Hollywood Writers' Strike (2023)

The 2023 Writers Guild of America strike lasted 148 days, from May 2 to September 27. Its demands included compensation and residuals reforms, but what drew Odell's specific attention was the guild's AI-related stance: contractual protections preventing studios from using AI to write or rewrite literary material, from using writer-generated material to train AI systems, and from requiring writers to use AI systems in their work. The strike succeeded. The resulting contract included specific protections for human creative labor against AI displacement — protections that were not granted by enlightened studios but extracted through organized collective action. Odell has cited the strike repeatedly as evidence that the narrative of AI's inevitable reshaping of creative work is not a description of physics but a political claim that can be contested. "We actually have the ability to make the decision that we want work to be a certain way and have dignity," she said at the Sydney Writers' Festival in 2023, with the strike as her clearest