The SAG-AFTRA have been in the news a lot this year, with the writers’ strike and their fight to protect the rights of their members in an age where AI is slowly gaining traction. Their fight against the movie studios has seen its ups and downs, and just when they thought that they can get back to normal, the movie studios are back again with a new request. According to latest reports, movies studios have approached SAG-AFTRA with a request to be able to use AI-Likenesses of deceased celebrities without the explicit permission of their families.
Now, what does it mean exactly?
If the movie studios are successful in this pursuit, they will be able to technically “bring back” deceased superstars by creating AI versions of them and integrating them into their projects. While this may sound exciting to some of you, doing it without the explicit permission of the respective families can open up a can of worms. Recently, Tom Hanks and Scarlett Johansson were all over the news as they spoke strongly against the use of their AI likeness by companies for their promotional purposes. If this is the case with active celebrities, legacy superstars will be a lot trickier.
What exactly are the studios prepared to offer?
Well, this is where things get tricky. During the negotiations with the SAG-AFTRA, the studio representatives offered a sort of pilot program, where they would consider Schedule F performers (union members earning more than $32,000 per TV episode or $60,000 per film). What would happen was that studios would approach the performers they were interested in and pay them an upfront amount to get an AI-scan that would be used in the studio’s project. However, the money they would be upfront was one and done, which means, once the performer received his/her upfront payment for the AI scan, the studio would receive an eternal license over that AI-likeness. This means that the studio can use this AI-likeness of the performer, wherever they wished and as many times as they wished.
This proposal was put forward by the studios as a part of their last and final offer to the SAG-AFTRA, but the response they got in return was to delete every mention of AI and AI related activities from the proposal. The two bodies are currently at an impasse of this and we will know more in due time.
