Thank you for your service: The role of AI in the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes

On July 13, 2023, following weeks of negotiation of the Television/Theatrical/Streaming contracts, the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) National Board officially declared a strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), the first time this had happened since 1980, and the first time it had happened in conjunction with a Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike since 1960. For context, the SAG-AFTRA President during that 1960 strike was the eventual 40th President of the USA, Ronald Reagan. With a combined 171,500 union members on strike, the film and television industries have virtually ground to a halt with no immediate end in sight, buoyed only by the hope that the months, or perhaps even years, of pain the strike will create will be worth it in the long-run. But what does any of this have to do with AI? To answer that question, we need to look at the underlying causes of the strike, and the contract disputes which have culminated in such radical action.

The entertainment industry has undergone seismic change over the last decade. We have seen the rise of streaming services, the catastrophic COVID-19 pandemic, decreasing competition amongst production companies, thanks to companies like Disney and Amazon, and the uptake of AI to recreate actors’ likenesses. Despite all of these changes, little has changed in the way actors’ contracts are specified, with the strike essentially centering on SAG-AFTRA’s desire for “essential contract improvements” which will reflect the changing marketplace. While many have been quick to dismiss the strike as the already rich Hollywood elites having a sook and demanding more then they’re worth, especially at a time when so many are suffering from cost of living pressures, this represents an inflection point not only for the wider entertainment industry, but labour markets as a whole. Many of the issues this strike revolves around can be generalised to various industries, and the way in which they are resolved are of great importance to people of all walks of life.

Much like in the general economy, the level of CEO pay has proved to be a highly contentious topic in Hollywood. The Economic Policy Institute found that in 2021, CEOs at top US firms were paid roughly 399 times as much as typical workers, with their pay increasing roughly 1460% since 1978 compared to an inflation-adjusted increase of only 18.1% for typical workers. This issue is no different in Hollywood. The average Hollywood executive gets paid approximately 384 times more than the average writer and actor, and while wages for actors and writers have fallen over the last few years, those of executives went up around 7.7% in 2022. While much of this can be put down to the vested stock options which these executives usually get paid in, another reason which has become central to the strike, is that of streaming residuals. For many actors, their pay is generally made up not only of a base salary, but also royalty payments, known as residuals. For film actors, this could be in the form of box-office cuts or home-video sales, and for TV actors, it is generally in the form of payments for reruns. However, with the streaming boom, such contract terms are no longer reasonable. When a movie is released to streaming either at or soon after its release date, it takes away from box-office revenue, and when a TV show is moved onto streaming from cable or broadcast TV, its reruns either stop or slow down. The issue with this is that generally, actors do not get paid residuals from streaming services, so no matter how popular your TV show is on Netflix, you don’t see any residual payments based off of this, with the streaming service reaping all of the benefits. This has proven to be an issue even with the elites of Hollywood, with Scarlett Johansson filing a lawsuit against Disney in 2021 for releasing Black Widow on Disney+ concurrently with its theatrical release without informing her, leading to a massive erosion of her pay, as her contract was largely based on box-office revenue. Similarly, Christopher Nolan left his deal with Warner Bros. in 2021, taking the rights to Oppenheimer to rival studio Universal, after Warner Bros. controversially decided to debut its entire 2021 slate of films on HBO Max rather than delaying them until cinemas were able to reopen. Although an incredibly important issue in this strike, the negotiations around pay and contract structures are a common feature of industrial action. The truly interesting thing about this strike, and the one which could have serious repercussions on society as a whole, is the question of what to do about AI?

Once the stuff only of science fiction, the age of Artificial Intelligence is well and truly upon us. Lately we have seen the emergence of what is known as generative AI, machine learning systems which can generate content like text, code and images. Think of Chat GPT and DALL-E, which can generate AI content with only a prompt. While AI clearly has the power for good, generative AI is a massive concern for those in entertainment and the arts. SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher stated that “artificial intelligence poses an existential threat to creative professions,” and that “all actors and performers deserve contract language that protects them from having their identity and talent exploited without consent and pay.” The desire to have strict contract terms regulating the use of AI has been echoed by the WGA, who have demanded that AI not be allowed to write or rewrite literary material, and that the works of unionised writers not be used as source material for AI works, nor to train AI. This comes in the wake of a shockingly dystopian proposal by the AMPTP, with SAG-AFTRA chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland claiming that studios proposed that “background performers should be able to be scanned, get paid for one day’s pay, and their company should own that scan, their image, their likeness, and should be able to use it for the rest of eternity in any project they want, with no consent and no compensation,” which is basically just the plot of the Black Mirror episode ‘Joan is Awful’. However, the AMPTP has countered that this is not correct, and that their terms only allowed for likenesses to be used for the motion picture in question, with consent and a minimum payment required for subsequent uses. Regardless of the exact wording, the ability of a company to own and reuse someone’s likeness in perpetuity for monetary gain is a truly terrifying concept. But importantly, this aspect of the strike represents the first real case of industrial bargaining over how generative AI is used in the workplace, and its outcome could have important ramifications for all industries as generative AI becomes more and more powerful.

While this whole strike can be viewed simply as an issue with the monetisation of streaming and AI, it raises a whole range of questions around the ethics of AI, and in particular AI art. There are the obvious concerns of an AI apocalypse à la The Terminator series, summarised in the March 2023 open letter to AI developers written by technology leaders like Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, which asked for a 6-month pause to AI development in order to properly assess the risks of building ever stronger AI systems and to put in place proper shared safety protocols. But the concerns of SAG-AFTRA and the WGA lead to the question of what art truly is, and whether art not made by humans can genuinely be considered art? In the opinion of this author at least, the answer is a firm no. Art is fundamentally any creative work produced by a human being, informed by their own lived experience and subject to all of the imperfections of their being. For the creative work of an AI system, essentially an algorithm taught how to create art by compiling knowledge of previous work, to be considered art is to reduce the human experience to an algorithm, completely ignoring how life itself informs art. While generative AI may simplify the creative process, helping to fact check or even providing editing help, it can never truly replicate a work of art, and never should.

While it may seem like the concerns of the pampered rich of Hollywood are far removed from those of the ordinary person, this is simply not the case. Fortunately, contract agreements for actors and writers have expired at a time when the world is on the brink of a true revolution, one which could threaten our very humanity. Dismiss them all you want, but the outcomes of the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes will likely inform the future of many far-removed industries. Whether it be concerns about firm profits being held at the top and never trickling down to workers lower on the ladder, or about AI and how one’s work and likeness is appropriated and replicated by companies, everyone should be keenly watching how these strikes progress. I, for one, know who I will be supporting.

References:

[1] (2023, August 21). Historic Dual Strike 2023. SAG-AFTRA. https://www.sagaftra.org/historic-dual-strike-2023

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[6] Bivens, J., & Kandra, J. (2022, October 4). CEO pay has skyrocketed 1,460% since 1978. Economic Policy Institute.

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[13] (2023, January 19). What is generative AI? McKinsey & Company.

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[15] Jarvey, N. (2023, July 13). SAG-AFTRA Strike: Studios’ AI Proposal Sounds Like Black Mirror, Right? Vanity Fair.

[16] Metz, C., & Schmidt, G. (2023, March 29). Elon Musk and Others Call for Pause on A.I., Citing ‘Profound Risks to Society’. The New York Times.

[17] Moneo, L. (2023, August 15). If it wasn’t created by a human artist, is it still art? The Harvard Gazette.