Sag-AFTRA votes unanimously to expand its strike to include the games industry
eurogamer.net
eurogamer.net
> In a statement posted to its official website, the union confirmed its board had "voted unanimously" to "send a strike authorisation vote to SAG-AFTRA members" in interactive media ahead of its "forthcoming bargaining dates with video game companies".
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/02/business/sag-aftra-strike-str... has more details that this is just one of multiple steps:
> While a strike authorization does not launch a strike, it can be a useful tool at the bargaining table because it gives the union the ability to declare a strike if negotiations break down. Eligible SAG-AFTRA members will be able to vote on authorizing a strike until September 25 at 5 p.m. PT, the evening before discussions resume.
If and when membership does authorize a strike, we would see language akin to this announcement: https://www.sagaftra.org/sag-aftra-members-approve-strike-au...
The headline is just flat-out 100% completely false.
At times like this I think it's good to remember Knoll's law, that other pieces you've read on Eurogamer are similarly flawed and inaccurate.
But in many places there's no need to get the members to authorize the strike, the union itself holds that power (I am at least 99% sure that's the case in Germany and France, at the very least.)
You don’t need a vote for „Warnstreik” (warning strike), which frequently is enough to make a point, which makes the „real”/open-ended strikes much more rare than otherwise.
AFAICT all strikes I’ve ever seen happen here (the plethora of different train and airport unions) were technically warning strikes and not „real” ones; but they were enough to get the unions their wins.
My reading of GP disappointed post was that they were accusing them of the latter; which is, in my opinion, underserved here.
There's a difference, but I don't really see the "world" of difference. They both seem like fundamentally irresponsible journalism. Case (a) should never happen because there's an assumption of due diligence, and case (b) should never happen because there's an assumption of truth-seeking. Not doing due diligence is pretty close to ignoring (or at the very least not caring about) the truth.
In the world we’re living in, with the incentives of modern journalism being what they are (and the state of gaming media industry specifically), I’m willing to cut more slack to people writing about things outside their comfort zone.
No other industry works like this. And thats without any AI involvement.
In that context this entire fight between creators and content publishers/distributors is a gigantic farce.
We are already drowning in an ever growing ocean of content. These people want to be rewarded without doing any single thing to reduce the size of that ocean. They think the ocean will alway expand. Its just as absurd to watch as the sub prime crisis.
BUT if you're talking about paid professional TV and film production (the context of SAG-AFTRA), probably something like 95% of content that is written, shot and edited into a final product makes it to audiences. After all, that stuff is expensive.
By the hour, most of that content is TV shows. Most of the unseen ~5% is produced pilot episodes that didn't get picked up for a full season. And a small amount will be films that halted production midway, or turned out to be so bad they weren't released.
> By the 2000s, so much information was being generated worldwide that only a small fraction (0.5% in 2015) of the digital data generated was being analyzed at all. [emphasis mine]
Not only is it ‘data analyzed’ and not ‘content consumed,’ but I can’t figure out what they mean by ‘analyzed’ either. Reading the rest of the paragraph makes me think that this is talking about things like clickstream data that businesses love to collect “so we can use big data to enhance user engagement” and then leave to pile up in their data warehouse once they discover that data analysis is hard; if so, this statistic is unrelated to the production:consumption ratio of “content” in the sense of things that people might want to look at on its own merits.
[1]: https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/attention_economy_...
For instance, many of Nintendo's games have very little voice acting, or have it done by random internal staff rather than professional actors. So most of the Mario, Kirby, Donkey Kong, Pikmin, Metroid, Animal Crossing, etc series could probably keep on going without any issues. And those franchises that did use voice acting recently (mostly Zelda) could probably just go release a few games in the old style where voices were limited to the odd grunt or yell and it wouldn't make much of a difference. Heck, Pokemon doesn't really have voice acting in its games even now, and that's the biggest media franchise in the world.
Add that to how the industry worked fine up til about the N64/PlayStation era without any voice acting (or at best, very limited acting) and how a large percentage of lower budget and indie games don't have it at all, and it's a lot less important than acting is in the film or television industry. Hollywood actors go on strike and don't appear in films or TV shows? Those industry comes to a screeching halt, since the cast is an essential part of the medium. Actors don't appear in video games? Well, guess the number of silent protagonists goes up significantly this year.
I do wish them the best of luck here and I do understand their concerns, it's just that games need actors a lot less than films do, and that gives them far less leverage as a result.
There are games that do require it, those are relevant.
However in video-games this is even more true. 'Talkies' crushed silent movies, out-competed them very rapidly in the span of a few years. But in video games this didn't happen, video games with voice acting have existed for roughly 30 years now but video games without voice acting still frequently find commercial success. In fact the most successful video game of all time, minecraft, has no voice acting despite competing against innumerable contemporary games with voice acting.
You could of course use non-union voice actors, but it's pretty easy to tell when games use random people to narrate or voice characters. It often harms the product.
I could not care less if they were voiced or not.
No disrespect to the actors, I just don't play games to sit and listen to them talk. I want to get back to gameplay as fast as possible
The situation is different for films and TV where no US-based TV show or film can be produced without the actors or writers. There are interim agreements that allow some TV shows and films to be produced. Even there, there are a lot of older or foreign TV shows and films that are slowly taking over.
I don't know what games you were thinking of, but I immediately thought of Half-Life, those games have a silent protagonist and a lot of voice acting.
When everybody and their mothers know that Charles Martinet, professional voice actor, is the now-retired voice of Mario?
But there are plenty of other examples where my post holds true. The ghosts from Luigi's Mansion 3 are voiced by Next Level Games development and marketing staff, the voice for Yoshi is Nintendo composer Kazumi Totaka, Shy Guys are voiced by Nintendo of America localisation manager Nate Bihldorff, the WarioWare cast were voiced by Treehouse (localisation) staff until WarioWare Gold, Donkey Kong 64 had Rare's staff voicing characters (like composer Grant Kirkhope as DK himself), etc.
Nintendo still uses internal staff for incidental stuff, but you can see the trend of professionalization. Tears of the Kingdom came out on the same day around the world with a large professional voice cast for every supported language. That's where Nintendo is going.
If ever there was a movie that could only have been made by one person. If ever there was a movie that if it had been made by anyone else would have fallen along so much more standard and predictable lines.
Ask an AI to create a talky 3 hour biopic with as few explosions as Oppenheimer, and people would flock to it at blockbuster levels. Go ahead. Keep clicking the generate button. Use the Nolan preset.
There are so many movies you could argue wouldn't lose anything for being AI. I wouldn't even trade those for AI, but I acknowledge they exist. Marvel has about 30 alone.
And if ever there was a technology more analogous to the bomb in terms of the need for their creators to have been more humble and prepared and less naive about their effect on the world before rather than after the invention, it's generative AI.
Even if Murphy was a nepo baby, you're right there's unfairness in Hollywood, still we can't overlook how much we still need people and we can't be so naive as to think the same unfairness in human nature would just go away rather than simply start to benefit a different set of privileged people.
In terms of acting, casting is a flexible talent sourcing process that has always cared less about the lowest rungs of talent: guest stars and co-stars. The production companies are struggling to adapt to less-lucrative streaming revenue models and dealing with the impact of covid on moviegoing. The industry is being forced to change and consolidate all at once. As much as I sympathize with the actors, they're arguing from a position of weakness, not strength. Their industry is struggling.
AI is going to bring the costs of production down 100x or more, and we're all going to be the beneficiaries of that. Content will be faster and cheaper to make, cheaper to buy, and it will tailor to an increasingly long tail of interests that have never before been served.
The task has always been storytelling, not location scouting, set decorating, lighting, electrical, blocking, capturing grids of photos, then splicing them together.
Folks that couldn't dream of starting their own film studio will now realistically be able to power than endeavor from home, and that includes these actors and writers that are complaining. The YouTube-ization effect where small creators monetize will lead to Hollywood capital outflows and more money being spent to prop up individual and small team creators.
Those at the bottom rungs are complaining about technology that will give them a bigger platform with more autonomy than they've ever had before. They won't need studio capital to execute on their dreams.
If a person now alive pictures the state of “content” getting far worse, that’s something profound to consider.
Do you value content on YouTube?
Has the internet brought you any kind of content of value?
If the answer is yes, then this is just a filtering problem.
---
edit: because of downvotes, I can't respond anymore. (Dang: you really need to fix this.)
Here's my response to a child comment:
> No thanks. I'd really rather take quality over quantity.
The domestic market supports roughly 1,000 productions a year. Most of which you won't be the target demographic for. Most of it will suck. That's a very small pipeline for "quality" to fit through.
Frankly, I don't like being limited to 1-2 "amazing" and 5-10 "good" things a year. We're not here for long, and we deserve so much more. Humanity has the capacity to do better than this.
The creativity of youths on TikTok and other platforms is absolutely inspiring, and we have barely begun to tap into it.
I've always seen more amazing content from indie creators and foreign markets than most big studios produce. Independent animation and web comics have been labors of love, and these new tools are going to empower those folks to do more than they've ever done before.
The pipeline of creators is going to widen as people see how fun and accessible it is.
There might be more noise, but there will be orders of magnitude more interesting content that fits the curvature of your interests like a fine glove. If you have a thing for space noir vampires, I'm sure someone will deliver it and do the concept justice.
If we can suck people out of busywork jobs and put them into satisfying careers delighting the human spirit, that's a great and worthwhile thing to do.
Which we have spectacularly won so far /s
No thanks. I'd really rather take quality over quantity.
*Especially* considering how immensely hard the spam problem is.
Maybe the diametric opposite of this? No, I do not value “content” and the Internet has brought us Hell, more or less.
That's your opinion. Sounds like it really sucks for you.
I fucking love the internet. Outside of freedom, steak, and whiskey, it's the single best thing on the planet.
It's an unlimited frontier with boundless possibility. I'm sorry you don't see it that way.
Edit: having perused your user page, I think I get it. You’re really passionate about the one man studio thing. I don’t think you’re wrong to do this at all, but it might be worth considering how Leo Strauss would interpret a nation of auteur content producers each producing for an audience of one. Everyone might get exactly what they want, but the coherent unified society does not get what it needs.
Meanwhile, we delve deeper into the audience-of-one dystopia that has unfurled around us. I believe we took great value from having cultural lodestars to set and recalibrate our society’s vision, and we appear to be on the cusp of replacing that entirely with autogenerated nonsense.
That is the power of solidarity: when the high profile actors say they'll go on strike to get AI banned, their voice will be heard. Almost all of those earning many millions of dollars now started as small scale actors or writers themselves, and while there are a few who got completely fucked over from affluenza, most still remember their roots and know who and what was responsible for them being able to rise where they are.
This is something that the IT industry could finally learn... for example, if the AWS Cloud engineers, support staff and all the other high paid employees went on strike in solidarity with their delivery workers who have to piss in bottles, guess how fast Amazon would clean up its act?
There's a reason why so many of the richest people in the world made their riches in tech: because tech workers couldn't be arsed to engage in collective organization, instead preferring hyper-competition with everyone fighting for himself and only himself - while not realizing that they could have enjoyed far more of a share of the profits, had they collaborated!
Anything that relies on the generosity of others is bound to fail. Moreover, if AI generated background/voice actors are actually better than non-AI ones on net, then it stands to reason that studios that use that technology will outcompete studios that don't. The SAG might be able to force all american studios to not use it, but unless they can secure some sort of global agreement, that just means american studios will get out-competed by non-american studio that don't abide by the ban.
Which is why it is backed and enforced by contracts. Unions in moviemaking, mining or construction have a long (and bloody) tradition... there's a reason why inane-seeming rules such as only members of a specific trade union being allowed to even touch something as a lighting rig, it's to prevent greedy studios from using staff with lower-paying jobs to undercut collective agreements.
Think outside of the box and now you'll realize that as inane as it sounds, what it guarantees is that money ends up as wages in the pockets of the workers instead of profit for the bosses.
> The SAG might be able to force all american studios to not use it, but unless they can secure some sort of global agreement, that just means american studios will get out-competed by non-american studio that don't abide by the ban.
Western audiences generally want Western actors and stories, Hollywood is where the money, connections and expertise is. Many have tried to outcompete American studios and they all failed - it's either survival off of "national production quotas" for TV networks for them or domestic focused/otherwise niche content ("Bollywood", anime).
This relatively simple power balance is what gives the SAG the leverage it has.
Anime are huge, Japan has been winning on all fronts with entertainment.
Edit: and of course the vast majority of anime are animated series, not movies.
IMO, it feels like hubris to draw linear projections near technological and sociological event horizons.
I am amazed how "television" is rapidly becoming interactive. We now more or less have "ractors" from Stephenson's Diamond Age, and series are being refined by fan feedback as they are being produced.
I feel confident that any pre-covid forms of entertainment are going to become as esoteric as radio plays and news reels are today.
Youtube videos today (basically post 2015ish) are mosty radio plays and news reels. The time where innovation happened on that platform has passed, too many youtubers just sit down and read a script to still images or borrowed video.
For now there's certainly no risk at all of that, unless you've seen something I haven't?
I disagree with your OP, a union's power isn't derived by its most powerful members, it's derived by solidarity against a large amount of people. If it's strong enough you can force the industry into union only contracts which makes even the powerful members of your profession need to maintain solidarity - SAG-AFTRA is the perfect example.
As for American studios outcompeted, I think that's an oversimplification of the videogame market. People buy terrible games all the time such as all the buggy AAA crap that's been coming out of certain American studios. Not to mention the awful mobile games industry which is worth billions... Quality of voice acting alone doesn't seem like something that could make or break an entire nation's game industry.
Large amounts of people yes, but it needs the high-skilled (or in case of the movie studios, the high-demand) people in the boat, those that a company can't replace on a whim. Walmart, Starbucks and the likes - corporate doesn't care even about closing down an entire location just because there's unionization talks. People dishing out coffees or stocking shelves can be replaced in an instant, corporate doesn't (need to) care.
But the high-skilled labor? Finance, HR, admin in the corporate office... if they were to strike in solidarity with the peasants, corporate would have a much more difficult time to replace them.
And they should, while their skills are “high-skilled”.
Every chance there’s the generic executive looking to cut costs, and the hard to quantify losses like reputation; security; maintenance; and longevity get pushed aside.
They won't however, as anti-union propaganda (and in IT, ungodly amounts of venture capital) has convinced them that they'd have a better chance at salary raises if they could have individual negotiations based on something they can control (i.e. work performance metrics) than if they were to collectively negotiate.
Young generations thankfully don't drink the koolaid any more, as they see how they live and how their parents lived at the same age.
I’ll believe it when I see it.
Most background "actors" are now all CGI. Imagine how it'll change in the next ten years. I imagine all actors will end up being CGI'd / AI generated.
In any supply chain whoever is able to consolidate and monopolize has economic power over their suppliers and customers. This sets off a chain reaction of consolidation as everyone else has to get bigger in order to protect their margins from being eaten by Amazon and Wal-Mart.
Unions are no different. If your industry is two or three companies you can't leave for a better job. So you have to either collectively negotiate or not negotiate at all.
While I disagree that AI is presently capable of replacing voice actors, I don't think it matters. We already have a global agreement that impacts AI, which is the copyright on the training data used in the models[0]. While you probably can't stop someone from training on public data entirely[1], you definitely can prohibit the use of derived models to generate work that competes in the same market using copyright.
US businesses were able to break the backs of working-class unions like UAW using free trade agreements with countries that don't respect organized labor. Mexico and China[2] are hideously anti-union in ways that would be patently illegal in the US. I'm not entirely sure this process would work for creative talent. It would require Hollywood to completely undermine their cultural hegemony and shut down their own productions in favor of foreign cinema from Japan and the EU - countries that have explicitly been in favor of ML training on public data.
[0] Unless you're worried about the North Korean film industry adopting AI, in which case...
[1] There are some lawsuits attacking generative AI on this basis but I expect fair use to block those cases
[2] Yes, communist China, ironically enough
My point is that actors with no value to their name or face are acting like their name and face are valuable assets.
Being COPIED is a meaningless threat. Being REPLACED is the threat they face.
Actors don’t break out by virtue of their stellar background acting work.
> Or what protects even large actors from studios using their face metrics and voice data which they have from CGI work to just use these datasets to "recreate" the actors without their consent?
Why would you bother recreating someone when you could generate someone better fit for the role?
Indeed. But it's a paying job that gives one the opportunity to learn how a film set works, and gain skills that will be useful later. Think of it as an internship, if you like. That, you'll surely agree, has some value?
>Why would you bother recreating someone when you could generate someone better fit for the role?
But, they're not doing that! They're taking background actors' images, and copy-pasting them into other scenes, and other works. That seems... Unjust? I mean, that's me, isn't it? Fair enough (I suppose), if they create an entirety synthetic person (that's totally been a thing for decades, for massive, anonymous crowds), but if you make something that's based on me, looks like me, moves like me, sounds like me, isn't that partly my creation, and shouldn't I get some credit, and some compensation?
I mean, maybe someday they may create entirely synthetic background actors, and then the point will be moot, but for now they're not quite there, and they're trying to get away with using actual peoples' work in ways that weren't ancicipated, and for which they were not compensated.
Sure. I generally agree that the loss of background actors would be harmful to actors, most of whom are poor.
> But, they're not doing that! They're taking background actors' images, and copy-pasting them into other scenes, and other works.
This is not clear. I think what you are saying and what SAG are saying is incorrect because frankly it doesn’t make sense to me. The studios have said those narratives are grossly incorrect, and I am inclined to agree simply because they do not make economic sense. Background actors are cheap and better than trying to “paste” them into future scenes. But I don’t really care because the actual thing we should care about is the near term future where background actors are simply generated entirely, which is the primary threat and completely unchallenged by the current debate being had.
That’s the problem. The argument is the problem. Not the general plight of the small actors. Any belief that they are solving their current problems or future proofing themselves is painfully naive.
If you think there is a world possible where there is a working AI generating technology that can produce good results, but it's banned because some high profile actors wanted it so, you are delusional. It's like saying cars would be banned because most prominent stable owners and horse breeders would object to that. It just not something that can happen. If that technology would exist and would be feasible financially, that's what would happen. If that'd require moving production to Mexico or Shanghai or Nauru, that's what would happen. No amount of striking would change that. It may delay it a tiny bit and give some (mostly very rich) people a tiny bit of a longer run, since some big movies rely on star power and need big names to push the marketing, but you can't just pretend the technology doesn't exist if it does.
Guessing the future is hard, but I’ll try to change your mind by comparing future change to past change.
AI came for chess. When it became superhuman, did chess professionals go out of a job? Not really; people come to the tournament for the story, for the human achievement. VAs are under the same scope: people want to see stars form, even when they are microcelebrities. I don’t doubt that there will be an increase in AI-generated content and a paying public, just like there are people right now that pay to watch AIs play chess against each other. But it doesn’t remove the genuine article.
(Contrary to what many believe will happen, they weren’t replaced by people that use AI either.)
As a cherry on top, while the game AIs are policy-based RL and can become superhuman with no human data to bootstrap it, LLMs currently are effectively SL and need to feed off human data. If the production of the latter dropped, the results would decline.
I 100% support bleeding whatever you can out of the megacorps, but I don't know if I'd rely on VA careers long term
It's hard enough for humans to understand natural language spoken by other humans, and we have the biology for it.
Current methods of "AI" or machine "learning" are not going to get us there; these methods (especially LLMs) are incapable of the understanding needed for natural language processing or actual AI.
Why?
“I can't wait for the games that let you talk to NPCs in natural language, and have them respond in natural language.”
That is as simple as popping together a speech-to-text model with an LLM and pipe the output to a text-to-speech module.
We can have a demo by tomorrow, and something actually enjoyable in a week. The challenges are purely of engineering (to for example reduce the latency so the conversation flows, and to fit the models on the average consumer’s hardware) and art direction (what do you want the npc to say?).
To make the npc act on the conversation is a bit harder, but stil within weeks.
> Current methods of "AI" or machine "learning" are not going to get us there
Get us where? :) I think you are way overthinking it. What do you think is so unachiavable about what the commenter wrote?
Even today, if you are a white or black American it is very difficult to get jobs in the entertainment technology industry. You are told it is because the jobs are uber competitive and the workers are the best of the best...but then you see the workers that actually work there and they can barely speak articulate sentences.
Regardless of how you see the future playing out, it’s pretty gross to characterize a people’s fight for their livelihood as “dumb”. Maybe it’s dumb to you, but they’ve given their lives to their work so we can enjoy the content they have a hand in making.
Imagine the day that your skills are completely replaceable with AI and your attempts to fight it are met with “that’s dumb.” What an impersonal and apathetic attitude to have.
is there an empathic approach that also accepts reality?
Or we could talk about how we could leverage this new technology to the benefit of the voice actors, by reducing their working hours, improving their working conditions, and giving them a large cut of the new profits the new technology unlocks.
Buuuut those conversations under this system have been DOA since the luddites. It seems profits and benefits for workers must be extracted at the gunpoint of government regulation and unionization. I agree that it'd be great if that wasn't necessary.
Yep. Those of us who’ve lived in the west have never seen massive worker uprisings, although they’re present throughout history. A society that becomes so unequal that it can’t provide opportunity for its people faces a reckoning.
What’s so damning about this is that the ultra wealthy know this and are planning for it.
everyone discussion has someone that’s always like "it'll only assist existing people of that profession"
and here I am training on voices I have the rights to (by simply asking, and with a release form), adding it to media including games with no prior experience, either in some wav output, or rendering dynamically pretty quickly (not quick enough but its coming)
I just don't see the basic economics that support the person with the voice for getting paid for that work at any analog to today's arrangements, and definitely not more. 4 year olds are going to be able to do what I'm doing. the supply will completely outstrip the demand.
I can see studios with prior obligations being committed to giving some kind of royalty, but the history doesn't suggest that those studios will be the one that taps into the market. All of Hollywood exists because it routed around entrenched interests in New York City by going to the other side of the continent and ignoring the contracts, unions and industry cartels. What exactly suggests the same thing won't happen again? That's what I'm missing here. Where is the discussion that puts the feelings aside and doesn't act like they're ignoring that just for the sake of not feeling like they're surrendering.
If I successfully offered something to the market and scaled it up, which I don't have ambitions to do but open to, but if I did and then it fulfills the entertainment register in people's minds and all of this stuff with SAG-AFTRA is moot. If it was procedurally generated trash, the same people that say "I just leave this on in the background" or "its a guilty pleasure" are going to be the same consumers. I just don't see the other outcome, the market is going to get filled with this stuff, and human only content is going to be a novelty for enthusiasts.
Hey, we do need *a lot* of people for the piles of skulls the Terminators crush with their metal feet in our inevitable future.
Imagine factory workers being replaced by replica androids, and the workers are upset because the androids are using their individual “likeness” rather than that the androids are taking their jobs.
They are fighting the wrong fight. The vast majority of actors represented here do not lose anything more than the factory workers under the particular thing they’re fighting against.
This isn't mostly about background actors -- digital extras are already widely used for things like large crowd scenes. And it's far cheaper currently to hire an extra to be a bartender who hands the main character a drink, than to 3D render that -- so it's not about that either.
It's about studios wanting to own the likenesses and voices of every actor they hire for a project, so they can hire someone with a really unique look for a single episode, then be able to produce the rest of the season with a cheaper actor and use AI to do a face swap and voice swap.
And that's unacceptable. Actors should be able to retain the rights to their likenesses, end of story. A standard contract shouldn't require that an actor signs over all rights to their likeness for an entire series just in order to be paid for a single episode. That's not right.
This is exactly what the studios tried to demand in their original offer, and it's the reason why SAGAFTRA went on strike instead of negotiating.
It also prevents an aspiring writer from using AI tools to help with the writing process -- not do it all for them, but work co-operatively like copilot and other auto-complete tools do for programming.
Even using tools like Photoshop, Blender, Unreal Engine (as used in shows like The Mandalorian) could be dicey as they incorporate AI models and techniques. -- Would things like NVidia's AI upscaling tech count for raytraced CGI? (I ask as it looks like SAG-AFTRA are after a blanket AI ban, not just around actor voice/image or writer text.)
Another thing that the production companies could do is to use public domain audio, video, and scripts as SAG-AFTRA cannot ban the use if AI on those.
The union is just saying that if you want the rights to use an actor's likeness without actually employing the actor to act, you have to pay separately for that, and pay what it's worth.
Which makes perfect sense. In your example of a de-aged Luke Hammill in the Mandalorian, Luke Hammill was paid $$$ for that. They didn't get to cast him for free just because he was in previous Star Wars movies. Nor should they.
That's all this is about. Go ahead and use AI, but pay the actors for their likeness. Don't force them to give it away for free as a condition of doing a single episode.
If studios can apply their likeness to a cheaper actor, they can also apply a made up likeness to a cheaper actor. Or the likeness of a model. Or the likeness of a volunteer who thinks it’d be cool.
The only case where this applies, maybe, is for characters with speaking roles that have enough positive reception that they have negotiating power for their cost to return for future works. But that’s a tiny segment far removed from the majority of this guild. And if it’s actually sensible to do this over hiring the actor then they could probably just do this from the beginning.
This isn't primarily about background actors (who usually aren't even members of SAG-AFTRA to begin with, because they usually don't even have acting training/experience or anything).
This is primarily about working actors with lines but who aren't big stars able to negotiate their contracts -- we're talking non-lead series regulars, guest stars, recurring guest stars, and the like. Because most actors are working for union minimums unless they're a series lead.
In other words, the actors who make up 95% of the union.
the obvious near term future is that they don’t even get the single episode.
Your example is silly. Hire someone who is funny looking to be a bartender and then have someone cheaper do them later on? My dude, the funny looking bartender is already going to be as cheap as it gets because they’re a nobody actor. And the barrier to face swapping a generated face that is just as good as the funny looking dude’s onto a different nobody from the beginning is very small.
Glancing through them, these seem reasonable, but it is a difficult Union battle nonetheless.
Anyone know how Netflix agreed to air (and create a likeness to itsself) such an episode. I enjoyed the episode, and was impressed with Netflix's liberal stance on allowing this, and impressed with the cautionary tale it tells -- i'm surprised because it seems against Netflix's interests.
How much better did Patrick Stewart make Oblivion? How better was the game from him being part of it?
Maybe stop and consider what led you here, and if this is really a position you sincerely believe and wish to defend.
I doubt that the working actor who is in the background of you favorite TV show does much for your experience. But he still needs to get paid.
I don't remember specific actor adding much to my experience ever.
If that's true, maybe you've only played games without quality voice actors, and they should have tapped into some SAG-AFTRA talent. Because if you had played any of the games I mentioned, it would be absurd to claim that none of voice actors added much to the experience.
To answer you new question, "Are you seriously telling me there is absolutely no as skilled people available outside SAG-AFTRA?"
No, I never said anything at all like that. I am only saying voice actors can add value and be memorable.
You could find a comparably talented person outside the SAG-AFTRA, who could do an amazing job. But that new person would also add to the experience, be memorable, and deserve recognition and remuneration.
> and I often will play the game on silent with some other source of audio playing alongside.
GP doesn’t listen to any sounds coming from games. That means sound effects, background music, etc.
That claim is so interesting to me. I don’t doubt it. But following GP’s logic, he must also think music composers for games aren’t important either.
Imagine Ocarina of Time being played without sound lol. Or even a music game being played without sound.
Or even games like Overwatch. There might be accessibility modes but if you don’t turn them on, you’re going to be SOL when someone on the enemy team does an audio cue and is about to ult and you can’t see them.
I do play games without sound sometimes. (For example, you don’t really need audio cues for League and I won’t listen to sound if my hair is drying and I don’t want to put the headphones on.) But it depends on the game and the circumstances, of course. That’s what I think a reasonable person would say lol
Back to specifically voice acting, I do recall the Overwatch voice actors having a huge fan base early on.
But I also pay for musical soundtracks separately if I am able (Bandcamp.com), those musicians can get money from me by making the album available for purchase and I do.
But if I recall the musicians are not on strike and not the topic of the article that was shared.
I know, but you said in general that you don’t listen to any sound. Maybe you shouldn’t have ended your original comment like that lol.
When I play games I turn off Music, and skip cut scenes, I want to play a game not watch a movie. If i want a movie I watch a movie...
the FPS I only leave on sounds required for the game, and most of the time I have my own music, youtube or some podcast on in the background as i am playing.
For non-FPS games, I turn off the sound completely.
I suspect my style of game play is more common that you would believe.
If voice actors disappears from gaming, I would not notice at all.
What % of people playing games do you think play it this way?
Most FPS games that have ranked competitive modes put very significant audio cues in. If you’re playing without sound, you’re freely giving up a significant advantage. Often audio is mechanically important.
However our preferences aren't the point of the article. It's the actors being cloned by the generative stuff that's in fashion without compensation that is.
As a gamer, based on the output of the image generators and chatgpt that i've seen, games making use of "AI" generated content will be borefests and I'll skip them anyway.
But then you miss out on the story. (Also, cut scenes usually aren’t that long lol.) I do sometimes speed up when NPCs speak because I can read faster. But when I do this too much, it actually begins to feel like the game is pointless.
> I suspect my style of game play is more common that you would believe.
Nope. If you read my original comment, I also acknowledged that I sometimes play games without sound. I also use YouTube while playing games.
Very rarely do I care.. I am wanting to blow things up, shoot something, etc.
if I want the story I can just go find the YT Video someone made of all the cut scenes played back to back...
//for the record, I am the type that loves spoliers, and reads about the ending of a movie while I am watching it... it does not "spoil" it for me.
But yes, a point I made in my original comment is that this all depends on the specific game and your circumstances whether and how much sound you listen to.
You'll be able to dial knobs for the voice itself - pitch, timbre, gender, age. Then adjust more knobs for emotional control (or infer it from other cues).
This will allow for fully-dynamic storytelling where the characters know your name and can respond to your infinite array of actions.
This tech already exists now though it is somewhat in its infancy.
(Yes, maybe the rest of the industry should have unionised a long time ago, but it hasn't happened)
Voice actors are important these days, but they aren't the 'movie stars' of gaming. The real stars of game development are usually unknown individuals developing internal tools and asset workflows, endlessly tweaking numbers to try and make a game 'feel' just right, doing CPU/GPU profiling and optimization, or doing tedious-but-essential QA work, tracking down those hard-to-replicate bugs.
And not everyone is in agreement on the whole AI issue. The hype/fear bubble is likely to deflate, and IMHO, AI-based tools are more likely to empower creators than replace them.
Some fictional programmer union wants AI, actors union does not want AI
Both strike, who wins?
Well, it would be easier for non-unionized workers to empathize with unionized if they stopped the ridiculous cancelling/blackmailing/ostracizing of workers who take up “union work”. It’s beyond anticompetitive to go on strike while simultaneously making it career suicide for a young professional who just graduated or something from accepting what would otherwise be a career defining opportunity. The WAG is notorious for this.
It's gig work that you're incredibly lucky to get a consistent amount of. And it takes a lot of training. A lot of these people are servers at a restaurant or drive for Uber to make ends meet. They're not making programming-level money on the side, nowhere even close.
The union is trying to ensure that the minimum payments for voice actors are reasonable, and that if you do get lucky enough to get a decent amount of work during the year, that it is something you can live on. (And remember that you'll probably audition for 50+ projects for every 1 project you land.)
They're working full-time, long hours (lots of unpaid overtime), and pay often isn't great even for programmers, but especially for non-programming roles (outside of the largest/most successful studios, mostly in the US, where it can be a lot better).
I'm sure they'd also love to do part-time gig work and be guaranteed a full-time income from it, but that's usually not an option. Many programmers leave games after a while for better-paying work, less stress, and/or more job security elsewhere.
Yes conditions could be better for programmers, but they're nowhere near as bad as for voice actors.
> I'm sure they'd also love to do part-time gig work and be guaranteed a full-time income from it, but that's usually not an option.
And voice actors would love that too. But they don't get it, that's the point. And "part time" is hiding the fact that, as I said elsewhere, they're often preparing for 50 auditions to get a single gig. It's not like there's an agency that just hands out work.
I remember trying to organize Bay Area tech workers in the '90s. Y'all were not receptive at all. The attitude seemed to be that tech workers are too precious for a union. Those were for garbagemen, not professionals.
Enjoy your working conditions. It's nice when results are proportional to effort.
I'm saying this as someone in support of unions in general, but also in support of our ai future, if a little fearful of the Terminator scenario playing out.
I don't think unions can stop ai from taking jobs, I think maybe all unions should ban together for a general strike to force a ubi vote, so that when ai does take jobs people can still eat and pay rent.
The script-writing AI, voice AI, actor-image AI will be used to create a multitude of options, and all but one will be thrown away anyways. Perfection isn't necessary, realtime isn't necessary, and a human correcting things here and there is always still an option. Compute resources are also far less limited, it doesn't have to fit in a "car" form factor and power consumption.
Isn’t that what we are asking for though? We know there will be fewer people working in the industry. We want to ensure those who will work will be paid fairly.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0611/why-movies-...
You assume that is not already happening? How many physical effects people where displaced or had to find different things to do when CGI automated large amounts of physical effects?
How much bigger would be budgets need to be to do physical effects instead of CGI?
I am sure their are tons of other examples of automation and technology that allows a movie to be made with far less people.
That is the natural progress of things.
The Trump checks/Biden checks caused too much inflation for that to be politically tenable.
From what I've seen the conversation is a lot more nuanced. It's not "yes AI" vs "no AI." It's more around can you use my likeness, writing, or artwork to train AI with minimal to zero compensation (what studios want) or with compensation structure both sites negotiate (what unions what). Or can the result of AI be used to undermine labor. Currently, the output of AI isn't up to expected standards for much of anything. Studios are obviously trying to use that output to replace "writing credit" which has a historical structure with higher compensation. The person they pay to go "punch it up" won't get that. The resulting product would be mostly the same, but the person polishing and finishing it does a lot more work with less compensation.
AI is also just a relatively minor part of what unions are trying to negotiate.
Pit the old creatives against the young ones. Nice.
https://ew.com/tv/mandy-moore-pennies-for-this-is-us-streami...
tl;dr - Mandy Moore (a very big name celeb) talks about receiving residual checks of 81 cents for her show that streams on Hulu. I'm not interested whether or not she's rich and doesn't need the money, but if she's being paid fairly with regards to value she's providing.
Personally, if my contributions were bringing my company an incredible amount of revenue, I would be annoyed if I wasn't being paid accordingly.
UBI will not stop landlords from sweeping it all. UBI won’t work until we either have rent control or abolish private ownership-for-rent of housing.
When Microsoft increased their housing stipend for interns, all the surrounding temporary housing and Airbnbs went up by that amount a few months after.
Valve isn't really a good example to use here... they have a policy of not hiring union VAs (and the few they have worked with in the last 5 years or so have been publicly mistreated, see how they treated Merle Dandridge) and have definitely made new lines by piecing together old recording sessions in cases where the actor wanted more money or in cases where the actor was deceased.
Actors' appearances can be replaced by AI. Their voices can be too.
Actors' performances cannot. Not now and not any time in the near future. Not vocally, not facially, not physically. AI can map one vocal performance to another voice. It can't produce a vocal performance full of emotion that nails exactly what the scene is about, in the first place.
Oh sure these computer programs can play chess, but can they beat a grandmaster? Not now and not any time in the near future! - some guy in the early 90s probably.
I don't know how to describe it except that performing a role in a fully believable way is akin to writing an engaging believable novel, which AI can't do, and is nowhere near doing, either.
If you try taking a beginner's acting class at an acting studio in e.g. LA or NY, you'll quickly see how difficult and artistic good screen acting is. How hard it is to perform lines in a way that seems like real life, as opposed to seeming like bad acting (melodramatic exclaiming of lines).
Of course, a lot of people don't understand just how difficult and skilled screen acting is, because the entire point is that you're not supposed to notice acting at all. You're supposed to be fooled into thinking these are somehow real characters.
Art was also thought to require human creativity until recently. We’re not going to produce a new paradigm of art or Picasso level impact, but the median artist can be replaced today in most ways imho.
I'm sorry, but you have clearly never worked in film and television, and certainly never in casting. Because your impression of acting is simply wrong.
Casting offices will audition literally hundreds of actors to find the one who can bring the right unique take to the role, that no other actor can. There are TV shows and plays that simply don't get made because they can't find an actor who can play the part with the needed charm and magnetism for the specific role. I'm not talking Oscars, I'm talking bread-and-butter network comedies and procedurals.
People watch shows and movies for the story/script, but they also watch them for the unique spark and charisma that the actors bring just as much. AI is not replicating that in the "very near future", not even close.
It is a skill set with way more supply than demand.
Expecting to be one of the lucky ones employed in this creative field, and then also dictating the terms of that employment is not going to happen.
If the actors unions become too overreaching the studios will just replace them with new non-union actors (or AI trained by non-union actors).
I don't know of any other studios who include so many "big name" actors.
Aside from the consequences of their collective ability to withhold labor and ability to penalize those who don't join their union, can anyone explain why we should support them?
Why should I be glad to see actors strike for more $, any more than I would be happy to see plumbers strike so that they can charge me even more for work?
Is this really what we want? Maybe it's time for Hollywood to change and grow away from unions and not proliferate into other areas of creative production.
https://deadline.com/2023/07/sag-aftra-making-moves-to-enlis...
This is a gentle way of saying that there are far too many unnecessary people in Hollywood.
And I also don't really care about those people - most of them seem to lost any connection with outside world and passion for the craft. The only motivation for most of them is feeding their overgrown egos.
Writers/actors/directors are kind of different - I would expect them to take a source material and create a show that is true (as much as possible given the media format) to the original source. Ideally without showing contempt for said original material. Either that or create something original - something that has new and fresh ideas. And blindly replacing one sex for another or one color of person for another is not my idea of "new" or "fresh".
To me it seems like they decided that these things don't matter anymore. So I don't mind if they go belly up.
I also find this to be a losing battle, and its kind of rich too, since Hollywood only grew by disregarding all the entrenched interested in NYC. To think the same won't happen to Hollywood or this current incarnation requires being stuck in every stage of grief, specifically bargaining and denial.
Its not apathy if some of us can skip straight to acceptance of the terminal illness of being superceded.
Keep Hollywood writers away from games.
I have not been negatively impacted by this strike in any meaningful sense.
But it is striking to see just how puppet-like every talking head on TV is, to the point they have nothing themselves to say unless they have a gaggle of writers pumping all the lines you hear.
For a really good insight on just who becomes these writers, the documentary about the creation of national lampoon out of Harvard shows you all the smart nerds that truly write your content
I see three possible ways forward:
1) Generative AIs are used on the fly by games to create NPCs the player can truly roleplay with
2) VA strike re-calibrates consumer expectations so we can go back to RPGs with text dialogue only, possibly with LLMs instead of scripted conversations. Either way, an improvement over:
3) Continue with the status quo.
Listed in order of preference. From an RPG gamer perspective, the worst outcome is that both human writers and human VAs keep their jobs.
Asking technology companies to not use AI in building their games is simply absurd.
It’s hilarious to me that people on HN whose literal job is to build things that replace menial jobs can’t see this. How many of you are working on a SaaS that replaces hundreds of paper pushers?
“They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-rea...
In a parallel here, the SAG-AFTRA actors are not against AI, per se. They're against their likenesses being scanned for 1 days pay and then being used in perpetuity forever without their consent or further payment.
Estimates show that movies may be losing up to 15% of potential revenue due to lack of promotion by actors.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/box-offi...
Something tells me having the electricians show up on the red carpet may not have recovered that loss
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/01/top-hollywood-exec-made-498-...
Honestly, if you side with management, you're kind of a sucker.
Siding with anti-technology rent-seekers seems far sillier.
"According to SAG-AFTRA, only 14% of its members make at least $26,470 annually to qualify for SAG-AFTRA healthcare coverage"
This doesn't seem like the majority of actors in the union are being paid well
https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/act...
Not sure why one would need to go through an apprenticeship to operate a machine as compared to needing to go through one in order to learn how to stitch well. The entire point of the machines was to cut down on labor costs and increase production, which the company could do with or without the Luddite workers; they simply brought in unskilled workers, because the machine didn't need all of the skill (and therefore higher labor cost) of Luddite craftspeople.
The same will happen with AI here, if companies can cut down labor costs, what will the current laborers do? They are striking, yes, but just like the Luddites, if there comes a technology that can replace them with cheaper labor, then that's what companies will do, and I don't think the current laborers have any recourse (in the long term, not the short term, as I know Luddites tried to destroy the machines but in the end they were defeated).