SAG accuses studios of wanting to scan extras' faces so they can own them forever
The fight over AI is central to the negotiations that will send the actors union to the picket lines later tonight
Amidst the various revelations and pronouncements that came out of this afternoon’s SAG-AFTRA press conference—during which Fran Drescher, president of the actors union, officially announced that its 160,000 members were going on strike tonight at midnight—there was one little, uh, tidbit that especially stood out. It came during the conversation surrounding the studios’ strong desire to start incorporating more AI into their production processes, something that’s apparently been a major sticking point for negotiations between the union and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. And we can’t even begin to imagine why that might be, as it was revealed during the press conference that the studios were trying to float the idea that they might start scanning “background” actors for their likenesses, paying them a single daily sum, and then using their images in perpetuity.
Anybody who had “grimly dystopian idea presented with upbeat enthusiasm” on their strike-watch bingo cards, feel free to fill in the square!
To be fair, we have only the actors’ side of things on this; it’s possible the studios actually made a very compelling and compassionate case for bribing working extras into putting themselves out of work in exchange for a single day’s pay, then filling films and TV shows with dead-eyed simulacra of the human form. We don’t know what those reasons would be, but, then, we’re not paid millions of dollars to think of them. Maybe they have the technology to put ’em all in really cute little hats! (In their response to the strike announcement, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers said they offered “a groundbreaking AI proposal that protects actors’ digital likenesses for SAG-AFTRA members.”)
It’s not like nobody saw this coming: Black Mirror literally just aired “Joan Is Awful,” an episode that touches on similar themes, while its Netflix-mate BoJack Horseman used a similar plotline way back in 2015. (This is also where we feel obligated to resurface the fact that Jet Li dropped out of the second Matrix movie because the studio wanted to scan and record his martial arts moves for future use; that was all the way back in the early 2000s.) Even so, there’s something bleakly hilarious about the studios trying to run this as a viable idea to working actors; between this and the “we want to make people lose their houses” response to the ongoing writers strike earlier this week, the studios really could not be handling the optics on this stuff worse.