As actors and writers strike for fair pay and protection from artificial intelligence intrusions, Netflix has opened a job opening for a machine learning product manager with a salary of $300,000 to $900,000 a year. According to the Screen Actors Guild (Sag-Aftra), 87% of unionized actors earn less than $26,000 a year.
The use of AI in film and television production, to save on scriptwriting, actor likenesses and creative work, has been a major sticking point in negotiations between the American Motion Picture and Television Producers Association (AMPTP) and the SAG and Writers Guild of America (WGA). Writers have been on strike since May, and actors joined earlier this month. The first joint strike since 1960 threatens to bring Hollywood to a complete halt.
The position, first reported by The Intercept, is a new role designed to “increase utilization of our machine learning platform” and billed as “the foundation for all of this innovation.” The job lists vague qualifications related to machine learning, but alludes to the company's broader goals for AI in “every area of our business.” Another “machine learning” section on the company's website states that the company uses AI to “shape our movie and TV catalog by learning the characteristics of successful content” and to “optimize the production of original movies and TV shows.”
Netflix isn't just looking for new AI positions. The Intercept reports that the company is looking to hire a technical director of generative AI for its games studio for $650,000 a year. Generative AI generates text, images and videos from input data that can be used to create original content and for advertising. The company's generative AI efforts are already paying off: earlier this month, Netflix premiered a new Spanish reality dating series, “Deep Fake Love,” in which “deepfake” simulations are created using face and body scans of participants, and the company's games division uses AI to create stories and dialogue.
Disney has also listed several machine learning positions but has not disclosed salary ranges. CEO Bob Iger, who has said that actors and writers' demands for increased pay are “unrealistic,” hinted at the problems the company may face in incorporating AI into its business model during a recent earnings call. “In fact, we're already using AI to create efficiencies and ultimately serve our consumers better,” he said, according to journalist Li Fang.
“But it's clear that AI will be hugely disruptive and potentially extremely difficult to manage, particularly from an IP management perspective.”
AI became a hotly contested issue in the first few weeks of the joint strike, especially after Sag-Aftra's lead negotiator Duncan Crabtree Ireland said the studios had “proposed that background performers should be scanned, paid a day's salary, and that the scans, their images and likenesses should be owned by their companies and available to be used in any project they wish, in perpetuity, without consent or compensation.”
The AMPTP disputes this explanation, saying it is a “misrepresentation” of the proposal aimed at “gathering support for a work stoppage.”
