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Video Game Actors Strike for AI Protections
"The video game industry generates billions of dollars in profit annually," said one union leader. "The driving force behind that success is the creative people who design and create those games."
Jul 25, 2024
After nearly two years of negotiations with video game giants and no deal that would protect performers from artificial intelligence, unionized voice and motion capture actors who work in video game development announced Thursday that they will go on strike starting at 12:01 am on Friday, July 26.
The performers are represented by Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), which last year won a contract for TV and film actors that included "unprecedented provisions for consent and compensation that will protect members from the threat of AI," after the union went on strike for four months.
The union has been negotiating on behalf of video game actors with major production companies including Disney Character Voices Inc., Activision Productions Inc., and WB Games Inc., and has won concessions over wages and job safety—but "AI protections remain the sticking point," said SAG-AFTRA on Thursday as the impending strike was announced.
Unionized actors want protections that would stop video game companies from training AI to replicate actors' voices or likeness without their consent and without compensating them.
"The video game industry generates billions of dollars in profit annually," said Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, national executive director and chief negotiator for SAG-AFTRA. "The driving force behind that success is the creative people who design and create those games. That includes the SAG-AFTRA members who bring memorable and beloved game characters to life, and they deserve and demand the same fundamental protections as performers in film, television, streaming, and music: fair compensation and the right of informed consent for the AI use of their faces, voices, and bodies."
"Frankly, it's stunning that these video game studios haven't learned anything from the lessons of last year—that our members can and will stand up and demand fair and equitable treatment with respect to AI, and the public supports us in that," he added.
Sarah Elmaleh, negotiating committee chair for the union's interactive media agreement, said the negotiations have shown the companies "are not interested in fair, reasonable AI protections, but rather flagrant exploitation."
"We look forward to collaborating with teams on our interim and independent contracts, which provide AI transparency, consent, and compensation to all performers, and to continuing to negotiate in good faith with this bargaining group when they are ready to join us in the world we all deserve," said Elmaleh.
The unionized actors voted in favor of the strike authorization with a 98.32% yes vote, said SAG-AFTRA.
The strike was announced as more than 500 workers who help develop the popular World of Warcraft video game franchise voted to join the Communications Workers of America (CWA), with the games publisher, Blizzard Entertainment, recognizing the bargaining unit.
CWA noted that the workers' journey to union representation began with a walkout in 2021 at Activision Blizzard, which was later bought by Microsoft, over sexual harassment and discrimination.
"What we've accomplished at World of Warcraft is just the beginning," Eric Lanham, a World of Warcraft test analyst, said in a statement. "We know that when workers have a protected voice, it's a win-win for employee standards, the studio, and World of Warcraft fans looking for the best gaming experience."
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Number of US Workers Who Joined Major Strikes Surged by 280% in 2023
"From the United Auto Workers to nurses across the country, these strikes provided critical leverage to workers to secure better wages and working conditions," said one expert.
Feb 21, 2024
While federal data released on Wednesday shows nearly half a million workers last year participated in 33 major work stoppages—the most since the turn of the century—labor experts still stressed the need for more policies protecting the right to strike.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics noted that there has been an average of 16.7 U.S. work stoppages with more than 1,000 strikers over the past two decades, meaning last year's number was almost double the norm. BLS also said that 458,900 workers joined the 2023 strikes, and nearly 87% of them work in service-providing industries, including 188,900 with jobs in education and health.
In their analysis of the data, also published Wednesday, Margaret Poydock and Jennifer Sherer of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) pointed out that "this is an increase of over 280% from the number of workers involved in major worker stoppages in 2022, which was 120,600. Further, it is on par with the increase seen in pre-pandemic levels during 2018 and 2019."
Poydock, a senior policy analyst at the think tank, said in a statement that "a surge of workers went on strike in 2023 to fight back against record corporate profits, stratospheric CEO pay, and decades of stagnant wages. From the United Auto Workers to nurses across the country, these strikes provided critical leverage to workers to secure better wages and working conditions."
Other notable actions include the actors' and writers' strikes that together effectively shut down television and film production for months. A report released last week by researchers at Cornell University and the University of Illinois—who, unlike the BLS, also tracked smaller U.S. actions—tallied 466 strikes and four lockouts involving a total of 539,000 workers.
"It's a historic moment for the labor movement," declared Robert Reich, a former U.S. labor secretary who is now a University of California, Berkeley professor. "Workers are done letting billionaires and corporations hoard all the wealth and power."
As Poydock and Sherer, EPI's State Worker Power Initiative director, wrote in their report:
It should be no surprise that workers are taking collective action to improve their pay and working conditions—but we should be asking why it is happening now. The U.S. economy has churned out unequal income growth and stagnant wages for the last several decades. Research shows that unions and collective bargaining are key tools in combating income inequality and improving the pay, benefits, and working conditions for both union and nonunion workers. However, the continued rise in collective action is not likely to increase unionization substantially unless meaningful policy change is enacted to ensure all workers have the right to form unions, bargain collectively, and strike.
The BLS said last month that "the union membership rate—the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of
unions—was 10% in 2023, little changed from the previous year."
"In the public sector, both union membership and the union membership rate (32.5%) were little changed over the year," the bureau added. "The number of union workers employed in the private sector increased by 191,000 to 7.4 million in 2023, while the unionization rate was unchanged at 6%."
Stressing that "the increase in major strike activity in 2023 occurred despite our weak and outdated labor law failing to protect workers' right to strike," Sherer argued that "federal and state action is needed to ensure the right to strike."
At the federal level, EPI supports several proposals. As Poydock and Sherer detailed:
- The Richard L. Trumka Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act includes critical reforms that would strengthen private sector workers' right to strike. The PRO Act would expand the scope for strikes by eliminating the prohibition on secondary strikes and allowing the use of intermittent strikes. It would also strengthen workers’ ability to strike by prohibiting employers from permanently replacing striking workers.
- The Striking and Locked Out Workers Healthcare Protection Act would prevent employers from cutting off health coverage of workers and family members in retaliation against striking workers.
- The Food Secure Strikers Act would allow striking workers to qualify for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.
- Congress should also pursue policies that extend a fully protected right to strike to railway, airline, public sector, agricultural, and domestic workers. None of these workers has the fundamental right to strike under current federal law.
"Right now, only a dozen states grant limited rights to strike to some public sector workers," the pair also highlighted. "States should also join New York and New Jersey in making striking workers eligible for unemployment benefits."
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FTC Proposes Ban on Impersonations of Individuals, Including With AI Deepfakes
The announcement came the same day that OpenAI—the company behind ChatGPT—unveiled a new tool called Sora that can generate a minute-long video from a written prompt, upping the regulatory stakes.
Feb 16, 2024
The Federal Trade Commission proposed a new rule on Thursday that would ban the impersonation of individuals, including with the use of artificial intelligence, or AI, technology.
The announcement came the same day that OpenAI—the company behind ChatGPT—unveiled a new tool called Sora that can generate a minute-long video from a written prompt, raising new concerns about how the technology might be abused to create deepfakes videos of real people doing or saying things they did not in fact do or say.
"Sooner or later, we need to adapt to the fact that realism is no longer a marker of authenticity," Princeton University computer science professor Arvind Narayanan toldThe Washington Post in response to Sora's emergence.
"Today's proposed rules to ban the use of AI tools from impersonating individuals are an important change to existing regulations and will help to protect consumers from AI generated scams."
For its part, the FTC is mostly concerned about how technology can be used to fool consumers. In its announcement, the commission said that it had introduced the new rule for public comment because it had been getting a growing number of complaints about impersonation-based fraud, which has generated a "public outcry."
"Emerging technology—including AI-generated deepfakes—threatens to turbocharge this scourge, and the FTC is committed to using all of its tools to detect, deter, and halt impersonation fraud," the commission said.
The proposed rule comes the same day as the FTC finalized a rule giving it the ability to seek financial compensation from scammers who impersonate companies or the government and builds on that regulation.
"Fraudsters are using AI tools to impersonate individuals with eerie precision and at a much wider scale. With voice cloning and other AI-driven scams on the rise, protecting Americans from impersonator fraud is more critical than ever," FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a statement. "Our proposed expansions to the final impersonation rule would do just that, strengthening the FTC's toolkit to address AI-enabled scams impersonating individuals."
The FTC also said that it wanted public comment on whether the rule should prohibit AI or other companies from knowingly allowing their products to be used by individuals who are in turn using them to commit fraud through impersonation.
Public Citizen, which has advocated for greater regulation of AI technology, welcomed the FTC's proposal.
"The FTC under Chair Kahn continues to be bold and use all the tools in their toolkit to protect consumers from emerging threats," Lisa Gilbert, executive vice president of Public Citizen, said in a statement. "Today's proposed rules to ban the use of AI tools from impersonating individuals are an important change to existing regulations and will help to protect consumers from AI-generated scams."
OpenAI's preview of Sora raises the stakes in the debate surrounding AI regulation. So far, the technology is only being made available to certain professionals in film and the visual arts for feedback, as well as "red teamers—domain experts in areas like misinformation, hateful content, and bias"—to help assess risks, OpenAI said on social media.
"We'll be taking several important safety steps ahead of making Sora available in OpenAI's products," the company said.
One major concern surrounding deepfakes is that they could be used to manipulate voters in elections, including the upcoming 2024 presidential election in the U.S. The campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, for example, raised alarms by using false images of former President Donald Trump embracing former White House Coronavirus Task Force chief Anthony Fauci in a video ad.
There are obvious errors in the Sora sample videos, as OpenAI acknowledged. Narayanan pointed out that a woman's right and left legs switch positions in a video of a Tokyo street, but also said that not every viewer might catch details like this and that the technology would likely be used to create harder-to-discredit deepfakes.
Another concern is the impact the technology could have on jobs and labor, especially in the arts. Director Michael Gracey, an expert on visual effects, told The Washington Post that the technology would likely enable a director to make an animated film on their own, instead of with a team of 100 to 200 people. The use of AI was a major sticking point in strikes by the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and Writers Guild of America last year, as Oxford Internet Institute visiting policy fellow Mutale Nkonde pointed out. Nkonde told the Post she also worried about the technology being used to dramatize hateful or violent prompts.
"From a policy perspective, do we need to start thinking about ways we can protect humans that should be in the loop when it comes to these tools?" Nkonde asked.
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