Since actors joined writers on the picket line in July, the two guilds, on their first joint strike since 1960, have found a common locus of fear and frustration: the potential encroachment of artificial intelligence on their livelihoods.
The Writers Guild of America (WGA) warns of the possibility that generative AI – the type of machine-learning systems capable of creating text, images and video, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT – could allow studios, represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), to cut costs by forgoing the employment of human writers for AI-produced scripts. The Screen Actors Guild (Sag-Aftra) is concerned with the use of digital likenesses, particularly after Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the guild’s chief negotiator, said studios proposed to pay background actors for a day’s work to use their images in perpetuity. (The AMPTP has disputed this claim as a “mischaracterization”.)
