In Duncan Crabtree-Ireland’s ideal world, hiring Tilly Norwood would cost just as much as hiring a real actress.
Here’s the thinking: A lack of cost savings could dissuade employers from using AI-generated performers instead of real actors like Emma Stone or Viola Davis. “In my opinion, if synthetics cost the same as a human, they’re going to choose a human every time,” Crabtree-Ireland said.
The national executive director and chief negotiator of the actors union SAG-AFTRA enumerated on his dollars-and-cents approach to what the labor group calls “synthetic performers” in an interview at the Consumer Electronics Show on Thursday. His remarks previewed the tack that the union may take when its negotiations with studios and streamers begin on Feb. 9, where AI is again expected to be a top issue.
Speaking to Puck’s Matt Belloni (a former editor of The Hollywood Reporter), Crabtree-Ireland acknowledged that the union still had unfinished business when it came to completely AI-generated actors from its last contract negotiation in 2023.
“Frankly, we didn’t get as much as I would have liked on the synthetic performance piece,” he said, noting that the union did receive notice requirements and bargaining rights if an AI performer is used in place of a human.
In recent dealmaking, though — for the union’s commercials contract, for instance, and its contract with major record labels — the labor group negotiated something different: financial penalties for using AI-generated performers. In the union’s 2024 record label deal, if employers use a synthetic voice in a track, they have to pay the same streaming royalties as they would have for a human singer.
As for the 2025 commercials pact, employers are prohibited from using synthetic performers as a cost-saving mechanism and must pay 1.5 times session fees and benefits contributions based on those fees, plus other costs, if they use a synthetic performer alongside at least one human performer.
That’s what Crabtree-Ireland suggested he would like moving forward for the union’s major contract with studios and streamers, but it remains unclear how receptive companies like Netflix and Paramount would be to that idea. And the negotiator may have another big change to AI rules on his wishlist: In the 2025 commercials deal, the union also won its first-ever restrictions in a major contract on using members’ performances to train AI tools. That’s something members wanted in 2023 and did not receive, leading to some outcry.
It will still be some time before the union and the bargaining group for studios and streamers, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, exchange formal contract proposals. And just in case the initial bargaining period starting in February doesn’t result in a deal, the union and the AMPTP have scheduled a second negotiations window before the union’s deal expires on June 30.
“Bargaining contracts is a regular and orderly way for unions and companies to address our working relationships. It doesn’t have to be a dramatic process,” Crabtree-Ireland and union president Sean Astin said in a message to members in December. They added, “We, of course, remain vigilant.”
