Article: How Can Artists and Actors Control the Tide of AI?

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Both actors and writers have risen to battle the use of artificial intelligence in their work. The creative industry of motion pictures, television, and streaming came to a halt in the United States when on May 2, 2023, the Writers Guild of America went on strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). AMPTP negotiates industrywide collective bargaining agreements between unions and major entertainment studios such as Disney, Netflix, Amazon, Sony, and Paramount. The Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG–AFTRA) went on strike on July 14, 2023 against (AMPTP) over an ongoing labor dispute to further halt the industry. This is the first time the writers and actors both been on strike simultaneously since 1960.

At the heart of the strike lies two significant issues related to technology but in different ways. The first relates to the fundamental change in how consumers access movies and television through streaming services such as Amazon Prime and Netflix. With the rise of streaming technology, actors and writers do not get properly compensated through ticket sales or per view of their work on TV as traditionally with movies and television. With shorter seasons and the lack of per-view payment structures for streaming sites, actors and writers have more difficulty maintaining a middle-class lifestyle. For example, many streaming TV series have only eight-episode seasons in contrast to traditional network seasons, such as Frasier and Seinfeld, which had about 24 and 20 episodes per season respectively. As such, writers and actors derive less royalties or residuals in syndication. Now writers and actors seek better compensation for their work.

Additionally, writers and actors want to get ahead of the use of artificial intelligence in their industry. With the rapid development of large language models such as chatGPT for generating text, writers fear that the studios will use artificial intelligence to replace writers. Additionally, with deep learning technology maturing, AI can literally place the voice and likeness of anyone on the body of someone else. Such deep fake technology potentially makes it possible to create new content with alive and even deceased actors without their consent or participation. Recently, Disney disclosed that it used AI to create the intro art in its Marvel movie “Secret Invasion,” much to fans’ displeasure. (techcrunch.com) Actors and writers see that the large language models and deep learning need great volumes of previous creative work to learn, but the writers and actors have had no say or compensation for their work and likenesses. The strike seeks to establish some control and remuneration for writers and actors.

In late spring of this year, the writers guild SAG-AFTRA went on strike against the major studios to bargain for better pay and protection against the use of AI to replace human writers in the creative process. In early summer, the Screen Actors Guild joined the strike against AMPTP for similar reasons. Both groups can see the rise of AI-generated scripts, acting and voice simulation, and scene generation. AI may not completely replace writers and actors, but the ground rules need to be established as what sets the rules for compensation and control. First, the large language models mopped up the internet in their training without thought of permission or copyright. The writers and creators currently have no say in model building or how the models get used to displace the people who created the work that the model depends on. The next few months, as the unions work to resolve the strike, will set an interesting precedent for the relationship between human creators and the massive AI tools that have been built on the compendium of human achievement.

Dr. Smith’s career in scientific and information research spans the areas of bioinformatics, artificial intelligence, toxicology, and chemistry. He has published a number of peer-reviewed scientific papers. He has worked over the past seventeen years developing advanced analytics, machine learning, and knowledge management tools to enable research and support high-level decision making. Tim completed his Ph.D. in Toxicology at Cornell University and a Bachelor of Science in chemistry from the University of Washington.

You can buy his book on Amazon in paperback and in kindle format here.