stakeholders (Jasanoff and Kim 2009, p. 120). Imaginaries about technologies are far from just stories; their dynamics can illuminate struggles for influence or resources and reify or disrupt existing arrangements of power.
Along these lines, labor and technology scholars have shown that automation is not simply a technical process, but also a cultural and discursive one. As Resnikoff (2022) argues, the term “automation” describes a “conviction: That industrial progress meant the abolition of human labor from industry” (p. 2). The way tools that promise to “mechanize” or “automate” human tasks are interpreted has implications for how we understand both the notion of work itself and which qualities and actions should be considered distinctively human.
While scholars have investigated efforts to make meaning of automation in industrial labor (Resnikoff 2022) and interpersonal labor (Pugh 2022), collective constructions of automation in creative labor have not been as widely studied—a gap that this project intends to fill. Creative workers have both specialized skills to tell compelling stories and public platforms through which to disseminate them. It follows that the automation imaginaries of organized cultural workers have the potential to be impactful far beyond the boundaries of their industries. By examining three historical cases of emerging technologies in Hollywood, this paper seeks to get a clearer view of the contemporary moment and which contextual factors are likely to be more important in shaping the trajectory of generative A.I. in creative work.
4 Methods
The logic of choosing the three cases of (1) the spread of motorized film projection in the early 1900s, (2) the rise of computer-based film editing in the mid-1980s, and (3) the introduction of screenwriting software in the late 1980s, was to select previous instances wherein emerging technologies promised to automate parts of the process of creative production. Rather than select on the “dependent variable” of labor conflict, our process of case selection focused on identifying technologies that were designed to be implemented in some stage of creative workers’ labor processes, based on a reading of the secondary scholarly literature on automation and technology in Hollywood since the development of commercial cinema in the late 1800s.
This article uses historical media articles and secondary literature to explore the three cases. First, we use industry trade publications that were influential at the time of each historical case—these included Moving Picture World, Variety, Screen International, Back Stage, and American Film. These were accessed with The Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive, and ProQuest Historical Newspapers database, available through our institutions’ libraries. Second, we used mainstream newspapers from the time periods that define the introduction of the technology in each case study. In total, 52 articles were analyzed, distributed among the cases as follows: Motorized projectors (1907–1929) (n = 20), computer-based film editing software (1985–1997) (n = 12), and screenwriting software (1983–2000) (n = 20). The framework for data collection was narrowly focused on materials that discussed these technologies during these periods. To locate materials in online databases, the names and brands of broader terms used to categorize technologies were used (e.g., “motor-,” computer, software) as well as the names of specific products (e.g., LightWorks, Collaborator, Plots Unlimited) as well as occupation-specific language (e.g., operators, projectionists). Publications from both industry and mainstream press were chosen to represent a variety of viewpoints from the groups involved in constructing the meanings of automation in each case; from the guilds and unions representing cultural workers, to business leaders, creative workers, and journalists and other industry insiders.
The coding strategy was intentionally open (Charmaz 2006); in conversation with secondary literatures, we first aimed at reconstructing a timeline of the introduction of the technology, and an understanding of the organizations involved with framing these technologies for different publics (e.g., an occupational public (trade publications) and general public (mainstream press)). Along with the labor and industry organizations, we also identified specific names of products or companies producing these technologies. We then sought to understand how focal occupations (projectionist, screenwriter, film editing) were categorized and constructed. This also included examining the ways the articles in the sample illustrated the conflicts, pressures, or tensions surrounding these occupations and their larger political or economic contexts.
This paper is part of a broader research project that examines how organized labor in media industries is conceptualizing, strategizing, and negotiating around generative A.I. As part of the larger project, we conducted a discourse analysis of media coverage about A.I.’s role in the overlapping WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes of 2023. Pulling from a combination of academic and public databases, we compiled a corpus of 179 news articles and analyzed them using a coding scheme we developed inductively. In addition, we conducted 17 semi-structured interviews with stakeholders involved with A.I. in Hollywood, including creative workers in a variety of Hollywood and adjacent occupations (e.g., actors, screenwriters, concept artists, novelists), as well as worker advocates, computer scientists, and tech executives which were recorded, transcribed, and coded inductively. While we do not extensively discuss our interviews or contemporary media content analysis in this article, our findings from those data inform our interpretation and discussion of the historical case studies.
5 Case I: the spread of motorized film projection (1907–1929): conflict over “skill”
The advent of the motorized projector was one of several factors that occasioned a proletarianization of projectionists’ work in the early days of commercial cinema in the U.S. Theater owners argued that the operation of the motorized projector required lower skill than its hand-cranked predecessor—and therefore justified lower pay. For their part, projectionists argued that motorized projectors entailed more skilled labor. While projectionists’ efforts were ultimately unsuccessful, the conflict over motorized projection was one of the inciting incidents for the unionization of this occupational group.
Contemporary film projectionists are not typically thought of as creative film workers in the same sense as actors, writers, directors, and editors. Yet, prior to the expansion of commercial cinema in the early 1900s, the filmgoing experience was more like a variety show, mixing live theatrical and musical performances with screening a moving picture. In this context, projectionists understood themselves to be showmen—highly skilled and well-paid masters of ceremony who would take the stage between acts. Additionally, projection work itself entailed a significant amount of creative discretion, because the film projector had to be manually cranked and coordinated with live music at variable speeds. Projectionists of this era would often vary the speed of projection on hand-cranked machines, for example by accelerating it to emphasize action sequences or slowing it down to savor a romantic scene (Wurtzler 2003; Barnard 2002).
However, much of this changed in the early twentieth century. Movie theaters expanded and industrialized at dizzying speed: between 1908 and 1909, cinemas in the US increased 100% to a total of 10,000 (Barnard 2002). With this rapid proliferation came a push for standardization of the moviegoing experience and “a discourse of systematic efficiency and investment” (Marzola 2021, p. 6). Film manufacturers and studios attempted to exert control over the speed of projection and render it uniform between theaters, which diminished projectionists’ autonomy and the creativity of their work. In addition, the growing number of movie theaters prompted an increased demand for projectionists. Many of these newly available jobs were filled by recent European immigrants, and wages declined during this period.
Taking these factors together, it is perhaps unsurprising that projectionists were among the very first workers in the burgeoning movie industry to organize—initially as independent locals and then, by 1907, under IATSE.Footnote 2 Still, in these early years, plenty of aspiring projectionists were not unionized, and industry trades published several letters-to-the-editor about the glut of newly trained, “unskilled” projection-operators they felt were depressing their wages.Footnote 3
It was against this contentious backdrop that theaters began to phase out hand-cranked projectors and adopt motorized ones (see Fig. 1). As motorized projectors became more widespread, two opposing narratives about them took shape. The first narrative, pushed by management (in this case, theater owners), cast motorized projectors as a simple technology that could be unproblematically operated by unskilled (and lower-paid) workers. For example, in 1927, the “chairman of public relations” of Baltimore’s Motion-Picture Theater Owners association explained their opposition to a union-proposed schedule of wages by saying, “It requires no great technical knowledge, nor more than average intelligence to operate a motion-picture machine. In fact, the modern projecting machine is automatic in its operation, being started by the throwing of a switch, or the pressing of a button, and is stopped in the same manner. Because of these facts, the exhibitors [owners of theaters] believe that the present wage scale should stand” (No Author, The Sun, 9-1-1927, p. 4).
For their part, organized projectionists were not uncategorically opposed to motorized projectors: the new devices eased the physical demands of their jobs, saving them from the arduous work of hand-cranking. Yet, they countered management’s story about the emerging technology with two alternative narratives. First, they made a case for their professional status on aesthetic grounds. They sought to frame their jobs as a crucial link in the process of creative production of which the audience member is the ultimate beneficiary. For example, one ad (Fig. 2), shown in the classified section of the Port Huron Times-Herald, explains to cinemagoers that, “The Motion Picture Projectionist of today has a great responsibility, for failure to measure up to the proper standard means that the Producer, Director, Players and Camera-Man’s efforts for artistic and commercial value have been lost and the pleasure of the audience lessened” (see also Fig. 3, in which a letter writer warns that “many good films have been condemned as worthless by the fault of the operator”). Here, we see the projectionists attempting to reclaim some of their creative agency from a bygone era by casting themselves as the responsible, essential, and highly trained stewards of Hollywood artistry.
Second, through their labor organizations, projectionists sought to position themselves as protectors of audiences’ physical safety, particularly against the threat of fire. Both types of early film projectors—hand-cranked and motorized—presented a significant fire risk.Footnote 4 Yet projectionists’ unions in the 1910s and 20s argued that the new machines were more likely than their hand-cranked counterparts to be left unattended, and sought to educate the public about the crucial role of the “skilled” projectionist in ensuring moviegoers’ safety. Indeed, after making a claim for the projectionists’ essential role in maximizing moviegoers’ aesthetic enjoyment, the Port Huron Times-Herald ad continues: “The Motion Picture Projector is no longer a mere mechanical contrivance cranked by hand or made to operate by the simple closing of a switch. The Motion Picture Projectionist of today must have an excellent knowledge of mechanics, electricity and optics and is in charge of a fragile and highly inflammable material.”
Similarly, in a 1908 letter to Moving Picture World, the President of the newly formed projectionists’ local emphasizes projectionists’ role: “pleasure and safety of the public is enhanced by employing a skilled operator.” He further argues that “unskilled labor” in the projectionist booth poses “danger to films exhibited, danger to the public and danger to the exhibitor…” (Fig. 4). This quote illustrates the way in which organized projectionists portrayed themselves as the only workers who could serve as responsible stewards of both the aesthetic enjoyment and security of the moviegoing experience.
Projectionists’ efforts to forestall their shift in status and wages from “performer to proletarian” ultimately proved unsuccessful as movies became the mass consumer products we know today (Barnard 2002, p. 50). Still, organized projectionists’ discursive efforts to resist the proletarianization of their occupation nonetheless illustrate how new technologies occasion intense debates about the nature and definition of “skill,” especially when they emerge against a backdrop of increasing structural precarity. Collective discursive constructions of skill also shift as workers seek to safeguard their status and position over time. It is notable that the hand-cranked projector—which afforded projectionists’ considerable creative discretion in varying projection speeds to suit the scene being shown—was later referred to by projectionists as a “mere mechanical contrivance,” in contrast to its motorized (and more standardized) successor. Just as striking, the Motion-Picture Theater Owners Association disputed projectionists’ claim to higher wages on the grounds that “the modern projecting machine is automatic in its operation, being started by the throwing of a switch, or the pressing of a button, and is stopped in the same manner.”
Emerging workplace technologies tend to be labeled as “automating” based on an assessment of their features. Yet this case study shows that whether a technology is considered to be “automating” or “deskilling” is in some cases less about its technical affordances and more about the stories that are told about it—and, in the case of competing narratives, which one comes to be taken-for-granted over time.
Might similar dynamics emerge in the case of generative A.I. in contemporary creative work? Though narratives about A.I. are still in their infancy, some parallels to the early era of motorized projectors are already apparent. Generally speaking, like their projectionist predecessors, organized creative workers in Hollywood are not discursively rejecting generative A.I. outright, but rather voicing openness to exploring how it might improve their working conditions (Petre and Ticona 2025b). Also like the projectionists, however, they are positioning A.I. as an emerging technology that poses significant risks—in this case, to the quality of creative products and to the future of human artistry—and casting themselves as professionals who can draw on their domain expertise to serve as crucial stewards (Petre and Ticona 2025a).
6 Case II: the rise of computer-based film editing (1985–1997): conflicts over job quality and pace
The widespread use of computer-based film editing was an occasion for management to narrate the necessity of technological adoption to meet already-existing speedups in post-production timelines. Studios then used the adoption of these technologies in the editing room to further justify compressed timelines, a sequence that we call the “cycle of managerial justification.” Editors, for their part, articulated consistent concerns about new editing technologies’ effects on the quality of their jobs, including autonomy and pace. Ultimately, while computer-based film editing systems were not adopted immediately, workers’ concerns were overridden by the technology’s utility in meeting demands for faster edits.
The spread of computerized editing software was often referred to in the trades as a “revolution” and one of the most significant technological changes to befall the film industry since the advent of the “talkies” in the 1920s (Weiner 1994). Before computer-based editing became mainstream for feature films in the 1990s, most features were edited using devices called flatbeds, on which editors physically cut and spliced film together to create the final cut, which would then be duplicated onto a continuous strip of film reel (Fig. 5). The pre-digital editing process was linear, in the sense that excerpts of film (e.g., different camera angles in a scene) had to be painstakingly assembled in a sequential, predetermined order. Once an edit was made, it was cumbersome and time-consuming to undo or change it. Additionally, each manipulation an editor made to the physical film—cutting, splicing, and duplicating—threatened to degrade its quality.
By contrast, computer-based editing tools such as Avid and Lightworks enabled a process that came to be called nonlinear editing: after shooting, filmstrip was transferred to digital video and uploaded into the software program, at which point editors could manipulate sections at will and in any order. Once the editing process was complete, the digital video file would be transferred back to film to be shown.
Early reactions to the rise of editing software in the feature film industry were decidedly mixed (Overpeck 2016). Some articles from this time period praised the creative flexibility afforded by nonlinear computer-based editing programs and pointed to prominent directors who were early adopters, such as Francis Ford Coppola and Sidney Lumet. Lumet, who used a nonlinear editing program called Montage to cut his 1986 film Power, told Variety that digital editing “allows you to be more creative because you can try almost anything you want…It allows your imagination to go further, to try different things. It’s wonderfully liberating and a tremendous help” (Gilroy 1985).
In addition to facilitating creative expression, the ability to edit more quickly was invoked as a selling point of the new computer-based tools (Overpeck 2016). “A non-linear system yields an editor’s cut in as little as a week after wrapping principal photography,” trumpets a 1994 Variety article (Rothman 1993). It is likely not a coincidence that computer-based editing became mainstream in the feature film industry when studios already were angling to compress post-production timelines. The Motion Picture Editors Guild (MPEG), the IATSE member union representing film editors, had rules that mandated that editors be given a minimum of 10 weeks to complete post-production work, but by the early 1990s, they were “no longer sacrosanct” (Rothman 1993); indeed, the 1994 film The Pelican Brief had a window of only 7.5 weeks between the end of shooting and the theatrical release.
As such, studio-imposed time pressure and the growing availability of computer-based editing tools worked in tandem to create a feedback loop: shorter post-production schedules incentivized the uptake of computer-based editing—for example, the director of The Pelican Brief convinced the film’s editor that cutting the movie on computer would help them make the tight deadline (Weiner 1994). The growing adoption of nonlinear editing software, in turn, lent credence to studios’ claims that post-production could be completed more quickly. As one editor put it, “Producers know, or believe they know, what you can do on a nonlinear system and how fast a movie can come together” (Resnick 1997).
The result was that editors were expected to complete jobs more quickly even when they voiced doubts that the software actually rendered their work more efficient. One editor noted that while the software was supposed to make her work quicker, she found she took fewer breaks when editing on a computer and more often ate lunch at her desk: “When I worked on film, I always went out to lunch…Maybe because on a Movieola [flatbed], there’s nowhere to put your food” (Resnick 1997). Some editors complained that “the new systems are simply making it possible to do more tinkering in the same amount of time—much as personal computers in the office increased options but haven’t gotten workers home earlier at night” (Weiner 1994).
Concerns about computer editing programs facilitating “more tinkering” were linked to another fear prevalent among editors: that the presumed efficiency of editing on computer, coupled with the ease of producing and playing copies of VHS tapes, meant that editors’ work was more vulnerable to interference from studio executives. As one editor put it,
Digital editing makes it easier and more fun for non-film people to get involved in the editing process…It used to take real commitment to watch a rough cut of a film. You had to get in your car and drive to a screening room…you thought about changes a lot more carefully. Now [executives] can sit in their offices with a VCR and get their calls. They just say “change this, this and this, then have somebody drive a tape over to my office” (Resnick 1997, p. 26).
These myriad concerns notwithstanding, “the industrial discourse about the coming of video-assisted editing downplayed the attitudes of editors, particularly those who were suspicious of new technology,” who were often written off as tribal and irrationally technophobic (Overpeck 2016, p. 132). Nonlinear editing tools were slow to be widely adopted, but this was more due to their cost and initially limited functionality than to any kind of organized labor opposition (Overpeck 2016). By the mid-1990s, computer-based editing had become the film industry standard, and MPEG, in keeping with its longstanding “producer-friendly” stance toward new technologies, was holding trainings for members on nonlinear editing tools (Monticone 2025, pp. 116, 129).
Considering the case study of computer-based editing in the context of contemporary labor struggles around generative A.I., a number of parallels emerge. Many of the concerns the editors raised have echoes in contemporary debates about generative A.I. (e.g., Spangler 2023; Werner 2023). While computer-based editing was expected to make editors’ work more efficient, editors complained that they actually ended up working more than they had on flatbeds. Similarly, an ethnographic study of A.I. implementation in a tech company found that employees who used A.I. tools “worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day…” (Ranganathan and Ye 2026). The increased “tinkering” that computer-based editing tools facilitated also has an A.I.-era counterpart: while A.I. can generate a high volume of material nearly instantly, workers report spending extra time editing and correcting low-quality A.I. outputs (sometimes referred to as “workslop”).
An additional commonality appears in what we have termed the cycle of managerial justification. In the case of film editors, existing shifts in the industry toward compressed post-production timelines made it difficult to altogether reject nonlinear editing programs; studios could then point to editors’ takeup of these programs to legitimize the compressed timelines, thereby reinforcing the very conditions the technologies were implemented to cope with in the first place. A similar cycle is already emerging in media industries grappling with generative A.I. In journalism, for instance, decades of industry contraction and consolidation have increased expectations that workers will do more with less time and fewer resources. These strained conditions make the adoption of A.I. more attractive and harder to resist, especially in lower-resourced news organizations (Simon 2024); journalists’ use of A.I. tools can then be invoked by management to justify further additional rounds of speedups and downsizing.
Just as the speedup and job quality conflicts over computer-based editing have echoes in the contemporary A.I. era, so too do they have a precedent in the more distant past. Indeed, the advent of computer-based editing tools was not the first time a new technology had prompted concerns among editors about their work pace and level of creative autonomy. The addition of sound to moving pictures in the 1920s added extra steps and new actors such as sound and music editors to the editing process, changes that film editors perceived to proletarianize and speed up their work (Monticone 2025, p. 162). And in the late 1960s and 1970s, some editors resisted the transition to flatbed editing consoles from their vertical predecessors, which had required editors to stand while they worked: Dede Allen, who edited Bonnie and Clyde among other Hollywood films, “liked to joke [that] the smaller viewing screen and upright position of the [vertical] Moviola made it that much more difficult for clients to stand over editors and suggest where to cut” (Wright 2016, p. 105).
What these examples illustrate is that, while technologies continue to change, creative workers’ concerns over the pace, autonomy, and general quality of their jobs remain remarkably consistent and persistent. Emerging technologies—be they horizontal flatbed, editing software, or generative A.I.—do not cause these conflicts so much as they provide a new canvas upon which they are re-articulated and negotiated.
7 Case III: the introduction of screenwriting software (1983–2000): conflicts over professional gatekeeping
The introduction of software aimed at screenwriters did not occasion a struggle between labor and management, but between established screenwriters and the promise these technologies’ founders made to amateur writers hoping to break into Hollywood. Against a backdrop where screenwriting was becoming more entrepreneurial, established writers’ aspersions against screenwriting software can be read as a form of professional boundary work aimed at delegitimizing emerging writers (Gieryn 1983). Screenwriting software was an object through which they contested the changing barriers to entry to their profession and evidence of their increased precarity during a structural transition in creative production in Hollywood.
The 1980s saw the rise of computer programs designed to assist in the screenwriting process. While the entertainment trades often group several programs into the broad category of “screenwriting software,” the tools had a variety of affordances and intended users: some, like Scriptor, which won an Academy Award for Technical Achievement in 1994, were intended to streamline the notoriously intricate and laborious process of script formatting. Others, such as Collaborator and Storyline, were designed to assist screenwriters with script analysis: for example, Collaborator asked writers a series of questions about story structure to help them ensure that their scripts adhered to Aristotle’s Principles of Drama. A third type of software promised to help screenwriters with “idea generation.” One such program, Plots Unlimited, allowed writers to choose variations from “a huge database of ‘plot bits,’” such that “a skeletal plot inhabited by a few specific characters can be fleshed out with a variety of plot options, each of which, when selected, lead to still more options.” Another program, Idea Fisher, was designed to function as “a sort of intellectual thesaurus, providing a user with words and concepts that relate to a word or phrase entered into a program. It can be used for both dialog creation and plot generation” (Levy 1993, p. 8).
These tools, especially the latter two categories, were essentially early precursors to generative A.I. tools like Squibler, Jasper, and Storyfit that are explicitly designed to assist with scriptwriting and marketed to screenwriters. Creators of these earlier tools, many of them screenwriters themselves, pitched their products in a way that will likely be familiar to anyone following the marketing of generative A.I. in contemporary writing: they claimed that the software would render creativity more democratic and entrance to an exclusive industry more accessible. Joe Mefford, owner of Screenstyle, an online software company, said the programs were valuable for beginning screenwriters. “Often the programs pose questions about genre and conflict that the writer may not know to ask himself… These programs facilitate writers; they don't replace them” (quoted in Kennedy 2000). John Truby, a "well-known Los Angeles screenwriting teacher" and creator of StoryLine, a program based on his screenplay structure classes, said his program would "democratize good-writing.” He further argued that “writing for Hollywood is a priesthood. Within that priesthood, they all communicate and they help each other. Outside, you don't get that kind of information because the people in the club don't want anybody to get in." (quoted in Marx 1992).
However, if the technologies themselves and the sales pitches to market them were similar to what we now see with generative A.I., the reception among writers was markedly different. Generative A.I. tools emerged as a central sticking point during the WGA strike of 2023: media coverage from before, during, and after the strike frame A.I. as a “threat” that the guild needed to “put checks on” (Maddaus 2023; Niedzwiadek 2023), and the WGA sought—and won—contract provisions stipulating exactly how A.I. may and may not be used in the writing process. By contrast, the response to early screenwriting software had little to do with a fear of technology-induced displacement and the degradation of working conditions in the industry. Instead, quoted writers’ objections to the software mostly centered around concerns of professional gatekeeping: the idea that the programs would allow more, presumably untalented or low-quality, writers into the process of creative production. For example, Larry Gelbart, screenwriter of Tootsie, quipped: "I don't wish [screenwriting software programs] terribly well. We don't need any more hacks. I think they are a mistake because how can anybody be genuinely creative if they're going to follow a recipe…On the other hand, I'll work with any machine that's Jewish" (quoted in Marx 1992). Similarly, a screenwriter quoted in a 1993 Variety article complained that “Now there will be a lot more hacks out there thinking they really can write.” (To drive home the point, the article’s illustration depicts a chimpanzee sitting at a desktop computer, presumably working on his screenplay) (Fig. 6).
What accounts for this discrepancy? In other words, why weren’t early scriptwriting software programs framed as presenting myriad worrying labor issues—from the specter of speedups to wage degradation—for screenwriters, whereas generative A.I. is? One clue may lie in the fact that early screenwriting tools were not imposed from above or understood as undercutting more secure writing jobs, but instead, were marketed mainly to emerging writers who were looking to establish their professional reputation in an industry that had shifted toward freelance writing. As Tom Sawyer, the owner of Plots Unlimited, explained to the LA Times in 1995: “We never figured that [WGA members] were a viable market.” Rather, “his target is the country’s estimated 4 million to 8 million would-be writers” (Hanania 1995). Advertisements for the programs often featured endorsements from aspirational figures, such as celebrities-turned-writers (Fig. 7), successful screenwriters with long resumes (Fig. 8), and auteurs (in a particularly shameless example, an ad for the program Cinewrite published in Variety shows Cecil B. DeMille lamenting that the software wasn’t available during his lifetime and crawling out of his grave—presumably to access it posthumously (Fig. 9). These ads drew a link between screenwriting software, on one hand, and professionalism and status in the screenwriting field, on the other (Green 2023, p. 42).
While the creative labor market of Hollywood had always been competitive for new entrants, it was becoming more individualized and precarious during this period. In the 1970s–80s, long-term studio contracts for screenwriters declined and speculative, or “spec” scripts took their place as the dominant form of screenwriting labor (Green 2023, pp. 58–59; Banks 2015). Because spec scripts are written prior to having a buyer secured in the hopes that they will sell (ideally after an inter-studio bidding war), they represent a transfer of risk from the studio to the screenwriter. Freelance screenwriters producing scripts on spec are engaging in aspirational labor whose payout is far from guaranteed: it stands to reason that for this group, unlike for editors hired by a studio, assistive software might be seen as something that could increase their output (and thus their odds of a payout) and something they choose to take up, rather than an imposition from above (Duffy 2017).
Indeed, media coverage of screenwriting programs paints a vivid picture of the isolated, individualistic working conditions for writers: for example, a review of the Dramatica program quotes a young screenwriter who noted that the tool was “ideal for writers working alone” because “it helps to serve as a writing partner. If you’re alone in a room with a computer, it’s easy to get locked into certain things. Dramatica lets you bounce ideas off someone, the way you would with a partner” (Stalter 1994). We have shown that both editing software and motorized projectors were framed as posing a risk by enabling managerial interference: editing software framed as enabling studio executives to speed up postproduction timelines and engage in more tinkering, and motorized projectors were framed as enabling cinema managers to deskill projectionists. By contrast, scriptwriting software was conceptualized as a tool that could mitigate the formidable individualized risk and isolation inherent in emerging screenwriters’ already-precarious jobs. As Green puts it, screenwriting software “takes on a hegemonic function by validating and supporting developing labor conditions, which…placed an increasing burden on writers to navigate the competitive precarious labor market as individuals” (Green 2023, p. 40).
Drawing forward the dynamics of this case to the situation of generative A.I. today highlights a striking irony. While generative A.I. and screenwriting software programs, especially those focused on idea-generation, are the most technically similar among the three historical cases presented here, the narratives surrounding them are the most dissimilar. Whereas the Hollywood strikers in 2023 emphasized the ways that generative A.I. posed a common threat to many different types of workers, established screenwriters facing the rise of screenwriting software in the 1980s were largely worried about the ways it would lower barriers to entry to new writers (the so-called “hacks”), thus posing a threat to their expertise and status from below. Their response was to denigrate and question the quality of cultural products produced by those using the new digital tools. By contrast, the Hollywood strikers made a solidaristic appeal to workers across industries by asserting their rights, and the rights of other workers facing automation, to decent wages and protections from A.I. (e.g., Toussaint 2023; White and Huston 2023; Grohmann et al. 2026).
8 Discussion
As we have seen, the narratives that emerge around novel technical artifacts can shape labor struggles in creative work. The stories about technology and automation in these case studies overlap with each other in several respects. For example, the projectionists and the screenwriters positioned motorized projectors and screenwriting software, respectively, as technologies that would enable low-skilled interlopers to enter the field and cause deleterious consequences; both the editors and the projectionists voiced concerns that the new technology’s adoption would diminish the artistic quality of the cultural product, and thus the audience’s experience. We have further argued that all three historical case studies share similarities with the still-nascent narratives that are taking shape about generative A.I. in creative work.
These commonalities notwithstanding, it is equally important to acknowledge that there is substantial variation in narratives of automation in creative work. We have argued that each of the three historical case studies centers a different type of labor conflict or concern. For the projectionists at the turn of the twentieth century, the spread of the motorized projector prompted a debate about the importance—and indeed, the very definition—of skill; this case study also serves as an illustration of how workers make a discursive case for their worth in instances when an emerging technology has rendered their traditional skills obsolete. For the editors, the transition from flatbed to computerized editing represented the degradation of their job quality—enabling role consolidation, fewer breaks, and more managerial interference in their labor process. For the screenwriters, early screenwriting software was marketed as a tool that promised greater efficiency and an antidote to writer’s block, but also posed a challenge for gatekeeping the profession against low-talent “hacks.”
The question that follows is: why do particular stories emerge about particular technologies at particular moments? How might this variation be patterned? While our case study approach does not allow us to make a causal argument, our analysis strongly suggests that political economic background conditions—and particularly, different varieties of structural precarity—influence the technological narratives that take root. Put another way, in order to understand how an emerging technology is discursively framed, we must first understand the structural context that precedes it. During the same period that saw the advent of the motorized projector, projectionists found themselves contending with an industry that was rapidly expanding and standardizing, coupled with an influx of immigrant labor willing to work in movie theaters for lower wages. Editors were facing condensed post-production timelines prior to the rise of nonlinear editing technology; editing software was understood as a technology that was both facilitating and providing managerial justification for a work speedup that was already occurring. Finally, early screenwriting software was positioned as a technology that could assist screenwriters in navigating a labor market that increasingly required them to individually assume the “burden of risk” (Neff 2012) in the form of the spec script, even as it was also perceived as threatening to lower barriers of entry to an unacceptable degree.
Narratives about generative A.I. among contemporary creative workers are still emerging and rapidly shifting. Yet, there are already clear parallels to narratives from the historical case studies: in particular, organized Hollywood workers are echoing editors in raising concerns about the implications of A.I. for their job quality; a la projectionists, they are also seeking to make a case for the unique value of their own labor. Whatever shape Hollywood labor’s narratives about generative A.I. come to take, one thing is already clear: they will be deeply informed by—and cannot be analytically separated from—the increased structural precarity that defined creative work in Hollywood prior to the advent of generative A.I. In particular, analyses of A.I.-related disputes in Hollywood labor must take into context three techno-economic shifts that preceded A.I: the rise of the streaming model of film and TV distribution (Banks and Fortmueller 2026), the platformization of cultural production (Nieborg et al. 2021), and, relatedly, the need for professionally/union-produced content to compete with user-generated content on platforms.
9 Conclusion
While assertions of the novelty of digital technologies, from streaming platforms to robot vacuums, are in fact common, the recent discourse around generative artificial intelligence tools has strongly proclaimed the unprecedented nature of both these technologies and their applications within creative production. However, insofar as generative A.I. is understood as a potentially automating technology that intervenes in the process of creative production, our case studies suggest that the issues it raises are not, in fact, unprecedented in creative work. Through three historical case studies of different technologies that promised to automate aspects of the creative process at the time of their emergence—motor-driven movie projectors, computer-based film editing, and early screenwriting software—this paper illustrates the longer historical trajectory of both potentially automating technologies and the cultural narratives by which creatives have understood automation in the context of their work.
On its own merits, this historical precedent is valuable for our current understanding of the significance of generative A.I. and conflicts surrounding it today. However, this analysis also shows that in order to understand automation, it is essential to first ascertain how the concept is meaningfully constructed by the actors involved. Too often, automation is understood to be a statement of technical capacities. A technology is either an example of automation, or it's not. However, as the case studies make clear, automation is a culturally constructed phenomenon (Resnikoff 2022). The same technical capacities can be understood as automating at one point in time or by one set of actors, while in another context they are not. For example, the projectionists fighting to retain their professional wages at the introduction of motorized projectors described their hand-cranked predecessors as a “mere mechanical contrivance,” while for the theater owners hoping to drive wages down in order to continue the expansion of the market for movies, it was the new projectors that were “automatic in nature.” The technical capabilities of generative A.I. to produce images, sounds, animation, and text from text-based prompts should not pre-empt a thorough investigation of the ways this technology is understood by the actors struggling over its meanings today.
The present study highlights the importance of examining cultural narratives—and contestations around them—for developing an understanding of the relationship between emerging technologies, including generative A.I., and labor. As these case studies illustrate, stories about new technologies emerge from existing structural conditions—and, once in circulation, become a way for different groups of social actors to make sense of and act upon the latter. This process unfolds differently depending on the context: managers can invoke narratives about technology to justify existing trends toward proletarianization and speedup (as in the editing case study), but workers can also narrate emerging technologies in such a way as to galvanize support for organization and foster labor militancy (as in the case of the projectionists). At present, generative A.I. is still narratively unsettled in creative work: the stories told about it in the coming years will shape the speed and extent to which the technology is implemented in media industries, the actions taken (or not taken) by organized labor, and perhaps even the regulatory environment that governs it.
The scope of this research is limited in two key respects. First, while we examine the discursive conflicts between unionized creatives and their managers, nonunionized creative workers, including content creators, are also facing questions surrounding the integration of generative A.I. tools into their creative production. These workers face distinct forms of structural precarity and production pressures, but also to date lack the ability to collectively bargain surrounding their working conditions (notwithstanding ongoing efforts to organize them (Craig and Cunningham 2023)). More research is needed on how nonunionized and informal creative workers are discursively constructing A.I., and how this compares to past instances of emerging technologies in their fields.
Second, while our focus is on the U.S. context, creative workers around the world are facing challenges—and in some cases, opportunities—presented by the integration of generative A.I. tools into creative work. State policies surrounding labor organizing, social welfare, and technology regulation vary in ways that will significantly change the contexts within which automation narratives are constructed. Future research should investigate the globally diverse and culturally specific conflicts in which different types of automation narratives emerge.
Data availability
No datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
Notes
Following Banks and Fortmueller (2026), we use the term “Hollywood” not primarily in a geographic sense, but as “shorthand to describe high-production-value film and television that is wholly or partially financed and distributed by major US entertainment companies that are staffed by US workers” (p. 7).
By June 1910, of the 10-15,000 projectionists, there were only 18 IATSE locals across the U.S. and Canada (Barnard 2002, p.52). However, not all projectionists organized under IATSE. Also, in 1908, Los Angeles projectionists organized a large theater chain, and soon after, came to represent all Los Angeles projectionists (Dawson 2009). Throughout the early 1900s, independent operators unions were scattered across the country. Some projectionists also organized under The American Federation of Labor (AFL).
As one anonymous projectionist complained in a letter to Moving Picture World: “When a chance of a job comes along they go and offer themselves for $10 or $12 a week. This makes it so that when a decent operator applies for a job and he asks anything around $20 a week he is laughed at and told that there are dozens of operators who will work for $12 a week…” (NA, 1909).
Motion pictures were printed on nitrate films, a highly flammable material, and early projections were done by limelight, a form of illumination that was produced by burning gas, as electricity infrastructure was not widespread. The combination of the burning gasses, highly flammable film, and projectionists’ smoking were a highly combustible combination. Concerns about fire risk in cinemas abounded in the early 1900s, before the advent of the motorized projector, and were raised again, as the machines spread throughout Europe.
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The authors would like to acknowledge the attendees at Indiana University's 2025 AEI Lab's Virtual Research Conference for their feedback on an early draft of this paper, and Maia Silber.
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Petre, C., Ticona, J. From motorized projectors to generative AI: cultural conflicts over labor automation in Hollywood. AI & Soc (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-03167-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-03167-7