SAG-AFTRA's Duncan Crabtree Ireland: AI guardrails curb replica risk

The entertainment industry's AI debate has run on a separate track from the existential-risk alarms coming out of the tech sector. The Verge reached out to Disney, Netflix, Amazon, Lionsgate, and other studios using AI, as well as film startups, for their reaction to recent warnings — none responded. The unions did, and their answer was to redirect attention to what they see as concrete, present-day harms: disempowered workers, a degraded internet, disinformation, and rising energy costs.

The context for that stance is a bargaining history the body lays out directly. SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild fought over AI during the 2023 strikes, with WGA members spending 148 days on strike before studios agreed to safeguards for writers. Crabtree-Ireland says that fight mattered because if the principle of requiring permission and compensation for AI replicas had not been established, the incentive to replace human performances would have been much stronger. Wheeler draws a different line: collective bargaining, in his view, is not a substitute for government regulation, and he credits states like New York for acting without federal action.

What the body leaves open is whether those union guardrails can reach the companies driving the loudest AI warnings — Crabtree-Ireland notes they cover entertainment employers, not OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google directly. Whether the unions' focus on current harms gains traction likely hinges on how the public weighs their warnings against the doomerism that Crabtree-Ireland says has become a way for AI companies to generate buzz — especially after Coxon's exit, which he says achieved traction but left him unsure what to believe.