I am a big fan of the show – Black Mirror.
If you have not watched it before, do yourself a favor and add it to your Netflix waiting list. It’s an anthology series that reminds me of The Twilight Zone but with an emphasis on technology. Case in point, in the latest season there is an episode titled “Joan is Awful” which presents a dark view of AI as it pertains to Hollywood. The Verge reviews the episode. Click here to read it in full if you don’t mind spoilers. This quote though won’t ruin anything.
“Joan is Awful” stars Annie Murphy as Joan, a very normal woman who kind of misses her ex, finds her fiancé a little boring, and is a middle manager at a tech company, doing the board’s dirty work while feeling pretty shitty about herself. One night she and her fiancé kick back on the couch, turn on Streamberry (a thinly veiled copy of Netflix) and settle in to watch the buzzy new show Joan is Awful. Joan, naturally, is horrified to realize the show is just about her, as played by Salma Hayek. Her life quickly spins out of control as her secrets are revealed against her will, and she embarks on a quest to wrest control of her life back from Streamberry (and Salma Hayek).
I brought up the episode because I see a version of this unfolding in real life. The Hollywood strike of writers (and actors) is due in part to the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in moviemaking. Imagine someone taking your picture and paying you a one-time fee of X for it. That same someone then puts your face on a character in a movie, the movie is a hit and there are 3 sequels and 4 spin-offs featuring a character with your face. All in all, the movie series goes on to make a trillion dollars. Great for the Hollywood studios but not for you because you sold the rights to your face on film, so your payday has long been past; and it was a single payment. Seem unfair? I think it is and because so many others feel the same way, there is a strike in Hollywood. “Joan is Awful” may be a cautionary tale, indeed. But there was already a canary in the coalmine – voice actors. They have been sounding the alarm on AI quite a bit recently. Here’s a media quote…
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a hot topic of debate at this year’s Comic-Con event, with voice actors sounding the alarm on the encroachment of AI into their industry. The rise of AI technology has made it possible for voices to be cloned and used without permission or consent. Tim Friedlander, founder of the National Association of Voice Actors, shared the story of a voice actor who lost their job because their company decided to create an AI synthetic voice using three years’ worth of their recorded voice.
The issue goes beyond the studios, as fans have also been using AI technology to clone famous voices and create new material, often of explicit nature. This poses a concern for voice actors who fear that their voices could be used to say things they don’t endorse and have their children hear it.
And according to Fox News, Hollywood is becoming more assertive in demanding that voice actors sign over the rights to their voices in perpetuity.
Actors are sounding the alarm on new artificial intelligence (AI) technology that creates replicas of their voices and could replace them without proper compensation.
According to a report by VICE’s Motherboard, Hollywood and videogame voice actors are being asked to sign contracts that give away the rights to their voices for use in generative AI. They claim that the increasingly common practice could decimate entire aspects of the industry.
“It’s disrespectful to the craft to suggest that generating a performance is equivalent to a real human being’s performance,” SungWon Cho, a game and animation voice actor, told Motherboard.
“Sure, you can get it to sound tonally like a voice and maybe even make it sound like it’s capturing an emotion, but at the end of the day, it is still going to ring hollow and false. Going down this road runs the risk of people thinking that voice-over can be replaced entirely by AI, which really makes my stomach turn.”
AI’s impact on the industry has exasperated pre-existing concerns over fair compensation because pay for actors has been on the decline on streaming services. Take for example the hit Netflix show – “Orange is the New Black.” Supporting actors in the show revealed they were paid as little as $27.30 a year in residual pay because of how streaming services pays. This is a significantly less than what they make on smaller network TV jobs. As a result, some actors had to work second jobs while they were starring on the show. I read about it in The New Yorker.
In December, 2020, in the depths of pandemic winter, the actress Kimiko Glenn got a foreign-royalty statement in the mail from the screen actors’ union, sag-aftra. Glenn is best known for playing the motormouthed, idealistic inmate Brook Soso on the women’s-prison series “Orange Is the New Black,” which ran from 2013 to 2019, on Netflix. The orchid-pink paper listed episodes of the show that she’d appeared on (“A Whole Other Hole,” “Trust No Bitch”) alongside tiny amounts of income (four cents, two cents) culled from overseas levies—a thin slice of pie from the show that had thrust her to prominence. “I was, like, Oh, my God, it’s just so sad,” Glenn recalled. With many television and movie sets shuttered, she was supporting herself with voice-over jobs, and she’d been messing around with TikTok. She posted a video in which she scans the statement—“I’m about to be so riiich!”—then reaches the grand total of twenty-seven dollars and thirty cents and shrieks, “WHAT?”
So how are the studio executives reacting to all the controversy? Whether its greed or cluelessness, they seem not to understand how their proposal to make digital twins of actors and use them on various projects (without paying extra to actors or even getting consent) would devastate an actor’s ability to make a living. Indeed, they see it all as “groundbreaking.” To quote The New Scientist…
The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers – which represents both traditional studios and streaming platforms such as Netflix – issued a statement saying they had offered a “groundbreaking AI proposal which protects performers’ digital likenesses” while requiring performer consent for the creation and use of digital replicas.
But during a press conference confirming the strike on 13 July, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, chief negotiator for the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), described the studios’ AI proposal in very different terms.
“In that ‘groundbreaking’ AI proposal, they proposed that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get paid for one day’s pay, and their companies should own that scan, their image, their likeness and should be able to use it for the rest of eternity on any project they want, with no consent and no compensation,” said Crabtree-Ireland.
Fran Drescher (which you might remember as “The Nanny”) is the President of SAG-AFTRA, the union representing over 150,000 television and movie actors. She made the statement, “If we don’t stand tall right now, we are all going to be in trouble, we are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines,” in a fiery speech against Hollywood studios. She reiterated this sentiment in several interviews, including with TIME, PBS, and MSNBC. In these interviews, Drescher discussed the threat of AI in Hollywood and the need for actors to stand up for their rights and protections in the face of advancing technology.
The writers & actors strike reminds me of the Napster controversy of the 90’s. In both cases, there is a clash between traditional industries and new technologies that threaten to disrupt established business models. Both involve disputes over intellectual property rights and compensation for creators. Both involve workers fighting for their rights and protections in the face of advancing technology. Both have the potential to reshape the entertainment industry and the way that content is created, distributed, and consumed. In the end, Napster folded but a new world order was established that benefitted all concerned.
Regarding the strike, I think what Fran said was right. I think her beef with the Hollywood studios is legitimate. I think in the end, new rules will be created that will fairly compensate everyone involved, just like with Napster. Until then, I stand with the actors and writers. Fight the power.