When AI advocates start talking up the “benefits” of tapping machines to slop out assets instead of hiring human beings to create art, cost is usually one of the first topics that gets brought up. As long as you’re willing to ignore infrastructure/environmental/cultural costs, and solely focus on short-term budgetary concerns, AI can look like a decent deal: Sure, you get cookie-cutter crap, but at least you get it cheap.
Actors union SAG-AFTRA is apparently interested in changing that dynamic, though, per reporting from THR from the CES trade show this week. The union’s top negotiator, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland—America’s most famous Crabtree-Ireland!—has suggested the tack that he and his fellow negotiators might end up adopting when they start negotiating their next contract with Hollywood studios again, starting next month. (The current contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which was the subject of the 4-month strikes that shut down Hollywood production in 2023, expires in June of 2026.) Noting that the 2023 contract got fewer protections on AI use than he would have liked, Crabtree-Ireland says the current thinking is to make what the union is calling “synthetic performers,” like the infamous Tilly Norwood, just as expensive to use as a real performer would be, by imposing contractual fines and payments that would eliminate the cost benefit to using AI.
SAG-AFTRA has already had some limited success with this approach, in fact: A recent contract it signed covering commercial production includes a provision that anyone casting a synthetic performer instead of a human being still has to pay “1.5 times session fees and benefits contributions based on those fees plus other costs,” while a record label deal it signed last year requires royalties to be paid even if a song uses a synthetic voice instead of a human one. The thinking being that, if producers are faced with the same costs whether they’re hiring a human or a machine, they’ll obviously pick the one that can give a genuine, lived-in performance, instead of algorithmic trough-filler. (Or, to quote Crabtree-Ireland: “In my opinion, if synthetics cost the same as a human, they’re going to choose a human every time.”)
The question, of course, is whether the big studios will go for any of this: The industry as a whole is still smarting from the 2023 fight, which only ended once both sides wound up pretty much kicking the can down the road on AI. Now that the issue is here, it remains to be seen how intransigent either side will be once the unions start cutting into the profit motivation for Hollywood’s newfound, starry-eyed embrace of AI.
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