SAG-AFTRA vs. AI: Why the Video-Game Strike Impacts All Actors
Actors have lots of concerns around generative artificial intelligence. A big one: What does an AI-generated version of me say or do, and do I have control over who pulls the strings? And: What if the AI version of you looks more like… Super Mario?
Last year, actors spent 118 days on strike against the film and TV studios in 2023, with AI as a major component. It was the last thing agreed upon before the strike was lifted.
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One summer later, actors are on strike again — this time against major video game studios like Disney, Warner Bros., Take Two, and Activision — and it’s all about AI. Video game actors hit the picket lines August 1.
The guild’s position is actors aren’t defined by the medium. Whether it’s film, TV, or video games, AI and other rights should be consistent; video game studios, to put it mildly, disagree.
“In our view, if you want to use somebody’s image, voice, likeness, movements, performance, to create some subsequent AI-based new performance or new content, you absolutely need to have their consent to that,” SAG-AFTRA’s chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland told IndieWire. “That’s not something that you can just own. You can’t own a person, and you can’t own that person’s output in that same way, and if they don’t agree with that philosophically, that’s the core of our dispute, ultimately.”
Thousands of actors work under SAG-AFTRA’s Interactive Media contract. Many primarily work in games, but others work across multiple contracts. Gaming gigs can be key to staying afloat between real-world jobs and meeting guild healthcare minimums.
“They’re willing to carve out some subsets of those performers and provide some protections to them, but they’re not willing to do it for everybody, and that’s something that even the studios and streamers and the record labels have been willing to do,” Crabtree-Ireland said. “So I think the video game companies are quite isolated in their unwillingness to treat everybody equally with respect to protection from abuse of use and unethical use of AI.”
For SAG-AFTRA, AI in video games faces the same existential issues as film and TV. However, the negotiating committee sees nuances that it believes the contract proposal addresses.
The fundamental difference is while AI is optional for film and TV, video games can’t exist without it. Some of its uses might be called generative like “No Man’s Sky,” a 2016 open-world game that generates virtually unlimited and unique planets. For the 2019 game “The Outer Worlds,” developer Obsidian used AI text-to-speech models to give designers a better sense of how expressive a character’s dialogue sounds before an actor comes in to record.
The theory is that generative AI could make NPCs (non-player characters) smarter, more realistic, and more unpredictable in their behavior or interactions and speech. That’s great for gamers who loathe dead-eyed NPCs that all look alike; even better if it could be incorporated into user-generated content for games like “Roblox,” “Fortnite,” or “Minecraft.”
For actors, those possibilities are less exciting.
While multiple actors contribute to the movements and voice of a game character, generative AI allows developers to create additional content without the actor’s contribution — even if the character you’re portraying doesn’t end up looking or sounding anything like you.
“When we when you work on a game, you have this avatar in the game that you’re contributing to, but when you can generate new material with that avatar, material that the actor never consented to, has no transparency about, and it’s not clear how they’re going to get compensated for it, that’s dangerous, that’s unethical, that’s exploitive,” Crispin Freeman, a video game actor and a member of the Interactive Media Agreement negotiating committee, told IndieWire. “So we need some principles about AI to make sure that we can participate and collaborate well with our video game employers and not be exploited by this new technology.”
Studios can also use gen AI to create fully synthetic performances and actors want to know what’s going into those models.
“The notion of a completely synthetic character being brought to life using one of these generative AI systems can get tricky,” Freeman said. “The question is, was an actor’s performance ingested in order to contribute to that synthetic character? These are the issues that are now being hammered out in the courts.”
SAG-AFTRA argues that indie game developers have already agreed to the same terms around AI; others use interim agreements similar to those employed during the film and TV strike. The studio signatories appear disinclined to cave; games have far longer development times than movies or TV, so it could take a while before they feel the financial impact of a strike.
SAG-AFTRA also appear uninterested in budging and the guild says it won’t return to work until all members are protected. Game on.
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