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Notes -
The Hollywood actors guild is on a strike. They are joining the Hollywood writers' strike, which has been ongoing for a few months. I did not know this, but apparently Fran Drescher (the loudly nasal woman from "The Nanny") is the president of the union.
Is this strike a big deal? Well, for one, it's the biggest strike for over 60 years. But what caught my eye was her rationalisation. You can read a summary of the demands.
A key demand has been surrounding generative AI. Actors do not want companies to create their own AI replicas of actors, nor to use generated voices and faces.
One possibility could be the actors raising the AI bogeyman as a cover to demand better pay. And to be sure, they are asking for a fairer split from the streaming model. Yet the AI demands are not directly linked to compensation per se, but rather asks about blanket bans. This does suggest that AI fears are genuine and real. Given very rapid progress in the generative field in recent years, perhaps they are right to be so.
Whenever I've read about jobs displacement from AI, invariably experts have opined that "the creative stuff will go last". Clearly the people who know their trade best are disagreeing with the experts. I'm not sure if this means that actors are paranoid or if we should disregard the expert consensus. Either way, I suspect we may see more and more of these kinds of Luddite strikes in the future, but perhaps not from those who people expected it from.
I'm having trouble finding the demands actually clearly stated, but everything I've seen has been about actors not wanting companies to create their own AI replicas of actors without paying actors royalties for using them or allowing any limitations or creative control over how they are used (e.g., so it could be legally used to fake up video of the actor supporting any product or political position).
As a pure, "don't use AI at all" claim, this doesn't actually make sense. Why would the studios want to make AI replicas of minor actors no one can recognize when they can use generative AI to create virtual actors that look like no real person? Either (1) they're seriously trying to claim the right to not pay big stars for AI replicas, (2) they want AI replicas of everyone who might one day be famous, or (3) they are worried about the legality of existing AI systems and want a data source they know they have rights to.
(Of course, while deep fakes do already exist, there's also the complication that this contract negotiation has to cover future AI technology that doesn't exist yet, so it's hard to be precise about exactly what uses they're worried about.)
Someone I heard talking about it on the World Service a few days ago (an actress representing some union or organisation or other) basically said that things like reshoots and follow-up gigs in, for instance, TV shows can be pretty important for small-time actors, and what she was worried about was that production had sometimes started filming with a real actor to begin with, but if they wanted to make changes/add small pieces late in the day using AI for such things. She objected to this both on the count that it deprived the actor of income from reshooting but also that it's unfair for them not to be able to 'control' their own performance, partly in the sense that they might not be happy with the quality of the AI performance and that that might reflect poorly on their reputation.
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