The Writers Guild of America East is partnering with the AI protection software company Cloak on a new offering for its members. WGAE members will have free access to the Cloak software, which makes documents unreadable to most AI models.
Cloak’s software is patent pending and protects documents from being scrapped by AI while preserving their original formatting and visibility for human readers. When either a Cloak member or a script registrant uses the software, they can send an AI-proof copy of their file to whoever they choose.
Non-WGA East members can add Cloak protection when registering their work through WGAE Script Registration for an additional $10. Script Registration is a a WGA East service that’s used by tens of thousands of writers and creatives every year to protect their work before they send it out to agents, producers and actors.
“The WGAE partnership with Cloak expands our efforts to protect members’ work and fight back against AI companies exploiting writers and other creative workers,” said Tom Fontana, president of the Writers Guild of America East. “We’re excited about the partnership with Cloak because it means members don’t need to worry that their work will be used to train AI models after they send it to producers or agents – or simply that the product of weeks, months, or years of work will be reduced to an AI-generated summary of an email attachment.”
“For the past three years, the assumption was that anything you put out onto the internet is at risk of being ingested by AI, so I developed Cloak as a way to give agency back to writers to protect against unwanted AI training, AI notes and analysis,” said Rishi Ambavanekar, founder of Cloak. “Until now, there hasn’t been a real technically-sound way to fight back against AI and determine how the content you create actually interacts with it. I hope Cloak can keep creative writing in the hands of people and not as data being processed by machines. I want to thank the WGAE and look forward to seeing writers have more confidence in sharing their work far and wide.”
Protection from AI has been a big concern for the WGA, both the East and West divisions of the union. The WGAE is pursuing federal and state legislation that will address AI protections alongside the guild’s allies, newsroom workers and press advocates. Those measures include the New York Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Requirements in News Act (NY FAIR News Act), a bill that passed the State legislature and is currently under consideration by Governor Kathy Hochul. The bill would require disclaimers on news content that is substantially or wholly created by AI.
