AI is shutting down Hollywood. But not in the way you think. Yes, artists everywhere are afraid that AI will one day take their jobs. But some of those artists are ahead of the curve, as the WGA (Writers’ Guild) and SAG-AFTRA (Actors’ Union) strike over the use of AI in their industry. Along with streaming, it’s the biggest change facing Hollywood today.
The use of artificial intelligence is quickly becoming rampant in the entertainment industry, but there are no terms to regulate its use in order to protect writers and actors. One of the many reasons SAG-AFTRA began striking was that AI was being used to imitate actors’ voices and approximate their likeness without prior consent. And the WGA was worried that producers might begin using AI language models to replace them as the technology advanced in the coming decade.
Now Hollywood is without writers or actors as picket lines block studios, and actors refuse to promote their own movies and TV shows. The WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes are likely to keep Hollywood shut down for some time. If they and the studios can’t reach an agreement to use AI ethically, even the Emmys are at risk.
Why Is Hollywood Shut Down?
Many people in Hollywood would like to see artificial intelligence used as a tool to help make their jobs easier. But from a business perspective, it’s much cheaper to replace the entire job with an AI. Producers would much rather begin cutting overhead by hiring a person to input one sentence on a computer instead of paying for an A-list actor that costs millions of dollars a day to be on set.
The strikes have affected Hollywood differently. The WGA strike has been going on for some time already, but producers had prepared for such an eventuality. Leading the charge in a lot of workers’ rights issues in the entertainment industry, the WGA is known to strike every decade or so. When negotiations began to break down this time around, many producers and studios began stockpiling scripts to try and weather the coming storm.
But SAG-AFTRA hasn’t gone on strike since 1980 before the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists merged into one organization. And SAG-AFTRA and the WGA haven’t gone on strike at the same time since 1960. This is just how significant these issues are, and needless to say, it’s a big problem for the AMPTP – the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.
A writers’ strike doesn’t necessarily halt the production of many movies and TV shows. But an actors’ strike will immediately put a stop not just to the filming process but to a lot of marketing efforts studios encourage as well. When an actor goes on strike, they stop making public appearances, which includes award shows like the 2023 Emmys, that are considering delaying the ceremony based on how severe the strike could become.
Why Is AI so Important to the Strikes?
AI may have a bigger role in the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes than in other professions. Since most of AI’s advancement has been in approximating art, it impacts this industry more significantly than others. Writers and actors specifically are worried about it since it’s becoming a more common practice to use the program to reduce overhead, since it’s more efficient to use a computer to do either job when it accomplishes it passably.
The Directors’ Guild of America threatened to strike but ended up coming to an agreement, likely because the issue of AI wasn’t on the table. Artificial intelligence can’t quite do the job of organizing the complex social situations that go into making a movie, yet.
Writers have protested before AI language models might begin writing whole movies by themselves. But actors find their jobs threatened even now, as AI is used to replicate their faces and learn from their materials without consent. The WGA said it would prefer to harness, but not ban, artificial intelligence.
According to the WGA’s negotiating position, their only concern with AI is how it is legally defined in relation to material published by WGA members, e.g., works written by an AI would not be considered “literary” or “source” material. However, SAG-AFTRA had a stronger position. Deadline quoted their statement:
“Artificial intelligence has already proven to be a real and immediate threat to the work of our members and can mimic members’ voices, likenesses and performances. We must get agreement around acceptable uses, bargain protections against misuse, and ensure consent and fair compensation for the use of your work to train AI systems and create new performances. In their public statements and policy work, the companies have not shown a desire to take our members’ basic rights to our own voices and likenesses seriously.”
To provide an example of the threat: Sarah Silverman recently joined with two other authors in a lawsuit against ChatGPT and Meta, claiming that their AI systems infringed on the authors’ copyright when they used their published works as training data. Arguments between SAG-AFTRA and the studios will similarly surround intellectual property rights.
However, the main goal here for the actors and writers is to prevent themselves from being replaced. If a change doesn’t come to the industry, a lot of people could be put out of work very soon.
