With a heavy cloud of uncertainty hanging over Hollywood in the wake of SAG-AFTRA’s decision to join the Writers Guild of America on the picket line in a strike against the studios, a trio of resident labor experts at Variety assembled last Friday to analyze the wide range of issues complicating the entertainment industry’s future.

Moderated on LinkedIn Live by Variety Intelligence Platform senior analyst Gavin Bridge, the lively interactive webinar touched on everything from transparency on streaming user data to the plethora of resulting reality shows. One consistent theme was the controversial usage of artificial intelligence, which has emerged as a sticking point in both guilds’ talks.

SAG chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland contended the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers’ proposal would have claimed the right to pay an actor with a non-speaking role a onetime fee that would give a studio permission to use a digital replica of that person’s likeness in perpetuity. The AMPTP, however, has denied any such proposal was made.

Gene Maddaus, Variety senior media writer and a labor authority, noted that was an example of the high stakes baked into the negotiations: “The fear is you agree to something today, and they get away with it forever.”

Cynthia Littleton, co-editor-in-chief of Variety, professed surprise that management in the entertainment business didn’t take a more proactive approach to something with implications as profound as generative artificial intelligence has wrought in showbiz, but she sees it as a function of a sector that has been so preoccupied with M&A it has freed up little bandwidth to prepare for much else.

“I’m frankly surprised there wasn’t more focus on this on an industry-wide level much earlier to avoid trying to put guardrails around this in a contract-negotiation setting with the clock ticking and emotions running high,” she said. “I would’ve thought there would have been people from SAG and DGA and all that on some kind of high-level AI working group.”

Maddaus revealed that while many inside and outside the industry woke up to AI relatively late, SAG-AFTRA has been studying the notion of “digital doubles” for actors for quite some time and has a fairly nuanced take that isn’t as hostile to the notion of digital simulations as some might assume. To that end, he believes SAG-AFTRA might be closer to reaching agreement on AI with AMPTP than WGA. “The writers and the studios just did not have any kind of productive discussion,” he said.

Another interesting comparison Maddaus made regarding AI and AMPTP was that of SAG-AFTRA and DGA. Because DGA managed to reach a tentative agreeement with the studios, including on the issue of AI, where the arrangement in place is the technology cannot be substituted for any function that would be performed by a human and that the DGA would be “consulted” in any instance where that’s not clear.

“That is the part that obviously struck people as just totally toothless,” he said. “Like, ‘Oh, you’ll just give me a heads-up that you’re using it?’ A lot of people didn’t like that language. But for DGA, it’s not the front-burner thing it is for the writers and for the actors.”

Littleton and Maddaus were joined on VIP+’s webinar by Variety senior TV reporter Joe Otterson, who also delved into into issues such as residuals and what viewers could be watching if there is a shortfall of scripted content as a result of production freezes.

See our full catalog of artificial intelligence articles …