What Hollywood thinks about existential AI warnings

What happened

As the tech sector sounds alarms about AI’s potential to destroy humanity, entertainment labor groups are urging the public to stay focused on what’s already happening. The Verge reached out to Disney, Netflix, Amazon, Lionsgate, and other studios who have started using AI, as well film startups focused on bringing generative AI into the mainstream to ask for their reaction to the recent warnings surrounding the technology.

When I recently spoke with the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists’ (SAG-AFTRA) chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree Ireland, he told me that the union recognized early on how AI could impact its members’ livelihoods. ” “We bargained for and achieved enforceable, meaningful guardrails around how this technology can be implemented by the major employers in our industry,” Crabtree-Ireland explained.

” Though Crabtree-Ireland believes we “should be concerned about the broader societal and social implications of AI,” he also thinks that some of the warnings about the technology being an extinction-level threat could potentially be hyperbole and overblown. Doomerism has become one of the more common ways that AI companies generate buzz around their products, but the fact that Coxon left Anthropic to sound the alarm has given Crabtree-Ireland pause.

Why it matters

None have responded to our request for comment. The Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and Writers Guild of America East (WGAE) did, however. The AI tools used in entertainment production differ from the AI systems that have sparked a recent round of whistleblowing and apocalyptic declarations.

” But despite the differences between entertainment-focused AI and the models developed by Anthropic and OpenAI, AI models that generate digital facsimiles of actors and attempt to replicate traditional filmmaking tools pose a threat to some human jobs.

Similar to the way that the Hollywood unions advocated for protections and increased oversight around AI’s use during the 2023 strikes, Coxon’s Anthropic exit has inspired a wave of AI researchers to speak out in favor of stronger safety protocols. The heads of major AI companies including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and X have also called for an industry-wide slowdown on the technology’s development.

While president Donald Trump has dismissed these concerns as overreactions, some other US politicians have felt pressured to take legislative action. Hollywood unions’ fight for strict rules around gen AI’s use did not stop the entertainment industry from embracing AI, but they have given Hollywood’s laborers a way to fight back in instances when they feel that AI tools are being used to harm them.

What to watch

” Getting people to believe that SAG-AFTRA’s fears about AI should be taken seriously was one of the union’s major goals when its members voted to strike. The key to doing that, Crabtree-Ireland told me, was leading the strike with a focused message that clearly laid out to the public what was at stake and steps that could be taken to prevent worst case scenarios.

If not for that, Crabtree-Ireland thinks that the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) might not have agreed to some of the union’s demands like requiring that studios gain permission and compensate actors for the use of their AI-generated replicas. ” Had the protections not been codified, Crabtree-Ireland is confident that entertainment workers would be in a much more dire position now.