People picket outside FOX Studios on the first day of the Hollywood writers’ strike on May 2, 2023 in Los Angeles.
David Macnew | Getty Images
Hollywood is gearing up for another labor battle, and concerns about artificial intelligence are once again at the center of attention.
The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers has three weeks and two days starting Wednesday to strike a deal with the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists — or see swarms of picketers outside the studio gates.
Hollywood talent wants to create guardrails for the use of artificial intelligence in future television and film productions.
A recent series of viral deep fake trailers featuring the faces of Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton and Timothee Chalamet as Wes Anderson-style versions of Star Wars And Lord of the Rings characters only exacerbated concerns that actors on film and television shows could be replaced without proper authorization or payment.
“Certain illicit AI use may effectively devalue the performance of some of our members, but the concerns go much further,” Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, national executive director and chief negotiator for SAG-AFTRA, told CNBC in an emailed statement. .
“Our members have a right to know what projects they are working on, what dialogue they are having, what cause their character is advocating for, what actions their bodies will have to take,” he said. “Our members are humans, not puppets, and it is an offense to use AI technology to make them do or say anything without their informed consent.”
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AI has been a major concern for all Hollywood guilds, who view their jobs as particularly vulnerable to this new technology. For its part, the AMPTP has said AI technology “raises difficult, important creative and legal questions for everyone.”
The Directors Guild of America was able to strike a tentative deal over the weekend with producers guaranteeing pay increases from 5% in year one, an increase in streaming residuals, and a guarantee that artificial intelligence would not be able to replace members’ jobs. The board of the DGA unanimously approved the agreementwhich paves the way for members to vote on it.
Both the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA are seeking protection against the use of AI in their negotiations, in addition to an increase in streaming content compensation.
SAG-AFTRA has recognized that AI technology can have its benefits in the industry, but it wants to ensure that any use of AI to replicate an actor or create a new performance is done with the actor’s consent and payment. The guild already has similar rules when it comes to capturing computer-generated images.
“Generative AI tools should be deployed to help and empower people, rather than replace them,” said Crabtree-Ireland. “Fundamentally, our members want to ensure a people-centered approach to AI deployment in our industry, where AI serves people, not the other way around.”
Some artists, such as James Earl Jones, have already agreed to have their voices cloned for use after they die. Jones, 92, played the famous voice of Darth Vader in the Star Wars franchise and tried to scale down the role. Jones was compensated and the technology was used to bring Vader’s iconic voice to Disney+’s “Obi-Wan Kenobi.”
Actors have different comfort levels with how AI is used, which is why SAG-AFTRA wants to advocate for informed consent when it comes to sitting down with the AMPTP. Essentially, the guild wants to make sure that if and when an actor agrees to have their image or voice used for a particular project, it will only be used for that intended purpose and that actors will be properly compensated.
The fear is that studios could try to cut costs and increase revenue by using AI to pump out new content by feeding the existing material, like how the Anderson parodies were made.
A brave new world of AI gods and monsters
Jaap Ariens | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Over the past year, generative AI has exploded in adoption and development, especially since the fall of 2022, when OpenAI released its AI chatbot, ChatGPT.
A few months and 100 million monthly active users later, the tool has set records for the fastest growing app in history. Overall, industry growth has generated billions of dollars in deals. And the phenomenon didn’t stop at text-based generative AI: Image and video generation models also went viral. Five weeks after OpenAI released the DALL-E 2 image generation model, more than 3 million people were reportedly using it to generate more than 4 million images daily.
Similar image generation tools like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney quickly gained steam, and tech giants love them meta, Google And Amazon – which has its own film studio – released AI models for generating video content.
“AI concerns are similar in some ways to concerns about the ethical use of CGI, but are much broader because of the tremendous flexibility available in using generative AI, along with the modest technological requirements to achieve surprisingly credible results,” said SAG-AFTRA’s Crabtree-Ireland. “The combination of these elements makes generative AI a much more capable and much more dangerous technological development, which deserves our attention and our efforts.”
Hollywood’s concerns about AI aren’t going away any time soon either. On Monday, SAG-AFTRA members gave its negotiators the option to approve a strike if negotiations stalled. If actors leave the negotiating table without a deal, 160,000 performers walk off movie and TV sets, leading to a mass halt in production.
The industry is already grappling with 11,500 writers refusing to work, leading to dozens of production and writing room closures.
Already Netflix has postponed the production start of the fifth and final season of ‘Stranger Things’ Warner Bros. Discovery‘Game of Thrones’ prequel ‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight’ closed the writers’ room and disney and Marvel’s “Thunderbolts” and “Blade” have paused production.
Some productions were able to continue in the aftermath of the writers’ strike because the scripts were already done. However, if SAG-AFTRA hits, those shows and movies will immediately stop shooting — and the debate about AI in movies will rage.
Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal and CNBC. NBCUniversal is a member of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.