Acting union calls out Hollywood studios for 'double standard' on AI use TV and film studios should obtain explicit consent from, give credit to, and compensate actors fairly for using their likeness to train generative AI systems, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists union argued this week to the US federal government. On Wednesday, at a roundtable discussion …
Businesses also want to remain in business. I'm prepared to bet that the upshot of this will be some sort of "agreement" whereby studios promise not to use an actor's work in AI training without the actor's explicit consent.
Which is as it should be, of course. In fact, that's pretty much what the law already says, barring a few edge cases such as actors who died before the current "deepfake" revolution. But it doesn't do anything to address movies made by anyone who's not an established, suable entity.
The owner of that studio is completely suable. And has no way of concealing their connection, assuming they want to make profit from its works.
No, the unregulated bit is the several millions of Internet users who probably can't even be identified. But who have access to deepfake video and audio production software (or web hosted services), and will be using it for everything from Lord of the Rings (Author's Cut) to Taylor Swift Does Dallas. To say nothing of Biden Eats Little Billy.
"studios promise not to use an actor's work in AI training without the actor's explicit consent."
...and the consent will be given by signing a contract, because it will be a clause in every actors contract unless you are big enough to refuse and they still want you. The vast majority of actors are interchangeable if they are "difficult" and can be easily replaced if they don't consent. After all, that's what actors do. They become different people, that's the whole point of the job, so collective bargaining is pretty much the only power most of them have, so long as they all stick together.
So many actors are not understanding the same situation many musical artists found themselves in, that they do not own the art they created.
If you dig down into the bowels of the contracts, they signed I am sure there are clauses that state: "All intellectual property belongs to the studio, and that will cover their likeness in the production.
Unless the courts are going to post-facto invalidate all those contracts.
California does have a law that prevents someone from profiting off your image and that lasts 70 years after death.
"After all, if an individual decided to infringe on one of these companies' copyright protected content and distribute it without paying for the licensing rights, that individual would face a great deal of financial and legal ramifications," Crabtree-Ireland said.
"So why is the reverse not true? Shouldn't the individuals whose intellectual property was used to train the AI algorithm be at least equally protected?" he asked.
So a plaintiff against worldwide corporatism can make a solid, definitive, well-stated argument, and simply not fold under pressure instead.
Hell must have just gotten a whole lot chillier.
It is not. I've read and signed performance contracts, they are (in the west at least) explicitly limited to a particular production and the directly related products such as toys and the like.
The reason for the limitations is of course because the actors unions fought hard to make and keep those limitations.
The studios are now trying to renege on these previous agreements, hence the current round of industrial action.
Of course, the studios are thinking stupidly short term, because if they actually got what they are demanding then the studios lose absolutely everything in a few years time.
It's easy to work out how much to compensate a specific performer if their likeness is directly used to make new content but how do we work out how to compensate one of a hundred (or a thousand or more) performers all of who's performances were used to train the AI that then made the content ? Surely this still ends up in some sort of 'we own this material in perpetuity for this fee and can do whatever we want with it' arrangement just out of practicality.
Also, I have to say that it will not be too far in the future before the AI is doing the whole thing all by itself.....
There could be a pool of talent used to train an AI and some of the profits resulting from the AI products would be used to pay into the pool. The devil is in the details.
Can the talent pool become infinitely large? Will the talent be subject to abuse based on the ease with which they could be denied a position in the training pool? Can talent (or their heirs) be driven to sign away their residual rights in perpetuity?
And the biggest devil in all of these details is the potential for something more prone to sequels and repeated plots than Hollywood was ever capable of; they'll run out of unique titles and need to start adding the date.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
