I have been in the entertainment industry since he was nine years old. I joined the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) when I was 11 in 1977, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) when I was 22, and the Directors Guild of America (DGA) the following year. I started out as a child actor on Broadway, studied film at New York University, and then acted in films like The missing child and the Bill and Ted franchise while writing and directing my own narrative work. I have experienced several labor crises and strikes, but none like our current labor closure, which started last spring when the contracts of the three unions were simultaneously pending renegotiation and the Alliance of Film and Television Producers (AMPTP) rejected his terms.

The unifying point of tension for labor is the devaluation of the worker, which has reached a boiling point with the rapid advancement of highly sophisticated and ubiquitous machine learning tools. Actors have been replaced by AI replicas of their images, or their voices have been stolen directly. Writers have had their work plagiarized by ChatGPT, directors’ styles have been stripped down and replicated by MidJourney, and all areas of the team are ripe for exploitation by studios and big tech. All of this set the stage for AI issues to become a major flashpoint in this year’s strikes. Last summer, the DGA reached an agreement with the AMPTP and on Tuesday the WGA reached an agreement. your own important agreement. Both include terms that unions hope will significantly protect their work from exploitation by machine learning technology. But these deals, while a decided start, seem unlikely to offer broad enough protections for artists, given how much studios have already invested in the technology.

The DGA contract insists that AI is not a person and cannot replace functions performed by members. The WGA’s language, though more detailed, is fundamentally similar, stating that “AI cannot write or rewrite literary material, and AI-generated material will not be considered source material” and requiring that studios “must disclose to the writer whether Some material delivered to the writer has been generated by AI or incorporates material generated by AI. Their contract also adds that the union “reserves the right to state that exploitation of writers’ material to train AI is prohibited.”

But studios are already busy developing countless uses for machine learning tools that are both creative and administrative. Will they stop that development, knowing that their own copyrighted product is at risk from machine learning tools they don’t control and that Big Tech monopolies, all of which could devour the entire film and television industry, Won’t they stop their AI development? Can the government get big tech companies to control them when those companies know that China and other global entities will continue to advance these technologies? All of which brings up the question of proof.

It’s hard to imagine studios telling artists the truth when asked to dismantle their AI initiatives, and attribution is nearly impossible to prove with machine learning results. Likewise, it’s hard to see how to prevent these tools from learning from whatever data the studios want. It is already standard practice for corporations to act first and apologize later, and it should be assumed that they will continue to collect and ingest all the data they can access, which is all the data. The studies will give some protections to people with higher incomes. But these artists are predominantly white and male, a fraction of the union’s membership. There will be little to no protections for women, people of color, LGBTQIA+, and other marginalized groups, as in all areas of the workforce. It is not my intention to begrudge the work of the DGA and WGA in crafting terms that may not adequately represent the scope of the technology. But we can go further, and SAG has the opportunity to do so in its ongoing negotiations.

The SAG is still on strike and plans to meet with the AMPTP next Monday. At your meeting, I hope you can raise the bar another level with even more specific and protective language.

It would be nice to see terminology that accepts that AI willpower be used by studios, regardless of the terms imposed on them. This agreement should also reflect the understanding that studios are as threatened by Big Tech’s voracious appetites as artists, that unions and AMPTP are sitting on opposite sides of the same life raft. To that end, contractual language that recognizes mutual needs will serve everyone’s interest, with agreements between AI users and those affected by its use on all sides of our industry. It would also be helpful to see language that addresses how AI’s inherent biases, which reflect society’s inherent biases, could be a problem. Must all make a pact to use these technologies taking into account those realities and concerns.

Mostly, I hope everyone involved takes the time to learn how these technologies work, what they can and what they can’t. do, and engages in an industrial revolution that, like anything created by humans, can provide enormous benefits and also enormous harm. The term Luddite is often incorrectly used to describe an exhausted and bitter population that wants technology to go away. But the real Luddites were very committed to technology and were adept at using it in their work in the textile industry. They were not an anti-technology movement but a pro-union movement, fighting to prevent the exploitation and devaluation of their work by rapacious corporate overlords. If you want to know how to solve the problems we face due to artificial intelligence and other technologies, get genuinely and deeply involved. Become a Luddite.

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