Hollywood online game actors go on strike over AI considerations

SAG-AFTRA members who work on video video games have voted to go on strike one yr after their counterparts in TV and movie started a piece stoppage that lasted 4 months.

The choice follows greater than a yr and a half of negotiations — with firms together with Activision Productions Inc., Disney Character Voices Inc., and Digital Arts Productions Inc. — primarily over the usage of synthetic intelligence, which was additionally a sticking level in final yr’s Hollywood strike, as performers needed protections from attainable job losses.

“We’re not going to consent to a contract that enables firms to abuse AI to the detriment of our members,” SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher mentioned in an announcement. “Sufficient is sufficient. When these firms get critical about providing an settlement our members can reside — and work — with, we will likely be right here, prepared to barter.”

Negotiations between the 2 sides started in October 2022, and members authorised a strike, with 98.3 % of them voting sure, in September 2023, in response to the guild.

“Though agreements have been reached on many points essential to SAG-AFTRA members, the employers refuse to plainly affirm, in clear and enforceable language, that they are going to defend all performers coated by this contract of their AI language,” SAG-AFTRA members said in a press launch.

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SAG-AFTRA’s nationwide govt director and chief negotiator, Duncan Crabtree-Eire, added: “The online game trade generates billions of {dollars} in revenue yearly. The driving power behind that success is the artistic individuals who design and create these video games. That features the SAG-AFTRA members who deliver memorable and beloved recreation characters to life, and so they deserve and demand the identical elementary protections as performers in movie, tv, streaming, and music: honest compensation and the appropriate of knowledgeable consent for the AI use of their faces, voices, and our bodies.”

The strike begins at 12:01 a.m. native time on July 26.

Roughly 160,000 performers — together with actors, broadcast journalists, DJs, voiceover artists, influencers,  program hosts, puppeteers, and extra — are members of SAG-AFTRA. Performers and audiences alike are nonetheless feeling the consequences of final yr’s SAG-AFTRA strike, which was compounded by a writers’ strike.