AI Unplugged: They Were Right
The writers' strike was about a lot of issues, not the least of which was the use of generative AI. Their fears are well-founded.
Creative Bulwarks Against AI
After one of the longest labor strikes in history, the Writers Guild of America finally reached an agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. To whit, here's the regulations they established:
That wasn't the only strike. The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) ratified its own contract, where they attempted to create some definitions as to what is AI, what's human, and what's in-between.
Employment Based Digital Replicas (EBDRs)
Of particular note is the contract's focus on Employment Based Digital Replicas (EBDR) and Independently Created Digital Replica (ICDR). EBDRs are relatively straightforward: the actor's digital likeness is part of their employment and treated as such.
Independently Created Digital Replicas (ICDRs)
ICDRs are more complicated, in that it creates a digital likeness of a performer without an existing employment contract with the performer themselves. ICDRs are where things get sticky, because they are functionally immortal and unbound by constraints that a living performer might need to worry about. The agreement stipulates protections as applied to that performer's likeness, including royalties after the performer's death.
Synthetic Performers (SPs)
And then there's Synthetic Performers (SPs), digital beings who are not representation of a performer or voiced by one (notably, this means vtubers may be protected under the SAG-AFTRA agreement, as vtubers have traditionally been voiced by a living performer). The agreement argues that the Union has the right to be given notice and "an opportunity to bargain in good faith over appropriate consideration, if any, if a Synthetic Performer is used in place of a performer who would have been engaged under this Agreement in a human role." Notably, there's a loophole: studios can use SPs without consent when the project is “comment, criticism, scholarship, satire or parody, a docudrama, or historical or biographical work.”
SPs are a bigger challenge to regulate for lots of reasons, not the least of which being that it's murky as to who "owns" it. This is video game territory, and video game actors were unhappy with the negotiations (SAG-AFTRA argued that they weren't willing to "meaningfully engage" after five rounds of negotiations).
But SPs aren't really made from whole cloth; like all generative AI, they are created from a pool of data. So an SP is arguably not owned by any one person or entity, but drawn from anyone who contributed to its training dataset. The agreement doesn't address this question (or rather, it punts on the issue), but it's a big enough problem that actor/director Joseph Gordon-Levitt wrote an op-ed on it.
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Gordon-Levitt argued that the real battle shouldn't be about the end product -- it's already too late to prove ownership at that point -- but that actors and writers should get residuals from the AI training data, well before it generates anything at all. In other words, if your data is used to train a generative AI, you should get a small payment each time it generates an end product potentially inspired by your work.
He's right -- the real issue isn't that a SP looks or sounds like you; it's that the SP looks and sounds vaguely enough like you that you can't claim it's an ICDR or EBDR. The only proof that it was generated from you is by checking its dataset -- a closely guarded secret by AI companies. The problem is that generative AIs today are run by shadowy organizations with unquantified data sets that are opaque to most users -- even though the AI is open to the public and develops itself further through said users. This battle has already started to play out with Reddit, who tightened up its API access (outraging many third parties in the process) to stave off AI from freely scooping up its valuable dataset of conversations ... only to turn around and sell it to Google for $60 million.
At the time, a lot of these negotiations sounded like science fiction. One year after the strike, they seem quaint.
Meet Sora, Builder/Destroyer of Worlds
Sora turns text into realistic video the same way Dall-E turns text into images, or ChatGPT creates text from a few prompts. It's generative AI for video, essentially, and it's quite good at what it does.
It's so good that Tyler Perry stopped an $800 million expansion of his Atlanta film and TV studios. And for good reason:
I no longer would have to travel to locations. If I wanted to be in the snow in Colorado, it’s text. If I wanted to write a scene on the moon, it’s text, and this AI can generate it like nothing. If I wanted to have two people in the living room in the mountains, I don’t have to build a set in the mountains, I don’t have to put a set on my lot. I can sit in an office and do this with a computer, which is shocking to me.
That's $800 million that's not going to go to producers, editors, and writers.
Catching the Future
The WGA contract is up for renewal on May 1, 2026. The SAG-AFTRA contract expires on June 30, 2026. The rate of AI development is far outpacing the speed negotiators work at, skipping ahead in a matter of months while the contracts are moving at a comparably snail's pace of three years. By the next time all parties are at the negotiating table, the AI world will be in a very different place -- and the unions will find themselves even further behind the curve.
As of today, we're still able to tell the difference between generated AI art and video and content made by humans, but that gap is closing fast. When they become indistinguishable, the two unions will have their work cut out for them.
Please Note: The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not necessarily represent those of my employer or any other organization.