Hollywood’s Lavish AI Investments Amidst Actor Strikes And Legal Complexities

As Hollywood executives continue to claim that raising actor wages is unrealistic, they are enthusiastically investing in advanced artificial intelligence (AI) programs.

While companies like Disney remain tight-lipped about their AI investments, job postings and financial disclosures have shed light on the extent of Hollywood’s embrace of AI technology.

“Netflix is offering up to $900,000 for a single AI product manager,” said industry insiders, raising eyebrows amidst the ongoing strikes by Hollywood actors and writers demanding better wages and regulations on AI usage in studios.

The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), the trade association negotiating with the unions, recently proposed a groundbreaking AI measure to protect actors’ digital likenesses.

The offer prompted comparisons to an episode of the dystopian sci-fi TV series “Black Mirror,” which depicted actress Salma Hayek locked in a Kafkaesque struggle with a studio using her scanned digital likeness against her will.

“So $900k/yr per soldier in their godless AI army when that amount of earnings could qualify thirty-five actors and their families for SAG-AFTRA health insurance is just ghoulish,” actor Rob Delaney, who had a lead role in the “Black Mirror” episode, told The Intercept. “Having been poor and rich in this business, I can assure you there’s enough money to go around; it’s just about priorities.”

Also Read: Twitter’s Rebranding As X Could Face Legal Complications Over Existing Trademarks

However, legal complications could arise due to existing intellectual property rights held by companies like Meta and Microsoft, which also possess trademarks related to the letter “X,” similar to Twitter’s recent rebranding.

Experts believe that the proposed AI technology could eventually replace actors and writers, and the current strike seeks safeguards against the manipulation of scanned likenesses without adequate compensation.

“They propose that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get paid for one day’s pay and their company should own that scan, their image, their likeness, and to be able to use it for the rest of eternity in any project they want with no consent and no compensation,” said Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, chief negotiator for the actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA.

One company, Realeyes, offered $300 to background actors for two hours of work to “train an AI database to better express human emotions.” This opportunity appears tailored to attract striking workers while skirting strike restrictions by emphasizing its research nature.

“Please note that this project does not intend to replace actors, but rather requires their expertise,” Realeyes says, emphasizing multiple times that training AI to create “expressive avatars” skirts strike restrictions.

Netflix’s aggressive foray into AI extends beyond just algorithmic recommendations, as they aim to harness AI for content creation.

“In fact, we’re already starting to use AI to create some efficiencies and ultimately to better serve consumers,” said Disney CEO Bob Iger, as recently reported by journalist Lee Fang on Hollywood AI investments. “But it’s also clear that AI is going to be highly disruptive, and it could be extremely difficult to manage, particularly from an IP management perspective.”

Iger added, “I can tell you that our legal team is working overtime already to try to come to grips with what could be some of the challenges here.”

While striking actors are seeking to protect their own IP from AI, so is Disney. “It seems clear that the entertainment industry is willing to make massive investments in generative AI,” Zhao said, “not just potentially hundreds of millions of dollars, but also valuable access to their intellectual property, so that AI models can be trained to replace human creatives like actors, writers, journalists for a tiny fraction of human wages.”

For some actors, Hollywood AI investments are not a struggle against the sci-fi dystopia of AI itself, but just a bid for fair working conditions in their industry and control over their own likenesses, bodies, movements, and speech patterns.

“AI isn’t bad, it’s just that the workers (me) need to own and control the means of production!” said Delaney. “My melodious voice? My broad shoulders and dancer’s undulating buttocks?

I decide how those are used! Not a board of VC angel investor scumbags meeting in a Sun Valley conference room between niacin IV cocktails or whatever they do.”