SAG-AFTRA Strikes Historic AI Contract, Protecting Actors’ Rights

On Monday, the top brass of the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) held a private webinar for its members to discuss the tentative contract the union had recently agreed upon with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). If approved, this contract will effectively bring to a close the longest labor dispute in the history of the guild. For many industry insiders, one of the most contentious and alarming aspects of the strike was the role of artificial intelligence.

Over the weekend, SAG unveiled the specifics of its AI-related clauses, an extensive array of safeguards that mandate both consent and remuneration for all actors, irrespective of their status. This agreement sees SAG taking a larger step than either the Directors Guild of America or the Writers Guild of America, both of which had previously reached agreements with AMPTP. This is not to suggest that SAG has achieved what other unions could not, but rather that actors are more directly and urgently threatened by advancements in machine learning and other AI technologies.

The SAG agreement mirrors those reached by the DGA and WGA in that it calls for protections whenever machine-learning tools are used to manipulate or exploit actors’ work. All three unions have hailed their AI agreements as “historic” and “protective.” Regardless of whether one agrees with this assessment, these agreements serve as crucial signposts. AI isn’t just a threat to writers and actors—it has implications for workers across all sectors, whether creative or otherwise.

For those observing Hollywood’s labor disputes to glean insights on how to handle AI in their own conflicts, it’s crucial that these agreements have the right protections in place. I empathize with those who have scrutinized them or called for them to be more stringent. I count myself among them. However, there comes a point where we may be advocating for things that cannot be achieved in this round of negotiations, or perhaps don’t need to be pushed for at all.

To gain a deeper understanding of what the public generally refers to as AI and its perceived threat, I spent several months during the strike meeting with many of the leading engineers, tech experts in machine learning, and legal scholars in both Big Tech and copyright law. The crux of what I learned confirmed three critical points:

Firstly, the most severe threats are not those most frequently discussed in the news. The majority of people who will be negatively impacted by machine-learning tools are not the privileged, but rather low- and working-class laborers and marginalized and minority groups, due to the inherent biases within the technology.

Secondly, the rise and unregulated power of Big Tech is as much a threat to the studios as it is to the creative workforce. This is a topic I delved into earlier in the strike and which WIRED’s Angela Watercutter astutely expanded upon.

The latest AI news & AI tools have shown that artificial intelligence-generated images and AI video generator technologies can significantly impact the work of actors. With these new contracts, SAG-AFTRA is taking steps to ensure that actors are protected in this rapidly changing landscape.