SAG-AFTRA Opens Contract Talks as AI Video Tools Threaten to Replace Actors

Yesterday morning, SAG-AFTRA negotiators sat across from studio executives to begin what union chief Duncan Crabtree-Ireland calls a critical battle over the future of human performance. The talks, conducted under a media blackout according to Variety, center on one overwhelming concern: video AI tools that can generate synthetic actors indistinguishable from real ones.

Disney's $1 billion investment in OpenAI last month has union leaders wondering whether studios are negotiating in good faith while simultaneously funding the technology that could replace their members. "While Disney claims the deal excludes performer likenesses, union leaders worry about the long-term implications," WDW News Today reported in January.

The core dispute revolves around what the union calls synthetic performers, AI-generated characters trained on thousands of real performances without mimicking specific humans. According to TheWrap, SAG-AFTRA wants these digital actors treated as a new category of labor requiring union oversight and compensation. Studios haven't publicly responded to this proposal.

To make human actors the smartest financial choice, the union is proposing the Tilly Tax, a fee on studios using AI performers named after the AI character Tilly Norwood. The Los Angeles Times reports the proceeds would fund union health and pension plans, effectively making synthetic actors subsidize the humans they're replacing.

Other industries like Gaming offer lessons for SAG. Last year's video game strike ended with mandatory transparency and consent requirements for digital replicas, setting a blueprint for these TV and film negotiations.

Crabtree-Ireland testified before Congress two days ago, urging lawmakers to pass the NO FAKES Act for federal protection of voice and likeness rights, according to Deadline. The union is also co-sponsoring California's AB 412, which would force AI developers to disclose the copyrighted works used to train their models, a direct challenge to the opacity of current video generation systems.

"We made progress in 2023, but the rapid advancement of video AI tools like Sora necessitates a second wave of aggressive bargaining," SAG-AFTRA President Sean Astin told Backstage last week.

The 2023 strike won some protections around digital replicas, but those guardrails assumed AI would need to scan specific actors. Today's video diffusion models can conjure entirely new performers or even existing ones from statistical patterns learned from millions of frames of human movement and expression. On tests we ran on ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 at Megaton AI, Hollywood stars like Anne Hathaway and Andrew Garfield appeared in various generations with 1 to 1 likeness.

Studios using synthetic performers would pay into union pension and health funds under the proposed Tilly Tax. OpenAI's new Sora safeguards require opt-in consent for celebrity likenesses but don't address synthetic performers. The NO FAKES Act would create federal protections against unauthorized digital replication. California's AB 412 would force AI companies to disclose training data sources. Video game strike protections from last year serve as the minimum baseline for film and TV negotiations.

The media blackout means we won't know the specifics of what's being discussed for weeks. But the union's public positioning suggests they're preparing for a fight that goes beyond just compensation to push forward more transparent rules. If synthetic actors trained on human data aren't regulated as derivative works, the profession itself becomes training data for the technology that could cut the amount of actor work in Film & TV.