SAG-AFTRA is worried about AI, but can it really replace actors? It already has.

Haley Joel Osment as an eerie android child in a futuristic world. Will Smith battling a flood of murderous robots. Data (Brent Spiner) on the deck of the U.S.S. Enterprise.

Hollywood has furnished the world with an abundance of stories about artificial intelligence, utopian and dystopian alike. But it's unlikely that the writers who penned those sci-fi scripts, or the actors giving soul to a machine, ever thought that AI might represent a serious threat to their livelihoods.

Yet that's exactly the fear of SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America, unions representing American actors and screenwriters. Both guilds are on strike (the first time both have done so at once since 1960), and a key issue holding up negotiations with the major Hollywood studios is the use and regulation of AI. The unions worry that text generators like ChatGPT could write screenplays and actors’ images could be used to create characters without any humans involved. 

"We will not be having our jobs taken away and given to robots,” "Breaking Bad" actor Bryan Cranston said at a recent rally in support of the SAG-AFTRA strike. “We will not allow you to take away our dignity." Meanwhile, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which represents the major Hollywood studios, says it has offered “groundbreaking protections” to prevent that. 

But could generative artificial intelligence really replace writers and actors on movie sets? Could we one day see a TV show written by a computer and "acted" by images of humans created by a machine, as a recent episode of Netflix sci-fi drama "Black Mirror" depicted? Is AI really the major threat to artists that many are saying?

“Totally,” says Haibing Lu, associate professor of Information Systems & Analytics at Santa Clara University. “I don't think that there's a way to totally ban the technology. We have to adapt to it. All parties need to sit down and figure out what’s the proper way to channel the profits.” 

At the moment, the parties aren’t sitting down. No negotiations have been scheduled between the AMPTP and the striking unions. When they finally meet again, they will have to put rules about the use of AI into new contracts. And the stakes are high, not only for the writers, actors and studios but for the rest of us. Would we want to watch movies and TV shows made by machines? Would they be original at all? Could they make us laugh and cry? Would artificially intelligent art have a soul?

And − crucially − is AI coming for our jobs too?

Generative AI makes new things, but it starts by learning about old things 

AI applications like ChatGPT and Midjourney create new text or images, but first, they must be trained on material that is similar to the content they are trying to generate. 

Text generators, also called Large Language Models, offer plenty of material for training. “There's a huge amount of text available on the internet, so it is very easy for them to collect and train,” Lu says. There are fewer photos and videos online than text, but AI models are still training on images they can find. “Your photos and my photos have probably already been collected and used. It's happening with more and more powerful technologies.”

Justine Bateman, the actor, writer and director who has been vocally opposed to the use of AI in filmmaking, describes it as “like a box. Say you want it to write books. You feed it a bunch of books, and then you give it a task: 'Write me a book about pandas and outer space,' and it'll spit out that book.” For her and others in the entertainment industry, it’s not just that AI could replace their work; it’s that any ChatGPT script or Midjourney movie would be partly based on the existing work of filmmakers. “Imagine something coming in and not only displacing you but displacing you with your own work,” she says.

Who is in SAG-AFTRA, anyway? The union has more working class actors than movie stars

Hollywood is already chock full of AI − how much more can machines do?

The guilds and the AMPTP may be arguing about the use of AI in films, but part of the future is already here. Actor Peter Cushing died in 1994, but he was digitally resurrected for the 2016 film “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.” Stars like Robert De Niro, Harrison Ford and Samuel L. Jackson have been digitally de-aged for films. The late Anthony Bourdain’s voice was recreated for a recent documentary about the celebrity chef. A slew of profanities was removed and replaced with new words and facial movements created by a computer from the 2022 film “Fall,” so it could earn a PG-13 rating instead of the more restrictive R. AI is part of what made all these digital effects possible. 

The use of generative AI is limited by three things: Computing power, training material and time. 

“Image processing takes more computational power than the textual information,” Lu says. “It's still slow. If you want to generate a video, which contains many images, it's going to be very slow.” More computing power and time cost more money, meaning it is cheaper and easier right now to generate text using AI than images and video. But that could change. 

“The power of computers doubles every one to two years,” Lu says, meaning AI technology is advancing at an exponential rate. “Over the next 10 years, it is going to be amazing.”

AI applications are also limited by what they can train on, which is a big part of the fight between the AMPTP and the two guilds. Should the people who created the materials that train AI be paid when their work is used? Are they legally and ethically required to be?

“'Generative AI’ cannot generate anything at all without first being trained on massive troves of data it then recombines. Who produces that training data? People do. And those people deserve residuals,” actor and director Joseph Gordon-Levitt wrote in a recent op-ed in The Washington Post. Residuals are royalty payments many in the entertainment industry receive when their work is reused, and are a central aspect of the current labor battle. 

“Computers can reproduce the image of a dead or living person and make this person a character in a movie,” says Daniel Gervais, a law professor at Vanderbilt University who specializes in intellectual property law. “In the case of a living actor, the question is whether this person will have rights when his or her image is used in a movie. Normally the answer is yes, but there are novel questions that emerge. Would an actor receive residuals if her image was used in the movie, but she, in fact, did not act in that movie?”

The guilds say the studios want to replace them with AI, but the studios say otherwise 

At SAG-AFTRA's press conference announcing the strike, the union’s chief negotiator, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, said the AMPTP wanted the right to scan the images of background actors (also called extras) and use their likenesses in perpetuity in any project they want, for one day’s pay. The AMPTP vehemently disputes that claim, saying its most recent proposal only “permits a company to use the digital replica of a background actor in the motion picture for which the background actor is employed.” 

SAG-AFTRA claims the AMPTP’s plans leave “principal performers and background actors vulnerable to having most of their work replaced by digital replicas,” while the AMPTP says it wants to establish provisions that “require informed consent and fair compensation.” The WGA, meanwhile, wants a new contract to say that “AI can’t write or rewrite literary material (and) can’t be used as source material,” nor can the writers' work be used to train AI. The AMPTP response to the WGA says the topic of AI needs “a lot more discussion.”

These proposals could change Hollywood, depending on how the strikes are resolved. While the AMPTP’s background actor proposal is not as drastic as Crabtree-Ireland suggests, any move to limit the work of background actors, who are often paid minimum wage, could remove a road to success for aspiring actors. Many actors get their start (and their SAG-AFTRA membership cards) by working as extras. “There was a time where we all had to do background work,” says Michael James Lazar, a SAG-AFTRA member who has had roles on shows like “How to Get Away With Murder.” “This phases them out.” 

The use of AI material for scriptwriting also could remove career paths for new writers, even if it’s just used to assist or supplement. 

“Most writers in the guild don't make their living by writing scripts from scratch,” says Jason Vredenburg, a professor of film and TV studies at Stevens Institute of Technology. “A lot of times they piece together a living by working on other people's scripts. That is where artificial intelligence is a more immediate threat.”

Many people in Hollywood see this as an existential threat. “If big corporations think that they can put human beings out of work and replace them with artificial intelligence, it's dangerous,” Fran Drescher, president of SAG-AFTRA, told USA TODAY. “And it's without thinking or conscience. Or caring. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.”

Joe Russo, co-director of “Avengers: Endgame,” recently predicted a more frightening future for AI in entertainment. “You could walk into your house and say to the AI on your streaming platform, ‘Hey, I want a movie starring my photoreal avatar and Marilyn Monroe's photoreal avatar,” he said on a panel at the Sands International Film Festival in Scotland last April. “And suddenly, now you have a rom-com starring you that's 90 minutes long.”

AI could affect workers far beyond Hollywood

There are several lawsuits pending in the U.S. about AI, and their outcomes will be consequential for everyone, not just those working in Hollywood. 

“The United States copyright office, and most scholars, consider that a machine cannot be an author,” says Gervais. “Should a court decide otherwise, there will be an enormous push to replace human authors with machines in all industries that use copyright as the basis for their business, including music, film, book publishing (and) journalism.”

It's not just jobs in the arts and publishing that Gervais sees being threatened by AI. "Machines will be able to replace humans at many jobs considered 'cognitive,' which includes many white-collar jobs," he says. "Ironically, it will be harder to replace manual labor."

Lu doesn’t think the situation is quite as dire. “AI can help us to do a lot of things, but it still requires experts to verify the accuracy of the information,” he says, noting that some lawyers recently tried to write a brief using ChatGPT, which spat out inaccurate information. “I don't think that AI will completely replace human beings. But AI has become like a digital calculator. It's going to help us to do the basic mathematics, but we still need to learn. It just helps us to improve our productivity.”

Even if AI could one day script and create a movie without any writers, actors, directors, set designers, makeup artists, or cinematographers, would people want to see it?

"Machines can beat any human on the planet at many games, including chess," Gervais points out, "yet people still pay to watch the best human chess players play one another."

"Will it be the same with movies?"

Contributing: Charles Trepany, Dana Taylor