(I’m trialling a new time for your weekly Monday Editor’s Letter. Let me know your thoughts.)
Very few of us would have named Hollywood as a bellweather industry for societal movements. Yet that is exactly what is being played out on the first picket lines to grace those Hills in 60 years.
The C-suite should watch closely: this is closer to your sector than you think.
As Lilly Wachowski, Co-Creator and Co-Director of The Matrix film series, noted: “I strongly believe the fight we [are] in right now in our industry is a microcosm of a much larger and critical crisis.”
The crisis? Artificial intelligence; in particular, its impact on how the industry of cinema and the silver screen will write, film and screen original content in the future.
On Thursday, the Screen Actors Guild—American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA)—went on strike. Like the Writers Guild of America (WGA), which is also on strike, one of the biggest disputes was over AI. The contention is with streamers and studios, which include Warner Bros., Netflix, Disney, Apple, Paramount and others. Both actors and writers fear their work, or they themselves, will become the source of new, cheap, AI-created content.
An example. If AI is used as a direct replacement of writers, that is a problem, argues the WGA. If AI is used to write scripts that humans edit for lower fees, that is also a problem.
The situation becomes more complex for actors because their relationship with AI is the inverse of many other jobs, even script-writing: AI is trained on actors, not the other way around. The contention becomes how protected actors are on the use of their likenesses. A-list actors joining the picket line and walking away from premieres signifies the strength of feeling within the industry.
For months we have been dissecting and discussing the impact AI will have on the workforce, productivity, bottom lines and leadership. Much of it has been abstract. Some of it has been prescient. Yet this is the first moment these conversations have, one, run parallel in multiple sectors at once for the public to map, and two, evolved into a powerful, joined-up and incredibly public push-back.
AI is more than asking ChatGPT to write evergreen content, fix snags in lines of code or build a leadership progression chart for a manager. It will have real impacts with real consequences, and the C-suite is expected to have real answers—from both your Boards and your teams.
The proposals put forward SAG-AFTRA and WGA are not luddite, but they are increasingly protectionist in the face of a cynical executive response. The result? Hollywood has pressed pause on their entire industry, a consequence it and its leaders call ill afford to make—no sectors can afford to make, in fact.
Other sectors can watch, however, and its leaders can learn.
