This is an incredibly editorialized headline that blurs the distinction between SAG-AFTRA leadership and membership, and the article itself contradicts the title in the very first paragraph:
> In a statement posted to its official website, the union confirmed its board had "voted unanimously" to "send a strike authorisation vote to SAG-AFTRA members" in interactive media ahead of its "forthcoming bargaining dates with video game companies".
> While a strike authorization does not launch a strike, it can be a useful tool at the bargaining table because it gives the union the ability to declare a strike if negotiations break down. Eligible SAG-AFTRA members will be able to vote on authorizing a strike until September 25 at 5 p.m. PT, the evening before discussions resume.
Yeah, it's scandalous that a site called _Euro_gamer does not have the expertise to understand the difference between an american labor union voting on a strike and an american labor union _board_ suggesting a vote on a strike.
I think there's a world of difference between "someone misunderstood something and published an incorrect article" and "someone deliberately wrote misleading headline".
My reading of GP disappointed post was that they were accusing them of the latter; which is, in my opinion, underserved here.
> I think there's a world of difference between "someone misunderstood something and published an incorrect article" and "someone deliberately wrote misleading headline".
There's a difference, but I don't really see the "world" of difference. They both seem like fundamentally irresponsible journalism. Case (a) should never happen because there's an assumption of due diligence, and case (b) should never happen because there's an assumption of truth-seeking. Not doing due diligence is pretty close to ignoring (or at the very least not caring about) the truth.
In the world we’re living in, with the incentives of modern journalism being what they are (and the state of gaming media industry specifically), I’m willing to cut more slack to people writing about things outside their comfort zone.
Well, there's no unified legal frameworks for them across all of _Europe_, for starters.
But in many places there's no need to get the members to authorize the strike, the union itself holds that power (I am at least 99% sure that's the case in Germany and France, at the very least.)
You don’t need a vote for „Warnstreik” (warning strike), which frequently is enough to make a point, which makes the „real”/open-ended strikes much more rare than otherwise.
AFAICT all strikes I’ve ever seen happen here (the plethora of different train and airport unions) were technically warning strikes and not „real” ones; but they were enough to get the unions their wins.
The UN report on the Attention Economy says 0.5% of content produced is consumed.
No other industry works like this. And thats without any AI involvement.
In that context this entire fight between creators and content publishers/distributors is a gigantic farce.
We are already drowning in an ever growing ocean of content. These people want to be rewarded without doing any single thing to reduce the size of that ocean. They think the ocean will alway expand. Its just as absurd to watch as the sub prime crisis.
Assuming this[1] is the report you’re referring to:
> By the 2000s, so much information was being generated
worldwide that only a small fraction (0.5% in 2015) of the
digital data generated was being analyzed at all. [emphasis mine]
Not only is it ‘data analyzed’ and not ‘content consumed,’ but I can’t figure out what they mean by ‘analyzed’ either. Reading the rest of the paragraph makes me think that this is talking about things like clickstream data that businesses love to collect “so we can use big data to enhance user engagement” and then leave to pile up in their data warehouse once they discover that data analysis is hard; if so, this statistic is unrelated to the production:consumption ratio of “content” in the sense of things that people might want to look at on its own merits.
He's right in that art consumption is an attention based economy. 0.5% would not surprise me. I think his conclusion is wrong though. He seems to question the need for a strike in the economic environment he described, but that environment is exactly why organized labor is important. Unions can make trying to pursue creative work professionally slightly more bearable.
If you're including every amateur unpaid artist, then sure maybe 0.5%.
BUT if you're talking about paid professional TV and film production (the context of SAG-AFTRA), probably something like 95% of content that is written, shot and edited into a final product makes it to audiences. After all, that stuff is expensive.
By the hour, most of that content is TV shows. Most of the unseen ~5% is produced pilot episodes that didn't get picked up for a full season. And a small amount will be films that halted production midway, or turned out to be so bad they weren't released.
Not sure how well this will work compared to their strike against Hollywood and the film industry. Many video game developers don't work with union actors at all, with plenty of games either not having voice acting period or hiring whatever random staff they have around to fill those roles.
For instance, many of Nintendo's games have very little voice acting, or have it done by random internal staff rather than professional actors. So most of the Mario, Kirby, Donkey Kong, Pikmin, Metroid, Animal Crossing, etc series could probably keep on going without any issues. And those franchises that did use voice acting recently (mostly Zelda) could probably just go release a few games in the old style where voices were limited to the odd grunt or yell and it wouldn't make much of a difference. Heck, Pokemon doesn't really have voice acting in its games even now, and that's the biggest media franchise in the world.
Add that to how the industry worked fine up til about the N64/PlayStation era without any voice acting (or at best, very limited acting) and how a large percentage of lower budget and indie games don't have it at all, and it's a lot less important than acting is in the film or television industry. Hollywood actors go on strike and don't appear in films or TV shows? Those industry comes to a screeching halt, since the cast is an essential part of the medium. Actors don't appear in video games? Well, guess the number of silent protagonists goes up significantly this year.
I do wish them the best of luck here and I do understand their concerns, it's just that games need actors a lot less than films do, and that gives them far less leverage as a result.
One of the most popular add ins for World of Warcraft released in recent memory is one that adds voice acting to all of the quests that were previously text only. No voice actors were hired as part of its creation. I doubt a return to silent protagonists is what we will see in this space.
Exactly. This is about games like GTAV and RDR2. These games don't exist without whole casts of talented actors, and they're SAG-AFTRA because every working actor at that level belongs to the union.
So what will happen is that the games using SAG-AFTRA voice actors will be delayed/dropped from production, while the games using non-US union voice actors or not needing voices will be produced. Therefore, the SAG-AFTRA games and the associated companies will suffer but the industry will not.
The situation is different for films and TV where no US-based TV show or film can be produced without the actors or writers. There are interim agreements that allow some TV shows and films to be produced. Even there, there are a lot of older or foreign TV shows and films that are slowly taking over.
Most of the games that 'require' voice acting actually don't, and could work with text. The reason they have voice acting is because mass audiences expect it, but consumer expectations are malleable and subject to change.
Basically correct, although it wouldn't actually happen unless sound in movies became cost prohibitive (which is what we're discussing.)
However in video-games this is even more true. 'Talkies' crushed silent movies, out-competed them very rapidly in the span of a few years. But in video games this didn't happen, video games with voice acting have existed for roughly 30 years now but video games without voice acting still frequently find commercial success. In fact the most successful video game of all time, minecraft, has no voice acting despite competing against innumerable contemporary games with voice acting.
And some of the top grossing video games of all time have voice acting. The modern Rockstar and Naughty Dog games would be less attractive and have much less emotional impact without the characters coming to life via voice. Character models help sell games, too. Sure, voice acting isn't required for all genres and many don't need motion capture, but if they didn't add anything studios could save a ton of money by cutting it out. It turns out not everyone wants to play indie platformers or sandboxed builders.
You could of course use non-union voice actors, but it's pretty easy to tell when games use random people to narrate or voice characters. It often harms the product.
Minecraft has no storyline or named characters though. It's not really "competing" against games with voice acting, as they're totally different genres. To me this feels like like saying movies don't need better CGI than Playstation 2 quality because of how's successful Paw Patrol and Baby Shark are.
Plenty of games can and do work fine with just text. But there's a hell of a lot of money in existing AAA franchises that have always had voice acting. If the next Halo or Far Cry or Call of Duty or GTA launched with text-only dialogue, fans would flip their shit, and the big studios know it.
Martinet is indeed the exception here, and one of the most well known voice actors ever.
But there are plenty of other examples where my post holds true. The ghosts from Luigi's Mansion 3 are voiced by Next Level Games development and marketing staff, the voice for Yoshi is Nintendo composer Kazumi Totaka, Shy Guys are voiced by Nintendo of America localisation manager Nate Bihldorff, the WarioWare cast were voiced by Treehouse (localisation) staff until WarioWare Gold, Donkey Kong 64 had Rare's staff voicing characters (like composer Grant Kirkhope as DK himself), etc.
You're not wrong, but you're going a bit historical there with DK 64, which came out in the 90s. On top of that, British developers were notorious for picking employees for voice work.
Nintendo still uses internal staff for incidental stuff, but you can see the trend of professionalization. Tears of the Kingdom came out on the same day around the world with a large professional voice cast for every supported language. That's where Nintendo is going.
The AI debate is pretty dumb imo. It’s not a winnable fight. Background actors and stunt people and minor voice actors are ultimately fungible. The tech will soon arrive that such things are easily generated at an extent and quality that it’s cheaper to do it with an all digital pipeline without models that are trained on these people or are perhaps trained on them in countries where any hard won battles here are ignored. You won’t have 30 background actors. You’ll have one digital artist with tools. You might have 30x as many movies if you’re lucky.
> The AI debate is pretty dumb imo. It’s not a winnable fight. Background actors and stunt people and minor voice actors are ultimately fungible.
That is the power of solidarity: when the high profile actors say they'll go on strike to get AI banned, their voice will be heard. Almost all of those earning many millions of dollars now started as small scale actors or writers themselves, and while there are a few who got completely fucked over from affluenza, most still remember their roots and know who and what was responsible for them being able to rise where they are.
This is something that the IT industry could finally learn... for example, if the AWS Cloud engineers, support staff and all the other high paid employees went on strike in solidarity with their delivery workers who have to piss in bottles, guess how fast Amazon would clean up its act?
There's a reason why so many of the richest people in the world made their riches in tech: because tech workers couldn't be arsed to engage in collective organization, instead preferring hyper-competition with everyone fighting for himself and only himself - while not realizing that they could have enjoyed far more of a share of the profits, had they collaborated!
Anything that relies on the generosity of others is bound to fail. Moreover, if AI generated background/voice actors are actually better than non-AI ones on net, then it stands to reason that studios that use that technology will outcompete studios that don't. The SAG might be able to force all american studios to not use it, but unless they can secure some sort of global agreement, that just means american studios will get out-competed by non-american studio that don't abide by the ban.
> Anything that relies on the generosity of others is bound to fail.
Which is why it is backed and enforced by contracts. Unions in moviemaking, mining or construction have a long (and bloody) tradition... there's a reason why inane-seeming rules such as only members of a specific trade union being allowed to even touch something as a lighting rig, it's to prevent greedy studios from using staff with lower-paying jobs to undercut collective agreements.
Think outside of the box and now you'll realize that as inane as it sounds, what it guarantees is that money ends up as wages in the pockets of the workers instead of profit for the bosses.
> The SAG might be able to force all american studios to not use it, but unless they can secure some sort of global agreement, that just means american studios will get out-competed by non-american studio that don't abide by the ban.
Western audiences generally want Western actors and stories, Hollywood is where the money, connections and expertise is. Many have tried to outcompete American studios and they all failed - it's either survival off of "national production quotas" for TV networks for them or domestic focused/otherwise niche content ("Bollywood", anime).
This relatively simple power balance is what gives the SAG the leverage it has.
Yeah but it's still niche in comparison. Out of the top 20 movies in 2022 [1], 18 were from Western studios, the two others were Chinese of which one was a domestic-only propaganda movie.
Anime are way cheaper than anything on this list to produce and many of them are available on streaming platforms runned by ads, looking at the top 20 movies 2022 do not show how actually impactful anime are in the western world. Nowadays it's even sometimes hard to find an illustrator on Twitter that was not heavily influenced by anime.
Edit: and of course the vast majority of anime are animated series, not movies.
> Western audiences generally want Western actors and stories, Hollywood is where the money, connections and expertise is.
IMO, it feels like hubris to draw linear projections near technological and sociological event horizons.
I am amazed how "television" is rapidly becoming interactive. We now more or less have "ractors" from Stephenson's Diamond Age, and series are being refined by fan feedback as they are being produced.
I feel confident that any pre-covid forms of entertainment are going to become as esoteric as radio plays and news reels are today.
I'm not sure what you mean specifically by esoteric.
Youtube videos today (basically post 2015ish) are mosty radio plays and news reels. The time where innovation happened on that platform has passed, too many youtubers just sit down and read a script to still images or borrowed video.
> if AI generated background/voice actors are actually better than non-AI ones on net
For now there's certainly no risk at all of that, unless you've seen something I haven't?
I disagree with your OP, a union's power isn't derived by its most powerful members, it's derived by solidarity against a large amount of people. If it's strong enough you can force the industry into union only contracts which makes even the powerful members of your profession need to maintain solidarity - SAG-AFTRA is the perfect example.
As for American studios outcompeted, I think that's an oversimplification of the videogame market. People buy terrible games all the time such as all the buggy AAA crap that's been coming out of certain American studios. Not to mention the awful mobile games industry which is worth billions... Quality of voice acting alone doesn't seem like something that could make or break an entire nation's game industry.
> I disagree with your OP, a union's power isn't derived by its most powerful members, it's derived by solidarity against a large amount of people.
Large amounts of people yes, but it needs the high-skilled (or in case of the movie studios, the high-demand) people in the boat, those that a company can't replace on a whim. Walmart, Starbucks and the likes - corporate doesn't care even about closing down an entire location just because there's unionization talks. People dishing out coffees or stocking shelves can be replaced in an instant, corporate doesn't (need to) care.
But the high-skilled labor? Finance, HR, admin in the corporate office... if they were to strike in solidarity with the peasants, corporate would have a much more difficult time to replace them.
> But the high-skilled labor? Finance, HR, admin in the corporate office... if they were to strike in solidarity with the peasants, corporate would have a much more difficult time to replace them.
And they should, while their skills are “high-skilled”.
Every chance there’s the generic executive looking to cut costs, and the hard to quantify losses like reputation; security; maintenance; and longevity get pushed aside.
> And they should, while their skills are “high-skilled”.
They won't however, as anti-union propaganda (and in IT, ungodly amounts of venture capital) has convinced them that they'd have a better chance at salary raises if they could have individual negotiations based on something they can control (i.e. work performance metrics) than if they were to collectively negotiate.
Young generations thankfully don't drink the koolaid any more, as they see how they live and how their parents lived at the same age.
Unions don't rely on the generosity of others, they rely on shared economic interest.
In any supply chain whoever is able to consolidate and monopolize has economic power over their suppliers and customers. This sets off a chain reaction of consolidation as everyone else has to get bigger in order to protect their margins from being eaten by Amazon and Wal-Mart.
Unions are no different. If your industry is two or three companies you can't leave for a better job. So you have to either collectively negotiate or not negotiate at all.
While I disagree that AI is presently capable of replacing voice actors, I don't think it matters. We already have a global agreement that impacts AI, which is the copyright on the training data used in the models[0]. While you probably can't stop someone from training on public data entirely[1], you definitely can prohibit the use of derived models to generate work that competes in the same market using copyright.
US businesses were able to break the backs of working-class unions like UAW using free trade agreements with countries that don't respect organized labor. Mexico and China[2] are hideously anti-union in ways that would be patently illegal in the US. I'm not entirely sure this process would work for creative talent. It would require Hollywood to completely undermine their cultural hegemony and shut down their own productions in favor of foreign cinema from Japan and the EU - countries that have explicitly been in favor of ML training on public data.
[0] Unless you're worried about the North Korean film industry adopting AI, in which case...
[1] There are some lawsuits attacking generative AI on this basis but I expect fair use to block those cases
The thing is, when "background actors" get replaced by AI, how will acting get new actors? Or what protects even large actors from studios using their face metrics and voice data which they have from CGI work to just use these datasets to "recreate" the actors without their consent?
> The thing is, when "background actors" get replaced by AI, how will acting get new actors?
Actors don’t break out by virtue of their stellar background acting work.
> Or what protects even large actors from studios using their face metrics and voice data which they have from CGI work to just use these datasets to "recreate" the actors without their consent?
Why would you bother recreating someone when you could generate someone better fit for the role?
>Actors don’t break out by virtue of their stellar background acting work.
Indeed. But it's a paying job that gives one the opportunity to learn how a film set works, and gain skills that will be useful later. Think of it as an internship, if you like. That, you'll surely agree, has some value?
>Why would you bother recreating someone when you could generate someone better fit for the role?
But, they're not doing that! They're taking background actors' images, and copy-pasting them into other scenes, and other works. That seems... Unjust? I mean, that's me, isn't it? Fair enough (I suppose), if they create an entirety synthetic person (that's totally been a thing for decades, for massive, anonymous crowds), but if you make something that's based on me, looks like me, moves like me, sounds like me, isn't that partly my creation, and shouldn't I get some credit, and some compensation?
I mean, maybe someday they may create entirely synthetic background actors, and then the point will be moot, but for now they're not quite there, and they're trying to get away with using actual peoples' work in ways that weren't ancicipated, and for which they were not compensated.
> Think of it as an internship, if you like. That, you'll surely agree, has some value?
Sure. I generally agree that the loss of background actors would be harmful to actors, most of whom are poor.
> But, they're not doing that! They're taking background actors' images, and copy-pasting them into other scenes, and other works.
This is not clear. I think what you are saying and what SAG are saying is incorrect because frankly it doesn’t make sense to me. The studios have said those narratives are grossly incorrect, and I am inclined to agree simply because they do not make economic sense. Background actors are cheap and better than trying to “paste” them into future scenes. But I don’t really care because the actual thing we should care about is the near term future where background actors are simply generated entirely, which is the primary threat and completely unchallenged by the current debate being had.
That’s the problem. The argument is the problem. Not the general plight of the small actors. Any belief that they are solving their current problems or future proofing themselves is painfully naive.
> That is the power of solidarity: when the high profile actors say they'll go on strike to get AI banned, their voice will be heard
If you think there is a world possible where there is a working AI generating technology that can produce good results, but it's banned because some high profile actors wanted it so, you are delusional. It's like saying cars would be banned because most prominent stable owners and horse breeders would object to that. It just not something that can happen. If that technology would exist and would be feasible financially, that's what would happen. If that'd require moving production to Mexico or Shanghai or Nauru, that's what would happen. No amount of striking would change that. It may delay it a tiny bit and give some (mostly very rich) people a tiny bit of a longer run, since some big movies rely on star power and need big names to push the marketing, but you can't just pretend the technology doesn't exist if it does.
This isn't mostly about background actors -- digital extras are already widely used for things like large crowd scenes. And it's far cheaper currently to hire an extra to be a bartender who hands the main character a drink, than to 3D render that -- so it's not about that either.
It's about studios wanting to own the likenesses and voices of every actor they hire for a project, so they can hire someone with a really unique look for a single episode, then be able to produce the rest of the season with a cheaper actor and use AI to do a face swap and voice swap.
And that's unacceptable. Actors should be able to retain the rights to their likenesses, end of story. A standard contract shouldn't require that an actor signs over all rights to their likeness for an entire series just in order to be paid for a single episode. That's not right.
No, that’s stupid. Nobody cares about the likeness of nobody actors. They are completely fungible. And if the actors guild thinks this is the hill to die on then they may win the battle and lose the war by an enormous margin.
the obvious near term future is that they don’t even get the single episode.
Your example is silly. Hire someone who is funny looking to be a bartender and then have someone cheaper do them later on? My dude, the funny looking bartender is already going to be as cheap as it gets because they’re a nobody actor. And the barrier to face swapping a generated face that is just as good as the funny looking dude’s onto a different nobody from the beginning is very small.
But the other extreme of saying no AI ever is also untenable. If SAG-AFTRA get that demand, it then means productions like Rogue One (AI Leia and Moff Tarkin), The Mandalorian (AI Luke), and de-aged Professor Xavier and Magnito in the X-Men are not possible.
It also prevents an aspiring writer from using AI tools to help with the writing process -- not do it all for them, but work co-operatively like copilot and other auto-complete tools do for programming.
Even using tools like Photoshop, Blender, Unreal Engine (as used in shows like The Mandalorian) could be dicey as they incorporate AI models and techniques. -- Would things like NVidia's AI upscaling tech count for raytraced CGI? (I ask as it looks like SAG-AFTRA are after a blanket AI ban, not just around actor voice/image or writer text.)
Another thing that the production companies could do is to use public domain audio, video, and scripts as SAG-AFTRA cannot ban the use if AI on those.
The union is just saying that if you want the rights to use an actor's likeness without actually employing the actor to act, you have to pay separately for that, and pay what it's worth.
Which makes perfect sense. In your example of a de-aged Luke Hammill in the Mandalorian, Luke Hammill was paid $$$ for that. They didn't get to cast him for free just because he was in previous Star Wars movies. Nor should they.
That's all this is about. Go ahead and use AI, but pay the actors for their likeness. Don't force them to give it away for free as a condition of doing a single episode.
That’s just insane though. People don’t care about continuity in background actors or what they look like. Many background actors will be reused in different contexts as different people.
If studios can apply their likeness to a cheaper actor, they can also apply a made up likeness to a cheaper actor. Or the likeness of a model. Or the likeness of a volunteer who thinks it’d be cool.
The only case where this applies, maybe, is for characters with speaking roles that have enough positive reception that they have negotiating power for their cost to return for future works. But that’s a tiny segment far removed from the majority of this guild. And if it’s actually sensible to do this over hiring the actor then they could probably just do this from the beginning.
This isn't primarily about background actors (who usually aren't even members of SAG-AFTRA to begin with, because they usually don't even have acting training/experience or anything).
This is primarily about working actors with lines but who aren't big stars able to negotiate their contracts -- we're talking non-lead series regulars, guest stars, recurring guest stars, and the like. Because most actors are working for union minimums unless they're a series lead.
In other words, the actors who make up 95% of the union.
Perhaps, but it’s still wild to me how many people approach these topics with complete apathy and surrender, as if the AI takeover is inevitable and therefore we shouldn’t try to fight it.
Regardless of how you see the future playing out, it’s pretty gross to characterize a people’s fight for their livelihood as “dumb”. Maybe it’s dumb to you, but they’ve given their lives to their work so we can enjoy the content they have a hand in making.
Imagine the day that your skills are completely replaceable with AI and your attempts to fight it are met with “that’s dumb.” What an impersonal and apathetic attitude to have.
Imagine factory workers being replaced by replica androids, and the workers are upset because the androids are using their individual “likeness” rather than that the androids are taking their jobs.
They are fighting the wrong fight. The vast majority of actors represented here do not lose anything more than the factory workers under the particular thing they’re fighting against.
> Perhaps, but it’s still wild to me how many people approach these topics with complete apathy and surrender, as if the AI takeover is inevitable and therefore we shouldn’t try to fight it.
Hey, we do need *a lot* of people for the piles of skulls the Terminators crush with their metal feet in our inevitable future.
We could start talking about what we should do in general when the value of human labor has dropped to pennies across multiple industries.
Or we could talk about how we could leverage this new technology to the benefit of the voice actors, by reducing their working hours, improving their working conditions, and giving them a large cut of the new profits the new technology unlocks.
Buuuut those conversations under this system have been DOA since the luddites. It seems profits and benefits for workers must be extracted at the gunpoint of government regulation and unionization. I agree that it'd be great if that wasn't necessary.
> It seems profits and benefits for workers must be extracted at the gunpoint of government regulation and unionization. I agree that it'd be great if that wasn't necessary.
Yep. Those of us who’ve lived in the west have never seen massive worker uprisings, although they’re present throughout history. A society that becomes so unequal that it can’t provide opportunity for its people faces a reckoning.
What’s so damning about this is that the ultra wealthy know this and are planning for it.
> how we could leverage this new technology to the benefit of the voice actors, by reducing
everyone discussion has someone that’s always like "it'll only assist existing people of that profession"
and here I am training on voices I have the rights to (by simply asking, and with a release form), adding it to media including games with no prior experience, either in some wav output, or rendering dynamically pretty quickly (not quick enough but its coming)
I just don't see the basic economics that support the person with the voice for getting paid for that work at any analog to today's arrangements, and definitely not more. 4 year olds are going to be able to do what I'm doing. the supply will completely outstrip the demand.
I can see studios with prior obligations being committed to giving some kind of royalty, but the history doesn't suggest that those studios will be the one that taps into the market. All of Hollywood exists because it routed around entrenched interests in New York City by going to the other side of the continent and ignoring the contracts, unions and industry cartels. What exactly suggests the same thing won't happen again? That's what I'm missing here. Where is the discussion that puts the feelings aside and doesn't act like they're ignoring that just for the sake of not feeling like they're surrendering.
If I successfully offered something to the market and scaled it up, which I don't have ambitions to do but open to, but if I did and then it fulfills the entertainment register in people's minds and all of this stuff with SAG-AFTRA is moot. If it was procedurally generated trash, the same people that say "I just leave this on in the background" or "its a guilty pleasure" are going to be the same consumers. I just don't see the other outcome, the market is going to get filled with this stuff, and human only content is going to be a novelty for enthusiasts.
This is a rerun of photographers complaining about digital photography and stock photo websites. Despite their worries, there's still plenty of work in shooting weddings and corporate events. Outside of folks like Roger Deakins, the person behind the lens has always has been fungible, so any argument that AI removes the humanity is dishonest.
In terms of acting, casting is a flexible talent sourcing process that has always cared less about the lowest rungs of talent: guest stars and co-stars. The production companies are struggling to adapt to less-lucrative streaming revenue models and dealing with the impact of covid on moviegoing. The industry is being forced to change and consolidate all at once. As much as I sympathize with the actors, they're arguing from a position of weakness, not strength. Their industry is struggling.
AI is going to bring the costs of production down 100x or more, and we're all going to be the beneficiaries of that. Content will be faster and cheaper to make, cheaper to buy, and it will tailor to an increasingly long tail of interests that have never before been served.
The task has always been storytelling, not location scouting, set decorating, lighting, electrical, blocking, capturing grids of photos, then splicing them together.
Folks that couldn't dream of starting their own film studio will now realistically be able to power than endeavor from home, and that includes these actors and writers that are complaining. The YouTube-ization effect where small creators monetize will lead to Hollywood capital outflows and more money being spent to prop up individual and small team creators.
Those at the bottom rungs are complaining about technology that will give them a bigger platform with more autonomy than they've ever had before. They won't need studio capital to execute on their dreams.
One way to parse “Content will be faster and cheaper to make, cheaper to buy, and it will tailor to an increasingly long tail of interests that have never before been served,” is that we will be adrift on a sea of garbage.
If a person now alive pictures the state of “content” getting far worse, that’s something profound to consider.
I find that take absurd. Niche long tail interest stuff is the best. Would you really claim that the plethora of smaller groups on Spotify that can make it work are inferior to the mainstream radio acts that got almost all the attention previously?
Niche, long-tail interest stuff is, by definition, garbage to the vast majority of people, though. I understand that you may be interested in collecting chicken bones, but no matter how cheaply you can make a chicken bone documentary, I will not watch it.
Meanwhile, we delve deeper into the audience-of-one dystopia that has unfurled around us. I believe we took great value from having cultural lodestars to set and recalibrate our society’s vision, and we appear to be on the cusp of replacing that entirely with autogenerated nonsense.
That is irrelevant to the discussion that tools which enable cheaper production will allow for more individually directed art for smaller niche interests.
Has the internet brought you any kind of content of value?
If the answer is yes, then this is just a filtering problem.
---
edit: because of downvotes, I can't respond anymore. (Dang: you really need to fix this.)
Here's my response to a child comment:
> No thanks. I'd really rather take quality over quantity.
The domestic market supports roughly 1,000 productions a year. Most of which you won't be the target demographic for. Most of it will suck. That's a very small pipeline for "quality" to fit through.
Frankly, I don't like being limited to 1-2 "amazing" and 5-10 "good" things a year. We're not here for long, and we deserve so much more. Humanity has the capacity to do better than this.
The creativity of youths on TikTok and other platforms is absolutely inspiring, and we have barely begun to tap into it.
I've always seen more amazing content from indie creators and foreign markets than most big studios produce. Independent animation and web comics have been labors of love, and these new tools are going to empower those folks to do more than they've ever done before.
The pipeline of creators is going to widen as people see how fun and accessible it is.
There might be more noise, but there will be orders of magnitude more interesting content that fits the curvature of your interests like a fine glove. If you have a thing for space noir vampires, I'm sure someone will deliver it and do the concept justice.
If we can suck people out of busywork jobs and put them into satisfying careers delighting the human spirit, that's a great and worthwhile thing to do.
Asking me for my opinion, getting my opinion, and then telling me it’s my opinion, and then judging my opinion is not a great conversation. I’m left wondering why you asked the original questions (I.e., do I value content and does the internet provide me valuable content) when you had already imagined my answer and drawn an illogical conclusion from my imaginary answers.
Edit: having perused your user page, I think I get it. You’re really passionate about the one man studio thing. I don’t think you’re wrong to do this at all, but it might be worth considering how Leo Strauss would interpret a nation of auteur content producers each producing for an audience of one. Everyone might get exactly what they want, but the coherent unified society does not get what it needs.
I mostly agree, but the actors and all are worried that they will lose their bargaining power completely, and the studios are gonna do really crappy things like use their faces / bodies /voices with little to no compensation. It's not just about replacement, it's about wholesale theft of their persons.
Anyone know how Netflix agreed to air (and create a likeness to itsself) such an episode. I enjoyed the episode, and was impressed with Netflix's liberal stance on allowing this, and impressed with the cautionary tale it tells -- i'm surprised because it seems against Netflix's interests.
Did any actors or writers complain when a huge chunk of the studio and streaming tech work went overseas, native workers in the US lost jobs, and tech work got limited to a small sliver of connected individuals in south bay?
Even today, if you are a white or black American it is very difficult to get jobs in the entertainment technology industry. You are told it is because the jobs are uber competitive and the workers are the best of the best...but then you see the workers that actually work there and they can barely speak articulate sentences.
I mean, did the tech workers even complain when those jobs went overseas? Perhaps tech workers should try to unionize then. The only reason we are even talking about this is because the actor’s and writer’s unions give them a loud enough voice for the rest of the country to hear their complaints. Kind of disingenuous to put the blame on writer’s and actor’s not putting up a fuss when tech work got shipped overseas, when tech workers themselves didn’t even bother to put up a fuss (or unionize).
> It’s not a winnable fight. Background actors and stunt people and minor voice actors are ultimately fungible.
Guessing the future is hard, but I’ll try to change your mind by comparing future change to past change.
AI came for chess. When it became superhuman, did chess professionals go out of a job? Not really; people come to the tournament for the story, for the human achievement. VAs are under the same scope: people want to see stars form, even when they are microcelebrities. I don’t doubt that there will be an increase in AI-generated content and a paying public, just like there are people right now that pay to watch AIs play chess against each other. But it doesn’t remove the genuine article.
(Contrary to what many believe will happen, they weren’t replaced by people that use AI either.)
As a cherry on top, while the game AIs are policy-based RL and can become superhuman with no human data to bootstrap it, LLMs currently are effectively SL and need to feed off human data. If the production of the latter dropped, the results would decline.
I can't wait for the games that let you talk to NPCs in natural language, and have them respond in natural language. They might even be able to take limited actions based on the outcome of the conversation.
I 100% support bleeding whatever you can out of the megacorps, but I don't know if I'd rely on VA careers long term
It's hard enough for humans to understand natural language spoken by other humans, and we have the biology for it.
Current methods of "AI" or machine "learning" are not going to get us there; these methods (especially LLMs) are incapable of the understanding needed for natural language processing or actual AI.
“I can't wait for the games that let you talk to NPCs in natural language, and have them respond in natural language.”
That is as simple as popping together a speech-to-text model with an LLM and pipe the output to a text-to-speech module.
We can have a demo by tomorrow, and something actually enjoyable in a week. The challenges are purely of engineering (to for example reduce the latency so the conversation flows, and to fit the models on the average consumer’s hardware) and art direction (what do you want the npc to say?).
To make the npc act on the conversation is a bit harder, but stil within weeks.
> Current methods of "AI" or machine "learning" are not going to get us there
Get us where? :) I think you are way overthinking it. What do you think is so unachiavable about what the commenter wrote?
The existence of masters and stars are irrelevant to the minor voice actors and stunt actors and background actors I was referring to in the quote you responded to
I just watched Oppenheimer, and I remember thinking how this would be much better as an HBO style multi season drama. But there's no way they'd be able to sign actors consistently for the many seasons it would take to cover all the material... using AI actors however, they would be able to keep consistent characters even as the actors switch out. Of course it's a race to the bottom, but think of all the talented actors who can't work because they don't have the right "look" and didn't get a lucky break.
It's uncanny how much nuance and craftsmanship there is to Oppenheimer you need to just... discard in order to make it into an example of a property that would benefit from AI.
If ever there was a movie that could only have been made by one person. If ever there was a movie that if it had been made by anyone else would have fallen along so much more standard and predictable lines.
Ask an AI to create a talky 3 hour biopic with as few explosions as Oppenheimer, and people would flock to it at blockbuster levels. Go ahead. Keep clicking the generate button. Use the Nolan preset.
There are so many movies you could argue wouldn't lose anything for being AI. I wouldn't even trade those for AI, but I acknowledge they exist. Marvel has about 30 alone.
And if ever there was a technology more analogous to the bomb in terms of the need for their creators to have been more humble and prepared and less naive about their effect on the world before rather than after the invention, it's generative AI.
Even if Murphy was a nepo baby, you're right there's unfairness in Hollywood, still we can't overlook how much we still need people and we can't be so naive as to think the same unfairness in human nature would just go away rather than simply start to benefit a different set of privileged people.
I fully support people getting paid for their work, and these actors deserve it. However -- when it comes to video games I personally do not mind if there is no voice acting, and I often will play the game on silent with some other source of audio playing alongside. Unsure of the impact of this one.
That's great, but do you think that's how the majority of people play video games? If all voice actors disappeared, people would just be "huh, oh well"?
> and I often will play the game on silent with some other source of audio playing alongside.
GP doesn’t listen to any sounds coming from games. That means sound effects, background music, etc.
That claim is so interesting to me. I don’t doubt it. But following GP’s logic, he must also think music composers for games aren’t important either.
Imagine Ocarina of Time being played without sound lol. Or even a music game being played without sound.
Or even games like Overwatch. There might be accessibility modes but if you don’t turn them on, you’re going to be SOL when someone on the enemy team does an audio cue and is about to ult and you can’t see them.
I do play games without sound sometimes. (For example, you don’t really need audio cues for League and I won’t listen to sound if my hair is drying and I don’t want to put the headphones on.) But it depends on the game and the circumstances, of course. That’s what I think a reasonable person would say lol
Back to specifically voice acting, I do recall the Overwatch voice actors having a huge fan base early on.
When I play games I turn off Music, and skip cut scenes, I want to play a game not watch a movie. If i want a movie I watch a movie...
the FPS I only leave on sounds required for the game, and most of the time I have my own music, youtube or some podcast on in the background as i am playing.
For non-FPS games, I turn off the sound completely.
I suspect my style of game play is more common that you would believe.
If voice actors disappears from gaming, I would not notice at all.
But then you miss out on the story. (Also, cut scenes usually aren’t that long lol.) I do sometimes speed up when NPCs speak because I can read faster. But when I do this too much, it actually begins to feel like the game is pointless.
> I suspect my style of game play is more common that you would believe.
Nope. If you read my original comment, I also acknowledged that I sometimes play games without sound. I also use YouTube while playing games.
I enjoy spoilers also. But if the game is story-driven, then I do feel skipping cutscenes makes me miss out on the story or become confused and start to care less about the game (e.g. Diablo IV)
But yes, a point I made in my original comment is that this all depends on the specific game and your circumstances whether and how much sound you listen to.
The number of ranked competitive FPS players that play without sound cannot be more than 50%.
Most FPS games that have ranked competitive modes put very significant audio cues in. If you’re playing without sound, you’re freely giving up a significant advantage. Often audio is mechanically important.
To add my 2 cents, when I play a text heavy game like a RPG and it has voice acting, I miss most of it because I skip the dialogue as soon as i finish reading it. If you make games please provide a skip button for those of us who can read.
However our preferences aren't the point of the article. It's the actors being cloned by the generative stuff that's in fashion without compensation that is.
As a gamer, based on the output of the image generators and chatgpt that i've seen, games making use of "AI" generated content will be borefests and I'll skip them anyway.
What I love about Baldurs gate 3 is how you can skip easily dialog and cut scenes, but what I love is just walking away from the game to do other random stuff and because it's turn based I don't have to pause and I just come back and play a bit whenever and so i take many frequent little breaks.
This is a good point about the music, I do find it important.
But I also pay for musical soundtracks separately if I am able (Bandcamp.com), those musicians can get money from me by making the album available for purchase and I do.
But if I recall the musicians are not on strike and not the topic of the article that was shared.
This is a good point, others may have a strong preference for it. But I have found that most games, at least in the indie space, completely lack any voice acting or it is just done by the developers themselves.
TTS for dialogue will be high quality in a few short years.
You'll be able to dial knobs for the voice itself - pitch, timbre, gender, age. Then adjust more knobs for emotional control (or infer it from other cues).
This will allow for fully-dynamic storytelling where the characters know your name and can respond to your infinite array of actions.
It would be too frustratingly difficult to express the desired nuance of a line of script purely through a set of ui/ux. The most likely technological advancement we're going to see is "tonal mapping" which would allow a regular dev to record a line with the desired inflection/emotion and then map this onto an existing TTS voice engine model.
This tech already exists now though it is somewhat in its infancy.
May be not all. But certainly if those under SAG-AFTRA did certainly. I don't remember specific actor adding much to my experience ever. I don't even recognize their voices or names, so can't be bothered.
What games do you like? The voice actors in games like Uncharted, Mass Effect, Last of Us, Red Dead Redemption, and God f War made a huge impact on the game and deserve credit, recognition, and financial reward. Games are in incredibly diverse medium though. I mostly play Hunt Showdown, and the only voice acting is the grunt of punch or cry why getting shot.
Those could have been done as well with other voice-actors. And be good enough in their jobs. Are you seriously telling me there is absolutely no as skilled people available outside SAG-AFTRA?
I don't remember specific actor adding much to my experience ever.
If that's true, maybe you've only played games without quality voice actors, and they should have tapped into some SAG-AFTRA talent. Because if you had played any of the games I mentioned, it would be absurd to claim that none of voice actors added much to the experience.
To answer you new question, "Are you seriously telling me there is absolutely no as skilled people available outside SAG-AFTRA?"
No, I never said anything at all like that. I am only saying voice actors can add value and be memorable.
You could find a comparably talented person outside the SAG-AFTRA, who could do an amazing job. But that new person would also add to the experience, be memorable, and deserve recognition and remuneration.
If this were really a widely held opinion, the Halo series wouldn’t have shilled out for Nathan Fillion. These orgs don’t spend money on voice acting for the artistic purity of it.
After multiple rounds of doubling and tripling down on your dubiously representative stance you have now reached the “game development studios don’t know how to make games” stage.
Maybe stop and consider what led you here, and if this is really a position you sincerely believe and wish to defend.
And you have entirely failed to provide whatsoever any proof that SAG-AFTRA voice actors are at all needed in video games. Like there must be some research on this? That prove that they positively affect sales.
As somebody who's worked in games as a programmer, it's hard to have too much sympathy for voice actors, when all the (almost entirely non-unionised) artists, animators, programmers, QA, and more have put up with so much overwork ('crunch periods') and undercompensation, along with constant threat of sudden lay-offs (usually studio closures) since, well, before games had voice acting. A strike could be an additional threat to the projects and therefore jobs of those non-unionised workers.
(Yes, maybe the rest of the industry should have unionised a long time ago, but it hasn't happened)
Voice actors are important these days, but they aren't the 'movie stars' of gaming. The real stars of game development are usually unknown individuals developing internal tools and asset workflows, endlessly tweaking numbers to try and make a game 'feel' just right, doing CPU/GPU profiling and optimization, or doing tedious-but-essential QA work, tracking down those hard-to-replicate bugs.
And not everyone is in agreement on the whole AI issue. The hype/fear bubble is likely to deflate, and IMHO, AI-based tools are more likely to empower creators than replace them.
I don't think the answer to mistreatment is for non-unionized workers to pull the unionized workers down into the crab pot with them -- at the end of the day, we are all labor (unless you control the capital), and infighting instead of solidarity only makes labor's bargaining position worse.
Well, it would be easier for non-unionized workers to empathize with unionized if they stopped the ridiculous cancelling/blackmailing/ostracizing of workers who take up “union work”. It’s beyond anticompetitive to go on strike while simultaneously making it career suicide for a young professional who just graduated or something from accepting what would otherwise be a career defining opportunity. The WAG is notorious for this.
Like it or not, unions have to come down pretty hard on strikebreakers, since they undermine their bargaining position. If the purpose of a strike is to withhold labor from the employer, someone who is otherwise providing labor is directly sabotaging their goal.
You do realize that while the artists, animators, and programmers you're talking about actually make a liveable salary on that, the voice actors mostly don't?
It's gig work that you're incredibly lucky to get a consistent amount of. And it takes a lot of training. A lot of these people are servers at a restaurant or drive for Uber to make ends meet. They're not making programming-level money on the side, nowhere even close.
The union is trying to ensure that the minimum payments for voice actors are reasonable, and that if you do get lucky enough to get a decent amount of work during the year, that it is something you can live on. (And remember that you'll probably audition for 50+ projects for every 1 project you land.)
> You do realize that while the artists, animators, and programmers you're talking about actually make a liveable salary on that, the voice actors mostly don't?
They're working full-time, long hours (lots of unpaid overtime), and pay often isn't great even for programmers, but especially for non-programming roles (outside of the largest/most successful studios, mostly in the US, where it can be a lot better).
I'm sure they'd also love to do part-time gig work and be guaranteed a full-time income from it, but that's usually not an option. Many programmers leave games after a while for better-paying work, less stress, and/or more job security elsewhere.
Yes conditions could be better for programmers, but they're nowhere near as bad as for voice actors.
> I'm sure they'd also love to do part-time gig work and be guaranteed a full-time income from it, but that's usually not an option.
And voice actors would love that too. But they don't get it, that's the point. And "part time" is hiding the fact that, as I said elsewhere, they're often preparing for 50 auditions to get a single gig. It's not like there's an agency that just hands out work.
Perhaps instead of anger at people trying to improve their material conditions, you could choose instead to ask the unionized people for helping setting up a union for your profession?
So you're upset that people who didn't bother to form a union are being mistreated, while those who did form a union are doing better? And you appear to want sympathy? Wow. HN really is the best site on the Internet for unintentional comedy.
I remember trying to organize Bay Area tech workers in the '90s. Y'all were not receptive at all. The attitude seemed to be that tech workers are too precious for a union. Those were for garbagemen, not professionals.
Enjoy your working conditions. It's nice when results are proportional to effort.
I wonder if this might backfire. In the age of ai when animated characters can be almost created wholly by ai, actors can be replaced by AI, the age of the movie star might be over. I think in the future live performances will be more sought after just to know you're actually watching a real person, at least until life like ai androids are indistinguishable from real humans.
I'm saying this as someone in support of unions in general, but also in support of our ai future, if a little fearful of the Terminator scenario playing out.
I don't think unions can stop ai from taking jobs, I think maybe all unions should ban together for a general strike to force a ubi vote, so that when ai does take jobs people can still eat and pay rent.
> I wonder if this might backfire. In the age of ai when animated characters can be almost created wholly by ai, actors can be replaced by AI, the age of the movie star might be over.
From what I've seen the conversation is a lot more nuanced. It's not "yes AI" vs "no AI." It's more around can you use my likeness, writing, or artwork to train AI with minimal to zero compensation (what studios want) or with compensation structure both sites negotiate (what unions what). Or can the result of AI be used to undermine labor. Currently, the output of AI isn't up to expected standards for much of anything. Studios are obviously trying to use that output to replace "writing credit" which has a historical structure with higher compensation. The person they pay to go "punch it up" won't get that. The resulting product would be mostly the same, but the person polishing and finishing it does a lot more work with less compensation.
AI is also just a relatively minor part of what unions are trying to negotiate.
Maybe the AIs will take the studio's jobs before they take the artist's jobs (enabling much higher pay for creatives). After all the script is just 5% of the cost [1]. I'm sure there are pieces of the multi-hundred-million dollar movie-production process that are easier to automate that script writing and acting.
>>I'm sure there are pieces of the multi-hundred-million dollar movie-production process that are easier to automate that script writing and acting.
You assume that is not already happening? How many physical effects people where displaced or had to find different things to do when CGI automated large amounts of physical effects?
How much bigger would be budgets need to be to do physical effects instead of CGI?
I am sure their are tons of other examples of automation and technology that allows a movie to be made with far less people.
> I think maybe all unions should ban together for a general strike to force a ubi vote, so that when ai does take jobs people can still eat and pay rent.
Pit the old creatives against the young ones. Nice.
Actors' appearances can be replaced by AI. Their voices can be too.
Actors' performances cannot. Not now and not any time in the near future. Not vocally, not facially, not physically. AI can map one vocal performance to another voice. It can't produce a vocal performance full of emotion that nails exactly what the scene is about, in the first place.
> Actors' performances cannot. Not now and not any time in the near future. Not vocally, not facially, not physically. AI can map one vocal performance to another voice. It can't produce a vocal performance full of emotion that nails exactly what the scene is about, in the first place.
Oh sure these computer programs can play chess, but can they beat a grandmaster? Not now and not any time in the near future! - some guy in the early 90s probably.
I don't know how to describe it except that performing a role in a fully believable way is akin to writing an engaging believable novel, which AI can't do, and is nowhere near doing, either.
If you try taking a beginner's acting class at an acting studio in e.g. LA or NY, you'll quickly see how difficult and artistic good screen acting is. How hard it is to perform lines in a way that seems like real life, as opposed to seeming like bad acting (melodramatic exclaiming of lines).
Of course, a lot of people don't understand just how difficult and skilled screen acting is, because the entire point is that you're not supposed to notice acting at all. You're supposed to be fooled into thinking these are somehow real characters.
Eh, I think anything that we have a lot of data on (ex: recorded acting) will and can be replicated in the very near future. Sure, you will have the occasional Oscar worthy actor that is some level of creativity that doesn’t work, but vast majority of acting is not finding new ways to show something in a script, the creativity came from the writing and directing choices.
Art was also thought to require human creativity until recently. We’re not going to produce a new paradigm of art or Picasso level impact, but the median artist can be replaced today in most ways imho.
> but vast majority of acting is not finding new ways to show something in a script, the creativity came from the writing and directing choices.
I'm sorry, but you have clearly never worked in film and television, and certainly never in casting. Because your impression of acting is simply wrong.
Casting offices will audition literally hundreds of actors to find the one who can bring the right unique take to the role, that no other actor can. There are TV shows and plays that simply don't get made because they can't find an actor who can play the part with the needed charm and magnetism for the specific role. I'm not talking Oscars, I'm talking bread-and-butter network comedies and procedurals.
People watch shows and movies for the story/script, but they also watch them for the unique spark and charisma that the actors bring just as much. AI is not replicating that in the "very near future", not even close.
Given that some actors effectively play the same character every movie or show they’re in (ex: the rock) and people still seem to mostly like them, why couldn’t you capture an actor’s “spark” (mannerisms) once and replay in different settings forever? What specifically can’t be simulated?
Good thing valve has made it clear that if you’re using AI generated content that you don’t have fully copyright over it they’re not going to accept your game.
UBI will not stop landlords from sweeping it all. UBI won’t work until we either have rent control or abolish private ownership-for-rent of housing.
When Microsoft increased their housing stipend for interns, all the surrounding temporary housing and Airbnbs went up by that amount a few months after.
> Good thing valve has made it clear that if you’re using AI generated content that you don’t have fully copyright over it they’re not going to accept your game.
Valve isn't really a good example to use here... they have a policy of not hiring union VAs (and the few they have worked with in the last 5 years or so have been publicly mistreated, see how they treated Merle Dandridge) and have definitely made new lines by piecing together old recording sessions in cases where the actor wanted more money or in cases where the actor was deceased.
I guess it won't backfire because the AI revolution will come anyways. I rather think that this strike is a last-ditch effort to contain the AI revolution and squeeze out the last bucks before the flow of money dries up.
No one gets killed by a car or sued by a pedestrian if an AI generated episode of "Love Death and Robots" underwhelms the 17 year olds that put it on while looking at something on their phone. This will spur studios to try to make it work even though it'll probably say no time and money and result in worse outcomes for their catalog of media.
Difference is that AI can generate good-enough content most of the time. And that is often enough. It is not like what is sold now produced by humans is especially spectacular.
Exactly. Self-driving is a far more complex problem. The car has to get it right, right here on the road, little to no margin for error.
The script-writing AI, voice AI, actor-image AI will be used to create a multitude of options, and all but one will be thrown away anyways. Perfection isn't necessary, realtime isn't necessary, and a human correcting things here and there is always still an option. Compute resources are also far less limited, it doesn't have to fit in a "car" form factor and power consumption.
> human correcting things here and there is always still an option
Isn’t that what we are asking for though? We know there will be fewer people working in the industry. We want to ensure those who will work will be paid fairly.
Asking to be paid fairly is of course possible and sensible. But I'm not sure that it will be successful. Fewer people working will create a huge overhang of qualified experts, at least initially, driving down prices.
A “sufficiently smart compiler” is a (frequently mythical) one that can implement some difficult optimization on its own, rather than needing hints from the programmer. (See e.g. https://prog21.dadgum.com/40.html?0 for some discussion on the topic.)
Ah interesting. I wonder if LLMs can help solve that, although if they don't know the programmer's intent, they likely won't be able to optimize any better either.
tl;dr - Mandy Moore (a very big name celeb) talks about receiving residual checks of 81 cents for her show that streams on Hulu. I'm not interested whether or not she's rich and doesn't need the money, but if she's being paid fairly with regards to value she's providing.
Personally, if my contributions were bringing my company an incredible amount of revenue, I would be annoyed if I wasn't being paid accordingly.
If this does happen, I'm assuming Kojima Productions will attempt to get an exemption to work under the demanded terms, like a few A24 movies have in the film strike. (if that's even possible with how they do texture scanning/motion capture of so many people)
I don't know of any other studios who include so many "big name" actors.
Last I heard, Hollywood actors and writers weren't being abused, deceived, or coerced into working in this industry. They're not working under hazardous conditions or agreeing to false terms of work. It seems that there are people who want to work for the wages that are offered, the group just isn't happy with what they're being paid.
Aside from the consequences of their collective ability to withhold labor and ability to penalize those who don't join their union, can anyone explain why we should support them?
Why should I be glad to see actors strike for more $, any more than I would be happy to see plumbers strike so that they can charge me even more for work?
SAG leadership also wants to start including YouTube and other online creators in union membership.
Is this really what we want? Maybe it's time for Hollywood to change and grow away from unions and not proliferate into other areas of creative production.
Why would SAG workers want to "grow away from unions" when management doing their best to screw them over and impoverish them? You do realize that their interests are not the same as managements, right?
It is what I want. Youtube has no value with content creators. But content creators have zero power and steer constantly bullied with DMCA requests for policy violations that are never explained to them.
I wonder if a lot of the money issues could be fixed by the union implementing a better distribution of income. Seems like inequality in Hollywood is even worse than other industries.
Shouldn’t they start with the actors in their union then if that’s what they really care about? Some of the people protesting make crazy amounts of money themselves, if they want to show equality matters to them, should they start by redistributing the big actors’ income?
No, pitting members of the union against each other would be an absolutely stupid idea. The union is supposed to be working to benefit all of their members.
If you have 10% of the members essentially eating the lunch of the other 90%, then it seems there should be some attention on this. Perhaps a maximum pay multiplier between members on the same project. It'd be stupid not to address the unfairness. Who gives a shit if the studios toss another 10% to the workers if it mostly ends up at the top earners.
They wouldn't have to "seek" it if their output was actually worth what they are asking for. It would simply be the competitive rate. The actual problem is there are way way way too many members in the union, so there's simply not enough work for all of them. Is it any surprise they make so little?
While I do agree that the desire to be in the industry is higher than it can support, there is still a real inequality problem when the top people make what, 10,000x-100,000x more than the others?
Honestly I believe that Hollywood and film industry needs to change. The sooner the better.
And I also don't really care about those people - most of them seem to lost any connection with outside world and passion for the craft. The only motivation for most of them is feeding their overgrown egos.
I'd say there is a difference - even though they get paid millions for kicking a ball, they do what you would expect then to do.
Writers/actors/directors are kind of different - I would expect them to take a source material and create a show that is true (as much as possible given the media format) to the original source. Ideally without showing contempt for said original material. Either that or create something original - something that has new and fresh ideas. And blindly replacing one sex for another or one color of person for another is not my idea of "new" or "fresh".
To me it seems like they decided that these things don't matter anymore. So I don't mind if they go belly up.
Isn't this similar to worries about machines taking over human jobs in other areas? Just like machines changed many industries and made people question the need for humans, why should acting be any different?
Despite this being clickbait, its a nice space to have this discussion
I also find this to be a losing battle, and its kind of rich too, since Hollywood only grew by disregarding all the entrenched interested in NYC. To think the same won't happen to Hollywood or this current incarnation requires being stuck in every stage of grief, specifically bargaining and denial.
Its not apathy if some of us can skip straight to acceptance of the terminal illness of being superceded.
I may be in a minority, but could not care less of the strife of the Hollywood writers, but that's hypocritical of me because saying that all their current crops of movies are microplastics garbage, while also not caring about their strikes, detracts from the core of the problem, which is the metastasized cancer of American DNA ; greed.
Keep Hollywood writers away from games.
I have not been negatively impacted by this strike in any meaningful sense.
But it is striking to see just how puppet-like every talking head on TV is, to the point they have nothing themselves to say unless they have a gaggle of writers pumping all the lines you hear.
For a really good insight on just who becomes these writers, the documentary about the creation of national lampoon out of Harvard shows you all the smart nerds that truly write your content
I thought writers were using video game jobs as an income source during the movie strike. So how are they going to pay their rents with zero income, now?
RPGs are ruined by traditional voice acting but naive consumers demand it anyway. The problem is that voice acting places practical constraints on the scope of dialogue in RPGs, rendering the RPGs shallow by necessity.
I see three possible ways forward:
1) Generative AIs are used on the fly by games to create NPCs the player can truly roleplay with
2) VA strike re-calibrates consumer expectations so we can go back to RPGs with text dialogue only, possibly with LLMs instead of scripted conversations. Either way, an improvement over:
3) Continue with the status quo.
Listed in order of preference. From an RPG gamer perspective, the worst outcome is that both human writers and human VAs keep their jobs.
Being a quite literal Luddite is never in your self interest long term. History has taught us that technology will and should replace jobs, and we are better for it. We should roll with it gracefully rather than trying to dig our heels in fighting the inevitable.
Asking technology companies to not use AI in building their games is simply absurd.
It’s hilarious to me that people on HN whose literal job is to build things that replace menial jobs can’t see this. How many of you are working on a SaaS that replaces hundreds of paper pushers?
The luddites were not against technology or progress.
“They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”
In a parallel here, the SAG-AFTRA actors are not against AI, per se. They're against their likenesses being scanned for 1 days pay and then being used in perpetuity forever without their consent or further payment.
> they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages.
Not sure why one would need to go through an apprenticeship to operate a machine as compared to needing to go through one in order to learn how to stitch well. The entire point of the machines was to cut down on labor costs and increase production, which the company could do with or without the Luddite workers; they simply brought in unskilled workers, because the machine didn't need all of the skill (and therefore higher labor cost) of Luddite craftspeople.
The same will happen with AI here, if companies can cut down labor costs, what will the current laborers do? They are striking, yes, but just like the Luddites, if there comes a technology that can replace them with cheaper labor, then that's what companies will do, and I don't think the current laborers have any recourse (in the long term, not the short term, as I know Luddites tried to destroy the machines but in the end they were defeated).
One days pay for one days work seems fair. The electrician that wired the building did far more important work, their work is evident in every single frame of the film, but doesn’t expect payment in perpetuity.
They go for the flashing lights and captivating sound far more than any actor. Without the electrician the movie would be two hours of darkness. Ticket sales would suffer far worse than 15%.
I don't think actors getting paid more is taking money away from electricians. Hollywood execs pay is up 53% from 2018. I suspect if actors get the deal they want, their increased pay might come from the $500 million a year paychecks from the executives and not the electrician.
You misstate my point either by accident or to build a strawman. The point I am making is that Electricians are fairly paid, unlike actors who already have a sweetheart deal.
Siding with anti-technology rent-seekers seems far sillier.
> In a statement posted to its official website, the union confirmed its board had "voted unanimously" to "send a strike authorisation vote to SAG-AFTRA members" in interactive media ahead of its "forthcoming bargaining dates with video game companies".
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/02/business/sag-aftra-strike-str... has more details that this is just one of multiple steps:
> While a strike authorization does not launch a strike, it can be a useful tool at the bargaining table because it gives the union the ability to declare a strike if negotiations break down. Eligible SAG-AFTRA members will be able to vote on authorizing a strike until September 25 at 5 p.m. PT, the evening before discussions resume.
If and when membership does authorize a strike, we would see language akin to this announcement: https://www.sagaftra.org/sag-aftra-members-approve-strike-au...