Around 10-15 Percent of SAG-AFTRA Membership Wants AI Blocked, CEO Tells Web Summit

Hollywood’s identity crisis was in focus at Lisbon’s Web Summit on Thursday.

SAG-AFTRA‘s national executive director and CEO Duncan Crabtree-Ireland was joined by Dan Neely, the co-founder and CEO of Vermillio, an AI licensing and protection platform aimed at helping humanity thrive in the age of generative AI. They spoke with Deadline‘s Stewart Clarke about performers’ rights, coexisting with AI and the potentially landmark NO FAKES Act (Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act), U.S. federal legislation currently in process (and in the U.K.) that is designed to protect a person’s voice and visual likeness against unauthorized digital replica uses.

“I think that there’s been a sense that if we put the right basic rules in place, there is a way to coexist with AI,” said Crabtree-Ireland at the summit. “I think there’s been an understanding and an acceptance of the fact that no one can stop it, no one can block it. Some of our members would like us to block it. I hear from them every day, and they’re angry that we aren’t,” he said. When asked what percentage of SAG-AFTRA’s 160,000-strong membership would like to see AI completely obstructed, he replied: “If I were estimating, I’d say something like 10 percent, maybe 15 percent.”

Crabtree-Ireland is buoyed by the collective agreement on three basic principles when it comes to adopting artificial intelligence in the entertainment space — consent, control and compensation. “When you’re taking someone’s image and doing that, those should be present,” he said. The fight for ethical use of AI is ongoing, he maintained, and said that much of SAG-AFTRA’s motivation is the shared certainty on the need for the human spark of creativity in our work. “We had a big strike in 2023. My favorite picket sign from that strike, a writer’s picket sign, not one of ours […] was ‘ChatGPT doesn’t have childhood trauma,'” said Crabtree-Ireland, “and I think that’s right. The human condition is uniquely human, and just mimicking it or copying it because you’ve been trained on it doesn’t mean that you can actually generate that spark of creativity.”

He continued: “Some of our members really want to work with AI tools for augmentation, but none of them want to be replaced by AI because they love the act of creation. That’s why they do this. It’s an incredibly hard career. It’s so hard to be an artist in this world. But you do it because you love it. […] What you want to do is have the chance to do it, and yes, have tools that help you expand your creativity. And so that’s the sweet spot of this. And frankly, if we could settle on that, and then spend the rest of the AI resources towards curing some more diseases or some other things like that, I think we could get on board with that.”

Neely, meanwhile, was bullish on his platform’s ability to course-correct. “We’ve developed a technology that allows us to detect when unauthorized uses happen,” he began to Clarke. “And then, once we understand that, and someone decides, ‘Hey, I’m actually okay giving consent now for something to take place. Here are the guardrails under which that can happen.’ So we have a guardrails product that says, ‘You can make these things,’ [or] ‘You can’t make those things.'”

The Vermillio model itself ingests content from major intellectual property holders such as music labels, studios, book publishers, and talent. Unsurprisingly, a gray area has swiftly emerged — performers may suspect their likeness is being used but can’t say it is definitively their voice or look. “We have metrics to say what it is and what it is not,” explained Neely. “Maybe 30 percent Duncan’s voice, 30 percent of my voice and 40 percent original — we need to be able to determine at those levels what’s going on,” he said as an example. “So Duncan could block my right and I could block his.” The company are expecting “much more clarity” around that specific topic in the next 12 months.

Crabtree-Ireland jumped in here to say SAG-AFTRA has a lower bar in this regard: “If it is going to be perceived as your voice, if it clearly sounds like you or if it looks like you — this is also an issue in the audiovisual world — then that is a replica.” He brought up the case of Scarlett Johansson, who threatened industry titan OpenAI with legal action for allegedly copying and imitating her voice after she refused to license it to the company. “I think OpenAI ultimately did the right thing and took that down. They did not admit that her voice was used, but it sure sounded a lot like her,” said Crabtree-Ireland, though he conceded it’s proved impossible to stay ahead of the technology advancements in AI.

One major problem for the industry is that sense of built-in fandom. “Very few people are creating unique and interesting things and just saying, ‘Oh, this is going to survive on its own,'” said Neely. “What happens is, no, they attach themselves to something that already has fandom and fame. So I’m going to go use an actor’s likeness, their name, their image, their voice. I’m going to use an aspect of that because that’s going to drive people to go listen to it, watch it, do something with it. And so that’s what’s happening more often than not.” That, he added, is why the issue of likeness is so rife.

Check out Web Summit’s panel with The Hollywood Reporter editor-in-chief Maer Roshan here. The conference runs Nov. 9-12.