On Monday, leadership from the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) held a members-only webinar to discuss the preliminary contract the union reached last week with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which, if ratified, would officially end the longest strike in the guild’s history.
For many in the industry, AI is one of the most controversial and feared components of the strike. Over the weekend, SAG released details of their negotiated AI clauses, a broad set of protections that all participants, regardless of their status, will have to agree to and be compensated for. With this agreement, SAG has gone further than the Directors Guild of America (DGA) or the Writers Guild of America (WGA), which came to an agreement with the AMPTP before them. This isn’t to say that SAG has succeeded where other unions have failed, but rather that participants face a direct, existential threat from advances in machine learning and other computer-generated technologies.
The SAG deal is similar to the DGA and WGA deals in that it requires protections against any use of machine learning tools to manipulate or exploit their work. All three unions claim their AI agreements are “historic” and “protective,” but whether or not one agrees with that, the agreements serve as important signposts. AI isn’t just a threat to writers and actors; it will have an impact on workers in all fields, creative and otherwise.
For people who are looking to Hollywood’s labor fights as a blueprint for how to handle AI in their own disputes, it’s important that these deals have the right protections, so I understand those who question them or push for them to be more stringent. I am one of them. But there is a point where we are pushing for things that cannot be accomplished in this round of negotiations and may not need to be pushed at all.
To better understand what the public generally refers to as AI and its perceived threats, I spent several months speaking with many of the leading engineers and technologists in the field of machine learning, as well as legal scholars in the fields of big tech and copyright law, during strike conferences.
The essence of what I learned confirmed three key points: First, the most serious threats are not the ones we hear about most in the news — most of the people negatively impacted by machine learning tools are not the privileged, but the underprivileged — working-class laborers and marginalized and minority groups due to the technology’s inherent biases. The second point is that studios are just as threatened by the rise and unregulated power of big tech as the creative workforce, something I wrote about at length before the walkout and brilliantly articulated here by Angela Watercutter at Wired.
Both lead to a third point, which is most directly relevant to AI transactions: there is no ironclad legal language to adequately protect artists (or anyone) from exploitation involving machine learning tools.
When we hear artists talk about fighting AI on legal grounds, they either sue for copyright infringement or demand that tech companies stop feeding creative works into their AI models. Neither approach is effective in the current environment. Copyright law is designed to protect intellectual property holders, not creative individuals, and most such infringement lawsuits are unlikely to succeed, or, if they do, to result in enforceable new law. This became clear when the Authors Guild’s copyright lawsuit against Google failed in 2015; their new set faces a similar challenge, as described below.
The need to control the ability of AI to be trained on artists’ work exposes a fundamental lack of understanding of how these models and the companies behind them operate, because in an age where everything is already ingested online, it’s impossible to stop who scrapes what. It also relies on trusting tech companies to self-regulate and not ingest work they’re told not to, knowing it’s nearly impossible to prove otherwise.
Tech entities like OpenAI are black boxes, and like all major Big Tech companies, they disclose little to no information about how their datasets work. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight for greater transparency and reformed copyright protections. However, it’s a long and uncertain game that requires government entities like the FTC to be willing to fight deep-pocketed lobbyists blocking meaningful legislation against Big Tech bosses. Progress will come eventually, but it will surely come too late for a labor crisis that has hurt so many.
The lack of enforceable laws to shackle Big Tech doesn’t mean these deals become meaningless compromises, far from it. There is tremendous value in a workforce that insists on having its terms written into their contracts. If the studios choose, they can find loopholes in some of these languages, as they have in the past, but they will be in violation of the agreed-upon contracts and will face publicly humiliating lawsuits from influential and beloved artists, as well as the possibility of another long and costly strike.
What’s historic about these Hollywood deals is that they make clear what creatives will and won’t tolerate from companies. Uniting behind this statement has enormous power, even if it can’t be fully enforced. It sends a message to other industry unions (several of which are facing upcoming contract negotiations) and to the entire labor movement that workers will not tolerate being exploited and displaced by Big Tech’s rapid advances. What the AMPTP shouldn’t lose sight of is that it may soon find itself making similar demands for its own survival as Big Tech, which is perfectly poised to circumvent or devour the traditional studios.
Over the weekend, there were calls for SAG members to reject this contract based on its AI provisions. I will vote to approve it, as I did with the DGA and WGA agreements, not because the terms are perfect or ironclad, but because the agreement makes sense and works. There are no practical and straightforward solutions that have not been addressed. It's time to get back to work.
This is not a battle that ends with the current strike; it’s still early in the tech era, with both painful disruption and huge benefits to come. The SAG deal, combined with the DGA and WGA deals, is a major early blow to labor’s fight for a fair and equitable position in the new world.