Teknoloji

Will AI take creative work away?

Union contracts, copyright lawsuits and the first income data: what is and is not known about AI in creative work as of 6 November 2026.

WyvOne Editör · 06.11.2026

In June 2026, members of SAG-AFTRA, the American union for film and television actors, approved a new four-year contract with the studios with 91.42 percent of the vote. Turnout was 19.25 percent of members. The contract also sets new limits on AI. The debate about AI in creative work is now playing out at union tables, in courtrooms and in the first data studies. What follows is what can be seen as of 6 November 2026; it is a provisional picture.

What did the unions win?

According to the website of the Writers Guild of America (WGA), the contract signed in 2023 does not count AI-written text as "literary material"; in other words, AI is not treated as a writer. Companies must disclose to a writer when material given to them was produced by AI, and cannot require a writer to use AI. The WGA also reserved the right to argue that using writers' work to train AI is prohibited by the contract or by other laws. The 2026 contract keeps these protections and adds one thing: if companies license scripts to train a commercial AI system, they will notify the Guild in writing and will also report the payment made to writers.

SAG-AFTRA's 2026 contract follows the same line. According to news reports, the contract starts on 1 July 2026 and runs until 30 June 2030. If producers want to use a "synthetic" performer generated by AI in a role a human actor could play, they must show that it adds "significant added value" to the production. This condition is not defined in the contract. In a dispute the union can go to arbitration. The idea of paying a fund an amount equal to an actor's fee for a synthetic performer did not make it into the contract. A complete ban on AI was not possible either.

What is happening in the courts?

In the United States, authors sued the AI company Anthropic, arguing that it trained a model on books downloaded from pirated libraries. On 20 July 2026 the court gave final approval to a settlement of about $1.5 billion. Roughly $3,000 per work is expected for the 482,460 works on the list. Objections to the settlement were rejected, but when payments begin depends on the appeal routes.

Elsewhere the outcome was different. On 4 November 2025, in the case Getty Images brought against Stability AI, the High Court of England and Wales rejected Getty's secondary copyright infringement claims; Getty won only on very limited trademark findings.

Another question is whether AI-generated output can receive copyright. The US Copyright Office's report of 29 January 2025 says that writing a prompt alone does not make a person the author of the output, and that protection is possible if a human makes a sufficient creative contribution. The Office announced the third part, on training, as a pre-publication version on 9 May 2025; the final version came later.

The situation in Türkiye

Law No. 5846 on Intellectual and Artistic Works (Fikir ve Sanat Eserleri Kanunu) defines a work as a product that bears the characteristics of its author, and the author as the natural person who creates the work. Article 8 also says the author of a work is the person who creates it. These definitions are written with humans in mind. We could not find a clear regulation in the Official Gazette (Resmî Gazete) or on the Ministry of Culture and Tourism's copyright page on how these provisions apply to AI output; the sources are mostly academic articles and commentary from law firms. For a definitive answer, check the current legislation and consult a lawyer.

What does the labour data say?

How much has the fear of job loss shown up in the data? An article by Christos Makridis of Gallup, dated 3 May 2026, summarises a study published in the Journal of Cultural Economics. The study uses US Bureau of Labor Statistics data (2017-2024), the Census Bureau's survey and Gallup's employee surveys. Its result: in arts occupations more open to AI, there is no clear overall drop in earnings; there was a slight rise in 2023, which partly faded in 2024. The authors think AI mostly changes early stages such as idea generation. But this is an early finding, and the measurement looks at tasks that "AI could do," not at how much it is actually used. Freelancers are poorly represented in official statistics.

So the picture is mixed: limits have been drawn in work protected by contract (screenwriting, acting), courts are answering the training-data question differently from country to country, and the data on job losses does not yet show a broad decline. Much of this article may be out of date within a year.