Before David Shore watched his daughter graduate from Boston University in May, the two of them made a pit stop at a picket line. Shore, showrunner forand a native of London, Ont., had been on strike with the Writers Guild of America for the past three weeks and was a member of the guild’s negotiating committee. It so happened that Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, one of the sources of the union’s ire, was giving the class of 2023′s commencement speech.
Though jurisdictions such as the European Union are taking steps to force the makers of AI models to be transparent around the material, to conduct risk assessments and avoid copyright infringement, government tech regulation generally. So unions are turning to their collective agreements to build in guardrails before precedents might be set for replacing their workers’ creations.
It may still be possible for actors to get further protections. The Directors Guild of America, for instance, secured language in a new collective agreement The Union of British Columbia Performers, an ACTRA division with a separate collective agreement, signed on to a contentious extension through 2025 with studios in July. It allowed a historic 5-per-cent raise in minimum compensation at the expense of negotiating any other terms until the extension ends. Though 78.5 per cent of members voted in favour, dozens of ACTRA members signed a letter before the vote discouraging B.C. actors from accepting the offer during the SAG-AFTRA strike.