Hollywood Unions Push Back on AI Doomerism — SkimNews
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- SAG-AFTRA chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said the union recognized early how AI could affect members' livelihoods and during the 2023 strikes "bargained for and achieved enforceable, meaningful guardrails" covering entertainment employers, though not OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google directly.
- SAG-AFTRA's 2023 contract requires studios to gain permission and compensate actors for AI-generated replicas — a principle Crabtree-Ireland said would have otherwise led to "much greater and faster adoption of digital replication."
- WGAE executive director Sam Wheeler condemned the "tech oligarchs pushing AI on our society" for "rampant dishonesty" and said the union "has long warned that unregulated artificial intelligence poses an existential threat to workers, to our democracy, and to the world."
- WGA members spent 148 days on strike in 2023 before studios agreed to AI safeguards for writers, though Wheeler stressed "collective bargaining is not a replacement for government regulation" and praised states like New York for enacting rules in the absence of federal action.
- Crabtree-Ireland said some extinction-level AI warnings could be "hyperbole and overblown," leaving him unsure "what to trust or what to believe" when warnings come from "the billionaires who've made their billions off of doing the exact thing that they're now warning us might not be good."
- Wheeler urged policymakers not to be distracted by apocalypse claims, listing disempowerment of workers, degradation of the internet, spread of disinformation, and rising energy costs as tangible harms AI has already exacerbated.
- Disney, Netflix, Amazon, and Lionsgate — all contacted by The Verge — declined to comment on the existential AI warnings.
Why it matters: Hollywood's two largest entertainment unions have secured contract protections requiring consent and compensation for AI replicas of actors and writers, but those safeguards exist only because of the 148-day WGA strike and SAG-AFTRA's strike action — and don't extend to the AI labs themselves. By reframing the debate around documented labor harms and demanding federal regulation, the unions are positioning collective bargaining as a floor, not a ceiling, on AI accountability.
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