Actors say Hollywood studios want their AI replicas

During today’s press conference in which Hollywood actors confirmed that they were going on strike, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA’s chief negotiator, revealed a proposal from Hollywood studios that sounds ripped right out of a Black Mirror episode.

In a statement about the strike, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) said that its proposal included “a groundbreaking AI proposal that protects actors’ digital likenesses for SAG-AFTRA members.”

“If you think that’s a groundbreaking proposal, I suggest you think again.”

When asked about the proposal during the press conference, Crabtree-Ireland said that “This ‘groundbreaking’ AI proposal that they gave us yesterday, they proposed that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get one day’s pay, and their companies should own that scan, their image, their likeness and should be able to use it for the rest of eternity on any project they want, with no consent and no compensation. So if you think that’s a groundbreaking proposal, I suggest you think again.”

In response, AMPTP spokesperson Scott Rowe sent out a statement denying the claims made during SAG-AFTRA’s press conference. “The claim made today by SAG-AFTRA leadership that the digital replicas of background actors may be used in perpetuity with no consent or compensation is false. In fact, the current AMPTP 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. Any other use requires the background actor’s consent and bargaining for the use, subject to a minimum payment.”

The use of generative AI has been one of the major sticking points in negotiations between the two sides (it’s also a major issue behind the writers strike), and in her opening statement of the press conference, SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher said that “If we don’t stand tall right now, we are all going to be in trouble, we are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines.”

Disclosure: The Verge’s editorial staff is also unionized with the Writers Guild of America, East.

Interesting post but isn’t entertainment audience-driven. If we don’t watch or listen to something then it flops. Right now audiences seem to be losing interest in ‘woke’

One of the strike issues, on which I agree completely with the writers and actors, is the demand for greater transparency on streaming numbers. The writers and actors have this odd belief, regarded as archaic and irrelevant by the streaming execs, that they have something to do with the success of a movie or show. The creatives do all the work. The streamers provide a distribution platform.

Before streaming, ticket sales and the secondary market of physical media purchases and rentals gave people real numbers for the purposes of negotiation. For the creatives, this was the gateway to becoming highly paid. Most of the writers and actors aren't A list. Most aren't rich. But the potential is there if they contribute to a couple or three huge successes. They may act for the love of acting -- it probably beats any number of more mundane, normie jobs -- but acting is very high risk with a very low probability of hitting it big. The dream is important.

Today the streamers derive most of their income from subscriptions, which most viewers let coast. While churn is increasing, the nation's couch potato viewers are still relatively passive. They signed up for Netflix or Disney or Amazon (many because they signed up for free shipping with Amazon Prime) and let it coast. And the actors and writers, like the trade press and the general public, are not allowed to see the streaming metrics. "How is my show doing?" is a reasonable question. "None of your business" is not a very good response. But if the streamers get away with not sharing the numbers, the creatives are seriously handicapped in negotiating for performance pay.

If I busted my butt to write or star in a show, I would think I'm entitled to know how the show is actually doing. Real numbers, not press release jabber or astroturfed buzz from media bought by the Borg. Real viewship data.

In the long run, entertainment should be audience driven. When ticket sales and the secondary market were the major revenue streams, the numbers were available. When streaming took off, the key performance numbers were kept secret. And the writers and actors aside, I don't think it's any accident that the wokeness disease metastasized to today's terminal levels at precisely the time that performance data disappeared behind the curtain.

The streamers now own most of the legacy studios. They dominate the industry from project development to distribution. Are they really audience/consumer driven? One of the chronic rants here at FR is that the industry now churns out woke garbage and backhands a huge chunk of the potential audience in the process. I think that's not a coincidence. The dominant revenue stream today is a huge passive income flow from subscriptions. It's not the same thing as making movies that succeed or fail on the basis of selling tickets, back when a movie had to be good enough to entice people to invest an evening and the price of a ticket. Nowadays, unless a movie is so bad that it sparks a backlash and drives people to cancel their subscriptions, the Borg just rolls on. The passive income stream, in turn, becomes a target for every grifting pressure group that wants a cut of the pie. For the grifters, there is no longer a need to actually put butts in seats. That would require talent, work, and enough discipline to not insult the audience. How old fashioned. Their current play is to mau mau the suits at Disney, Amazon, Apple and the rest, with the pitch being intersectionality scores, not viewership.

And for the streaming execs, opaque numbers are a way of evading accountability.

Sunshine is a very effective disinfectant. Let everyone know what the real numbers are. Back when the industry depended on ticket sales, attendance numbers were closely followed, and hot movies used good numbers in their advertising campaigns. Notice how that's disappeared, except for the handful of tentpoles? What do the streamers talk about? Glad you asked. They talk about how diverse their productions have become. That's not a coincidence.

P.S. Another issue, not involved in the strike as far as I know, is how the siloing of content on streaming platform penalizes the creatives. In the old days, the people who made a film wanted the maximum number of butts in seats. They wanted their films in as many theaters as possible, and they bargained hard with the theater chains for screens. Lots of ticket buyers, and everyone could make money.

Now the streamers put their new content behind subscription walls that exclude the substantial majority of the potential audience. Oh, sure: a good movie, if it has any legs at all, will usually (though not always) emerge eventually on other platforms. But that may take a long, long time — becoming generally available long after the buzz has passed and you and I have forgotten about it.

The streamers silo the content because they use it as bait for selling subscriptions. But that’s a revenue model that cuts the creatives off at the knees — especially when the viewership data isn’t shared so that the creatives have no basis for negotiating for performance pay.

I suppose in a perfect world, the creatives would declare independence, form their own production companies, and seek alternative distribution arrangements on their own terms. The independents have always done it this way. In ten years, looking back, we may see that the current angst is simply another stage in the death throes of a legacy business model.

The YouTube presentation that I linked earlier touches on this. The presenter, who is very good, hits this point hard. Yes, the whole industry is in freefall, but it is the suits who blew up the established system. The big companies all bet on the streaming model. They embarked on insane overexpansion and incurred huge debt trying to become the next Netflix. Most of the streamers have never broken even; they have accepted operating losses as the price of rapid expansion. Now the industry is oversaturated and starting to contract, with production cuts and a further wave of consolidations. Basically, the suits made a huge mistake. The execs got an epic case of groupthink and they made a huge mistake. Now they’re killing the creatives, who are the basis of their industry, to cut costs.

But not to worry, AI will replace all the people anyhow.

At last.

If SAG-AFTRA and WGA want to stand up the Borg, they need to stop whining and take action. And by "action," I don't mean picketing. I mean actions like this:

SAG-AFRTA now granting waivers to independent film producers

The creatives need to declare independence. Tell the Borg that Disney, Amazon, HBO, etc. aren't the only game in town. Be entrepreneurial. Take some risks. Accept lower pay but break the Borg's stranglehold.

They might even experiment with a restoration of the old distribution model. Or a new model. Why not make some good movies and give them a 90 day theatrical window before they're leased to a streamer. Or longer. Release a DVD and Blu-ray before the streamers get it. If the movie is really good, keep it away from the streamers entirely and eventually pay for view themselves.

I don't know what the exact formula should be. I just want to see the streamers' stranglehold broken. And take a long time horizon. Don't be greedy. Form strategic alliances with the indie film producers and the struggling theater chains, including the art house theaters. Invest now for the next war.

I came across this today. I think it's pretty good: 2023 Actors Strike: Everything You Need to Know

That was an excellent wrap-up. When technology changes rapidly, entire guilds of artisans get shut down, seemingly overnight; while the executives are insulated from the impact to a great degree. This industry has been hit hard by streaming and zooming, and cheapening the marketplace by glutting it with too many competitive products and shortened release times so that people can stream that latest film within days of the theater release.

The artisans feeling most of the hurt are the little guys trying to make ends meet—the production people whose lengthy list of names moviegoers walk out on as the credits are run at the end of the film. They are shut out of realistic residuals from streaming. And as the commentator said, these little people have no golden parachute. As a lifetime independant contractor on the print side of media, I felt that in my gut.

Twenty years ago, when people would say, "Wow, it must be so great to be producing content for a huge company like XYZ," my answer would be, "If they could get it done in China, they would." When I started out, the top American businesses had grown up in a few large cities, and your work day largely corresponded with the time zone in that location. In mid-career, a killing 24/7/365 schedule developed, as the corporate community started globalizing. Someone on one's "team" was awake and working somewhere around the globe at all times, and might call you in the middle of your night to discuss the fine details of a project on which a lot of money was riding. If you missed a typo and a big mogul was offended, you as a contractor would simply be "out." Some star-struck recent graduate would be eager to take your place.

This commentary correctly understands that the power players in this struggle are no longer the studio heads, but the executives of the handful of huge "media'n'enterntainment" conglomerates that derive much of their profit from a widely diversified line products and consumer offerings—the movie, the book about the movie, the coloring book, the action figures, the video game, the theme park ride, the publicity articles, the special events, the t-shirts, the candies, the licensing of the characters' images, the soundtrack, the stars' personal appearances, the reruns....

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