VIDEO GAME ACTORS ARE NOW ON STRIKE.HERE'S WHY

Hollywood’s video game performers went on strike after negotiations with game industry giants that began more than a year and a half ago came to a halt over artificial intelligence protections.

Leaders of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists have billed the issues behind the labor dispute — and AI in particular — as an existential crisis for performers. Game voice actors and motion capture artists’ likenesses, they say, could be replicated by AI and used without their consent and without fair compensation.

The union says the unregulated use of AI poses “an equal or even greater threat” to performers in the video game industry than it does in film and television because the capacity to cheaply and easily create convincing digital replicas of performers’ voices is widely available.

SAG-AFTRA negotiators said gains had been made over wages and job safety in the video game contract, but that the two sides remained split over the regulation of generative AI.

A spokesperson for the video game producers, Audrey Cooling, said the studios offered “meaningful AI protections” to performers in their proposal, but SAG-AFTRA’s negotiating committee said that the studios’ definition of who constitutes a “performer” is key to understanding the issue of who would be protected.

“The industry has told us point blank that they do not necessarily consider everyone who is rendering movement performance to be a performer that is covered by the collective bargaining agreement,” SAG-AFTRA Chief Contracts Officer Ray Rodriguez said at a news conference last week afternoon. He said some physical performances are being treated as “data.”

Here are five things to know about the strike:

WHO IS COVERED UNDER THE CONTRACT?