On Monday morning, SAG-AFRTRA President Fran Drescher defended the union’s new contract during a Zoom meeting for members. Drescher scolded those opposed to the new contract and stated, “Sadly, there have been some naysayers who have exploited this momentum of ours [who have] tried to tear down what was being done in the negotiating committee.”
This meeting marked the beginning of the ratification process for the new deal, which was reached last Wednesday, thus ending the union’s historic 118-day strike.
Drescher emphasized that members must listen carefully to the terms and agreement “if [they] haven’t yet been poisoned by contrarians.” Her statement here seemed to allude to filmmaker and actress Justine Bateman, who tweeted multiple criticisms of the deal’s artificial intelligence provisions.
The union sought board protections against AI “digital replicas;” while the final deal does include many provisions SAG-AFTRA had demanded, it does not include all. It allows AI models to create synthetic characters, also known as “Frankenstein,” by “training” on actors’ performances. Actors can prevent this from happening, but they can only do so if recognizable facial features are included in the final output.
In the aforementioned criticisms, Bateman argued that the allowance of synthetic performs in the union contract is “anathema,” calling it “akin to SAG giving a thumbs-up for studios/streamers using non-union actors.” She added, “I find it baffling that a union representing human actors would approve of those same actors being replaced by an AI Object.”
SAG-AFTRA’s chief negotiator, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, defended the deal’s AI terms during Monday’s Zoom meeting, saying, “There are some aspects of this agreement that aren’t perfect…This negotiating team fought so hard to get the best possible protections in artificial intelligence. We all play our hand. This hand that we have played from our perspective achieves what we set out.”
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