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AUSTIN—Months after his union wrestled major concessions from Hollywood studios and video-streaming services over their uses of AI, SAG-AFTRA’s chief negotiator advised big video-game studios to learn from that experience.“We are not going to make deals with these companies that do not prevent our members from abusive or exploitative uses of AI,” Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, national executive director and chief negotiator of Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, said during a Saturday talk at SXSW here. The odds of a video-game strike are “at least 50-50, or more likely,” Crabtree-Ireland told his onstage interviewer, Fast Company editor-in-chief Brendan Vaughan. “I really hope that we are able to avoid that.”The basic issues here are parallel to those that led SAG-AFTRA to go on strike last year after studios and streamers put forth proposals that would have allowed open-ended use of AI clones of actors for minimal compensation: How can actors and performers control and benefit from how a studio uses AI to replicate their voices, faces, or bodies? Crabtree-Ireland observed that smaller game studios are already signing an agreement SAG-AFTRA announced in February. “They’re all saying we can work with this,” he said. “The only people saying we can’t are the big game companies.”Vaughan opened the hour-long session by having Crabtree-Ireland recap the history of the union’s bargaining and strike. As the negotiator put it, “literally fighting an existential battle with some of the biggest and most powerful companies in the world who actually own the media.” That ended with a victory for the union—an agreement reached in November and approved by members in December, with AI the hardest-fought bit. “We had a detailed proposal on AI on day one,” Crabtree-Ireland said. “It was the last issue resolved.”He described the resulting contract provisions (PDF) as requiring companies to implement AI “in a fair and responsible and ethical manner.” For example, a studio can’t use a digital replica of an actor’s voice without their informed consent and approval over each intended use, and then they must pay the actor along terms set out in the agreement. Other provisions govern AI-generated performers with no resemblance to any one human, requiring studios to negotiate upfront with SAG-AFTRA before doing so.“Our focus in that area is making sure that there’s not an economic incentive for companies to go down that road,” said Crabtree-Ireland, who emphasized that trying to stop studios from using AI entirely was out of the cards.“The fact of the matter is, we’re going to have AI,” he said. Banning it would never work: “We can’t do that, any more than any union ever in history has been able to stop technology.”Crabtree-Ireland also pointed to copyright rulings in the US and elsewhere that AI-generated content is ineligible for copyright protection as another cause for studios to step cautiously.“That underlines the idea that copyright is for human creativity and human artistry,” he said. “It is at their own peril that they forget that.”Crabtree-Ireland voiced his hope that other, upcoming court rulings will compel developers of AI models to train them only with licensed material instead of allowing AI developers to have their software read anything publicly available. Especially when those developers then don’t release their models on an open-source basis.
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“It is really bizarre that these companies do not see the hypocrisy in this situation,” he said.Crabtree-Ireland didn’t endorse any particular legislation to resolve that situation but did call for Congress to pass a law giving people a right to control the digital use of their name, image, and likeness as a way to combat the risk of AI-generated deepfakes. President Biden mentioned that problem during Thursday’s State of the Union address, calling for Congress to “ban AI voice impersonations and more.” And Vaughan highlighted that problem at the start of the panel by playing a deepfake video in which Crabtree-Ireland appeared to criticize the new SAG-AFTRA contract.“There’s no image or likeness right that I can assert,” Crabtree-Ireland said. Such digital-rights group as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, however, have called bills like the NO AI Fraud Act (endorsed by SAG-AFTRA in January) an invitation to abusive legislation and copyright overreach. He brushed those criticisms aside, saying “I love the First Amendment. We represent broadcast journalists.” But, he contended, deepfakes that put words in people’s mouths themselves infringe your First Amendment right not to associate yourself with views you hate: “This is an area that requires real public-policy intervention, and it needs to happen now.”
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