Screen Actors Guild strike is a risky move in a world of competitive entertainment

The Screen Actors Guild (SAG) is striking due to a series of disputes, including a disagreement over studios’ ability to use artificial intelligence to synthesize actors. In a world where entertainment options are multiplying, the SAG risks handing its competitors a decisive cost advantage.

The thousands of actors who earn their living by starring in Hollywood movies are confronting the same existential professional threat that we are all facing as artificial intelligence technologies develop at breakneck speed. The particular form that they fear is computer-generated faces and voices. Since they have been unable to secure satisfactory guarantees from studies about the security of their jobs, the result is the present, indefinite strike.

When a union goes on strike, it bases its decision on two key parameters. First, how quickly can the union’s members be replaced by competing workers within their industry? Second, in the event that their demands are successful, is there any risk of their entire industry being replaced by a competitor?

For the SAG, their calculations regarding the first are probably accurate: with movies like the sequels to Avatar and Gladiator being interrupted, and film studios still reeling from the pain of COVID-19, they will be keen to return to work as quickly as possible. Moreover, the value of familiar, brand faces remains as high as ever. Hence, as long as the big and small Hollywood actors stick together, they need not fear the threat of being undermined by replacement actors.

However, it is the second parameter – the entire industry being sidelined by a competitor – where the SAG is on much shakier ground. By now, we have all seen AI-driven images of totally fictitious events, and shuddered at the accuracy of some of the deepfake videos circulating on the internet. In five years, it’s not difficult to imagine these technologies becoming virtually impossible to distinguish from reality.

If this evolution transpires, this places anyone who is willing to computer-generate movies at a massive cost advantage compared to those who insist on using human actors. Moreover, if the SAG is securing the sort of compensation that it is demanding for its members, AI competitors’ ability to undercut them will be enhanced.

Thus, the SAG finds itself between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, it can capitulate to the movie studios, allowing human actors to be active contributors to their erasure by artificial intelligence. On the other hand, it can lock in high compensation and delay Hollywood studios’ transition to AI-powered actors, while simultaneously empowering nascent entertainment providers who will disrupt the market by exploiting their massive cost advantage.

It’s possible that all of this is well known to the actors’ union, and that they are merely trying to grab as much cash as they can while they still have an opportunity to ply their trade.

Alternatively, they may be pursuing a strategy that is as ill-fated as that of their 19th century progenitors, the Luddites, whose response to the threat of technology-induced unemployment was the clandestine destruction of new machines. The movement was violently repressed, and while 21st century actors are unlikely to find themselves shipped to a penal colony or publicly hanged, the odds are similarly stacked against them.

Perhaps a more prudent strategy would be for the SAG to demand shares in the top studios for its members. If they can secure a large enough quantity, then at least they can hedge against the development of AI alternatives by securing their share of the resulting profits. In other words, lower acting income will be compensated for by increased dividend income.

Ultimately, the biggest barrier that all stakeholders face in these negotiations – and that the government faces as it looks to regulate AI – is that nobody has a good sense of where we are going, and what the commercial landscape and labor markets will look like in 20 years.

While the millions of “this is what is going to happen due to AI” threads that are spamming your Twitter feed contain useful musings, their claims of 100 percent prescience are certainly fallacious. For the time being, we will all continue to grope around in the dark, edging toward a complete understanding of our future.

Alternatively, an even bolder strategy could be for actors to spearhead the transition to synthesized acting, advocated by American philosopher and futurist, Buckminster Fuller, who once quipped: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

Whatever they decide, an ocean of concerned workers well beyond Hollywood’s borders, from every industry that comprises the economy, will be watching closely. The current strike may end up being a key turning point in the long-running war between those who develop new technologies, and those who are affected by them.

Omar Al-Ubaydli (@omareconomics) is a researcher at Derasat, Bahrain

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