The thread was 10 tweets lengthy—verbose by X requirements—and 219 phrases, however there was only one phrase that caught out. Threat. The message, posted on the @SAG-AFTRA account, summed up every part the actors union had fought to get within the tentative settlement with Hollywood studios. In the context of the fast rise of generative AI, it’s price studying in full: “We have achieved a deal of extraordinary scope that includes ‘above-pattern’ minimum compensation increases, unprecedented provisions for consent and compensation that will protect members from the threat of AI, and for the first time establishes a streaming participation bonus.”
“Threat,” after all, is how many individuals have come to view synthetic intelligence. US president Joe Biden’s latest executive order on the expertise was seen as, partially, a approach to tackle the dangers the expertise presents to nationwide safety. Last week, 28 international locations, together with European Union nations and China, signed on to an settlement to include AI, warning that it was advancing in a means that would carry “serious, even catastrophic, harm.” In Hollywood, the worry was that AI could be used to scan actors and recreate their performances with out consent or compensation, or that enormous language fashions could be used on scripts in a means that might edge out screenwriters.
Terms of the contract between the Screen Actors Guild—American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) gained’t be revealed till after it’s been reviewed by the guild‘s national board, but based on SAG’s tweets, it appears doubtless the union obtained the AI protections they’d been holding out for. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the latest proposal from the AMPTP sought to permit studios to pay for AI scans of what are often called “Schedule F” performers and, following the actors’ loss of life, enable them to make use of these scans with out the consent of the property or SAG. The guild pushed again, asking for compensation and consent.
When the Writers Guild of America settled their labor dispute with the studios and streamers in September, they obtained a contract that put up protections to make sure AI-generated materials didn’t come to them for rewrites and that prevented studios from coaching AI fashions on their scripts with out approval. On Friday, presumably after SAG indicators the cope with AMPTP, the world will know in the event that they obtained equal protections.
AI has been the foremost sticking level in strikes carried out by each writers and actors this yr. The final time there was an enormous work stoppage—the writers strike of 2007-08—one of many main points was honest compensation for content material produced for the online and higher residual funds for content material that will get downloaded from companies like (then) iTunes. Mind you, this was years earlier than House of Cards and Netflix’s large push into unique content material. Hell, it was years earlier than Netflix would be a part of AMPTP. But, as with different Hollywood labor disputes earlier than it, the strike now appears like a canary in a coal mine. Streaming has come to dominate the trade within the years since, “disrupting” the system and main labor unions in Tinseltown to hunt higher compensation for work that, 15 years in the past, appeared fringe in comparison with community TV and big-screen blockbusters.
It’s not fringe. All of that disrupting labored, and going into this yr’s negotiations, the guilds sought to beef up how a lot writers and actors had been paid when their exhibits obtained licensed to streaming companies. “They’ve got a 2023 business model for streaming with a 1970 business model for paying performers and writers and other creatives in the industry,” SAG chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland advised my colleague Will Bedingfield again in June, when the union’s members had been contemplating a strike. “That is not OK.”
