AS HOLLYWOOD EXECUTIVES insist it is “just not realistic” to pay actors — 87 percent of whom earn less than $26,000 — more, they are spending lavishly on AI programs.
While entertainment firms like Disney have declined to go into specifics about the nature of their investments in artificial intelligence, job postings and financial disclosures reviewed by The Intercept reveal new details about the extent of these companies’ embrace of the technology.
In one case, Netflix is offering as much as $900,000 for a single AI product manager.
Hollywood actors and writers unions are jointly striking this summer for the first time since 1960, calling for better wages and regulations on studios’ use of artificial intelligence. Just after the actors’ strike was authorized, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers — the trade association representing the TV and film companies negotiating with the actors and writers unions — announced “a groundbreaking AI proposal that protects actors’ digital likenesses for SAG-AFTRA members.”
The offer prompted comparisons to an episode of the dystopian sci-fi TV series “Black Mirror,” which depicted actress Salma Hayek locked in a Kafkaesque struggle with a studio which was using her scanned digital likeness against her will.
“Having been poor and rich in this business, I can assure you there’s enough money to go around; it’s just about priorities.”
“So $900k/yr per soldier in their godless AI army when that amount of earnings could qualify thirty-five actors and their families for SAG-AFTRA health insurance is just ghoulish,” actor Rob Delaney, who had a lead role in the “Black Mirror” episode, told The Intercept. “Having been poor and rich in this business, I can assure you there’s enough money to go around; it’s just about priorities.”
Among the striking actors’ demands are protections against their scanned likeness being manipulated by AI without adequate compensation for the actors.
“They propose that our 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 to be able to use it for the rest of eternity in any project they want with no consent and no compensation,” Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, chief negotiator for the actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA, said.
Entertainment writers, too, must contend with their work being replaced by AI programs like ChatGPT that are capable of generating text in response to queries. Writers represented by the Writers Guild of America have been on strike since May 7 demanding, among other things, labor safeguards against AI. John August, a screenwriter for films like “Big Fish” and “Charlie’s Angels,” explained that the WGA wants to make sure that “ChatGPT and its cousins can’t be credited with writing a screenplay.”
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