The various guild leaders and members I’ve spoken with over the last few months want to differentiate ethical and legal utilize of AI from, as Barber
The various guild leaders and members I’ve spoken with over the last few months want to differentiate ethical and legal utilize of AI from, as Barber puts it, “AI that is created and/or used with the intention to replace human artists. It’s a simple distinction.” The Brutalist actually would likely be eligible under future, finalized MPSE guardrails because Respeecher is compliant with ethics initiatives and requires permission from the actor. But even then: “It is hard to know the degree to which it was used,” Barber says.
Broadly, the technology is evolving so aggressively that specific cases can’t be properly evaluated. “[I] can’t go by a week without something popping into [my] inbox about a new generative-AI breakthrough,” Barber says. “They’re coming fast and furious—and pretty much without regard to industry professionals or even societal implications. We had to put a stop to the wave.”
When I profiled Scarlett Johansson earlier this year, she told me that the end of the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike came down to, in part, the inability to properly address AI with the large studios—a partial driver of the work stoppage that proved ultimately too unwieldy to negotiate in a timely manner. “[We were] repeatedly reminding the union, ‘This is not an issue we can solve. People need to go back to work,’” she said.
This is what organizations like SAG are dealing with—they’re at the whim of legislation that would protect actors and others in the industry that simply doesn’t exist, at least not yet. It’s why the MPSE is shutting down the potential for AI in its awards until the industry has more clarity on how it can and should be used. It’s why several other guilds declined to speak for this story—they’re in wait-and-see mode. And it’s why others are choosing not to address AI, for now, in how they determine the value of their craft. “It’d be a Herculean task to decide what constitutes fair use of AI and not fair use, and try to separate out those and have people report on each and every use,” says Kim Davidson, the board chair of the Visual Effects Society. “Sometimes they’re using tools they don’t even know are powered by AI, per se.”
The VES Awards have no mandatory disclosure of the utilize of AI tools for submissions, only an attestation of no copyright violations. But as Davidson, the president and CEO of the company SideFX, acknowledges, “It’s hard to go through them with a fine-tooth comb.” The visual effects field has long been at the controversial forefront of Hollywood awards. According to The Guardian, at the 1983 Oscars, Tron was disqualified from the visual effects category for allegedly cheating by using computers.
“There’s been machine learning—now popularly called AI—in computer graphics for years before it became popular in the broad, mainstream press. De-noising, rotoscoping, de-aging—those kinds of things preceded the popularity of AI,” Davidson says. “But the last thing we would want to do is cheat anyone out of fair attribution. We’re not going to get any benefit out of doing that. Studios are not going to get any benefit out of cheating out actors and writers—in fact, you need them.”
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