LOS ANGELES (AP) — Hollywood video game actors said they would strike Thursday, bringing parts of the entertainment industry back into strike action after talks for new contracts with major game studios collapsed. Protection by artificial intelligence.
The strike, the second by video game voice and motion capture artists under the Screen Actors Guild and the National Federation of Television and Radio Entertainers, begins at 12:01 a.m. Friday. Two years of negotiations The company has signed new interactive media deals with gaming giants including Activision, Warner Bros. and divisions of Walt Disney.
SAG-AFTRA negotiators said that while the video game contract reached agreement on wages and job security, the two sides disagree on regulating generative AI. Audrey Cooling, a spokeswoman for video game production companies, said the studios proposed the AI protections, but the SAG-AFTRA negotiating committee said the studios' definition of who constitutes a “performer” is key to understanding who gets protected.
“The industry has been very clear that we do not consider everyone who performs a physical act to be a performer covered under a collective bargaining agreement,” Ray Rodriguez, SAG-AFTRA's chief contracts officer, said at a press conference Thursday afternoon. He said some physical acts are treated as “data.”
Without guardrails, game companies could train AI to imitate the voices of actors or create digital likenesses of them. Without consent or reasonable compensation, the union said.
“We are going on strike as a last resort. We have been responsible and have given this process as much time as possible,” Rodriguez told reporters. “All other possibilities have been exhausted, that's why we are going on strike now.”
Couling said the companies' proposal would “meaningfully expand AI protections.”
“We are disappointed that we were so close to an agreement and the union chose to walk away. We are ready to resume negotiations,” she said.
Andy Norris, an actor and union negotiating committee member, said the games companies' proposal would still put stunt performers and monster actors at risk.
“The performers who bring their work to these games are creating a wide variety of characters, and all of that work has to be covered. Their proposal would be to cut out anything that doesn't look or sound exactly like how I look and sound as I sit here, when in fact I am a zombie, a soldier, a zombie soldier, any given week,” Norris said. “We do not and will not accept that a stuntman or movement performer performing a full performance onstage next to a voice actor is not a performer.”
According to game market forecasters, the global video game industry generates more than $100 billion in revenue annually. New ZooSAG-AFTRA said the people who design and bring these games to life are what drive their success.
Last year, union members voted overwhelmingly to give leadership the power to strike. Concerns about how studios might use a strike Fueled by AI Last year, labor unions staged a four-month strike in the film and television industry.
The last interactive contract, which expired in November 2022, offered no protections for AI but did secure a bonus compensation structure for voice actors and performance capture artists after an 11-month strike that began in October 2016. The strike marked the first major labor dispute by SAG-AFTRA since the merger of Hollywood's two biggest actors unions in 2012.
According to the union, the video game contract covers more than 2,500 “off-camera (voice-over) performers, on-camera (motion capture, stunt) performers, stunt coordinators, singers, dancers, puppeteers and background performers.”
In the midst of tense interactive negotiations, SAG-AFTRA crafted a separate deal in February aimed at independent and low-budget video game projects. The Tiered Budget Independent Interactive Media contract includes some of the AI protections that the video game industry giants rejected. Interim Interactive Media Agreement, Tiered Budget Independent Interactive Agreement The union said the strike was not intended to prohibit any actions that violated the Interactive Localization Agreement or the Interim Interactive Localization Agreement.
