SAG-AFTRA Video Game Strike Continues AI Fight for ‘Consent and Compensation’

Hollywood’s battle over artificial intelligence has shifted to the interactive front. SAG-AFTRA has called its second video game strike in eight years over an impasse with the top video game producers over provisions to protect voice actors and motion capture performers from abuse of the nascent technology.

In a press conference on Thursday afternoon, Sarah Elmaleh, chair of the guild’s negotiating committee for the Interactive Media Agreement, said the provisions proposed by the video game companies signed onto the contract — which include Disney, Warner Bros. Games, Electronic Arts and Activision — were “partially but dangerously incomplete.”

“If your performance is being replicated, you deserve access to essential information,” Elmaleh said. “You deserve to give or not give your consent, and you need to be paid properly, period. This is fair, this is feasible, and anything less is exploitation.”

More details on SAG-AFTRA’s strike plans are still pending, including possible picket lines. The guild is running the core strategy from their playbook from last year’s TV/theatrical strike: interim agreements.

SAG-AFTRA members will be striking from all video game work, not just those produced by the signees of the IMA. But all video game productions will be able to apply for interim agreements that contain all the terms the union agreed to on pay, working conditions and other terms with the IMA employers, along with AI protections the union is seeking.

The one major strike exception will be San Diego Comic-Con, where hundreds of union members are set to make appearances this weekend, including on projects for struck companies — SAG-AFTRA will also hold a panel. The guild made the exemption due to the extremely short notice members would have had to pull out of panels and other events at the pop culture convention.

“It’s just out of consideration in fact that this is happening very quickly, and our members are no doubt going to take some time to absorb the the full scope of the strike order and the rule,” Elmaleh said. “We feel very passionately that being at Comic Con in order to share what it is we need, why we need it, is the best way to serve this action…That’s one reason why we decided to allow that — that moment for folks to take their time and understand how exactly to be in compliance, while at the same time, sharing this message as broadly, and as quickly as we can.”

In a statement, a spokesperson representing the IMA companies said that the employers’ offer was “directly responsive to SAG-AFTRA’s concerns and extends meaningful AI protections that include requiring consent and fair compensation to all performers working under the IMA.”

The guild’s negotiating committee pushed back on that claim, saying that in the employers’ offer, motion capture performers would only be able to claim protections around AI consent and compensation if their work was being done for a character that bore a noticeable resemblance to them. Given that motion performers work with characters of all shapes and sizes, many of them not even human, this would leave a significant portion of motion capture work for video games outside of AI protections.

“Their proposal would carve out anything that doesn’t look and sound identical to me as I sit here; when in truth, on any given week, I am a zombie. I am a soldier. I am a zombie soldier,” said committee member and motion performer Andi Norris.

“We cannot and will not accept that a stunt or movement performer giving a full performance on stage next to a voice actor isn’t a performer,” Norris continued. “This bargaining group’s AI provisions do not clearly and unambiguously acknowledge and protect movement as performance. They would leave movement specialists, including stunts, entirely out in the cold to be replaced without so much as notice by synthetic performers trained on our actual performances.”

For both voice actors and motion performers, video games make up a significant portion of employment opportunities that are now at risk of being decimated by AI automation. That new technology is now rising at a time when years of labor organizing in the motion picture industry is starting to bear fruit.

This past week, the Communication Workers of America announced that the employees at Bethesda, developers of the “Elder Scrolls” and “Fallout” series, have voted to join the union, as have the developers of the nearly two-decade old Blizzard online game “World of Warcraft.” Microsoft, which owns both Bethesda and Blizzard, has agreed to recognize the bargaining units, along with that of a team of 60 Blizzard QA workers based in Austin, Texas.

The post SAG-AFTRA Video Game Strike Continues AI Fight for ‘Consent and Compensation’ appeared first on TheWrap .