Justine Bateman
Angela Weiss/Getty Images for Art Los Angeles Contemporary
Although SAG-AFTRA officially reached a tentative agreement on a new deal with studios and streamers earlier this week, Justine Bateman isn’t very happy with the terms surrounding artificial intelligence.
The actress, author and filmmaker told MSNBC’s Ali Velshi on Friday that actors should only agree to the deal “if they don’t want to work anymore.” If they want to be replaced by synthetic objects made by generative AI, why not ?”
SAG-AFTRA members are expected to begin voting to ratify the agreement on Tuesday after the new contract was approved by 86 percent of the union’s board members on Friday.
Velshi further pointed to a recent story from in which DreamWorks founder Jeffrey Katzenberg predicts that AI will dramatically reduce the number of workers needed to produce animated films.
In response, Bateman, who worked as a union consultant on generative AI, said she felt studio executives were “choosing to no longer be in the film and series business.”
“I think they like to think of themselves as tech barons or something like that. But if you do projects that don’t involve people, then you’re no longer in the film business,” she added. “People who don’t want people there have never actually been on set. They don’t know what it’s like to make a film.”
Bateman said of herself as a filmmaker: “She never uses generative AI. I like what people do as members of a crew, as members of the writers, the editors, the cameramen, the make-up artists, the actors.”
Velshi also asked the filmmaker what entertainment and media consumers can do to help protect creatives in the industry who want to avoid using AI. Bateman said it “depends on what you want.”
“I mean, soon they’ll have customized movies for you based on your individual viewing habits,” she explained. “And they won’t bother copyrighting it because it’ll be like Kleenex. They’ll make a million of these an hour, they won’t care. …You can get scanned and put into these pieces. And there will be a novelty that eventually wears off because I think people will still be hungry for something real and human.”
She continued: “The railway line is divided. A train track says, “Okay, we’re going to engage in these kinds of negotiations with the cannibals and talk about how you’re going to cut off my foot, and are you going to grill it or boil it, and what kind of sauce are you going to put on it.” ?’” This track is the one that features generative AI.”
But Bateman said she’s on a very different path: “I’m going to make human things for a human audience with human crews, casts and so on. And we’ll see what happens.”
Following her discussion on MSNBC, Bateman took to X (formerly Twitter) early Saturday to say she planned to read the actual contract, not the summary, so she could explain “the breach.” [AI] Permissions that the AMPTP has over you. I am very disappointed that SAG leadership and the SAG committee did not follow my guidance on this [AI] problems.”
She added in her thread: “I have said from the beginning that the deployment is generative in nature [AI] will collapse the structure of this business. I want the actors and crew to have enough self-respect to turn the tables and piss off the CEOs when it happens. They will leave you with nothing to lose.”
Later in the day, Bateman shared another thread on X to make the actors “aware of some of the language in that.” [AI] Part of the tentative SAG agreement.” After listing several points, she noted what she called “the most serious issue,” namely the “inclusion of “Synthetic Actors” or “AI Objects” that resemble humans in the Agreement. This gives studios/streamers the green light to use human-looking AI objects instead of hiring a human actor.”
“It’s one thing to use GAI to create a King Kong or a flying snake (although this pushes out many VFX/CGI artists), it’s another thing to use an AI object as a human character instead of a real actor to let play,” she added. “For me, this inclusion is anathema to a union contract in general.”
Although the contract has not yet been publicly announced, national managing director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland explained several aspects of the contract at a press conference on Friday, including AI protections that cover consent and compensation when parts of an actor’s face or body are used in the Production uses a “synthetic” actor through generative AI.