Hollywood groundbreaking proposal

The Verge reports Actors say Hollywood studios want their AI replicas — for free, forever:

[..] 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.”

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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.”

It’s straight up from the first episode of the latest season of Black Mirror.

SAG-AFTRA, the actors union in the US is on strike as the negotiations for a new contract failed. While there are a lot things in this dispute, this groundbreaking proposal seems to be egregious, and on the part of the “producers” (i.e. the employers). It’s not groundbreaking for the actors. And the WGA (the writers union) has a similar contention point where producers would love to replace human writers with some AI¹ to write entertainment.

The so called AI¹ that is trending in tech lately seems to spare no sector. From using github Copilot to write bugs, using Large Language Models (LLM) to write stories, or ChatGPT to do customer support, it seems that it’s all about removing labor to produce.

Remember AI will not steal your jobs. The employers will be, by deciding to use some machine learning based software to reduce their cost. And this seems to be exactly what the groundbreaking proposal from Hollywood is.