What Hollywood thinks about existential AI warnings

The studios have been silent, but Hollywood’s biggest labor unions aren’t buying the AI apocalypse narrative.

The studios have been silent, but Hollywood’s biggest labor unions aren’t buying the AI apocalypse narrative.

As the tech sector sounds alarms about AI’s potential to destroy humanity, entertainment labor groups are urging the public to stay focused on what’s already happening. The Verge reached out to Disney , Netflix , Amazon , Lionsgate , and other studios who have started using AI, as well film startups focused on bringing generative AI into the mainstream to ask for their reaction to the recent warnings surrounding the technology. None have responded to our request for comment. The Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and Writers Guild of America East (WGAE) did, however.

The AI tools used in entertainment production differ from the AI systems that have sparked a recent round of whistleblowing and apocalyptic declarations. They do not seem to be as existentially dangerous as the AI systems that drove former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon to quit his job and prompted Anthropic alignment lead Evan Hubinger to insist that the technology could “kill all humans” at some point “within the next decade.”

But despite the differences between entertainment-focused AI and the models developed by Anthropic and OpenAI, AI models that generate digital facsimiles of actors and attempt to replicate traditional filmmaking tools pose a threat to some human jobs. Similar to the way that the Hollywood unions advocated for protections and increased oversight around AI’s use during the 2023 strikes , Coxon’s Anthropic exit has inspired a wave of AI researchers to speak out in favor of stronger safety protocols. The heads of major AI companies including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and X have also called for an industry-wide slowdown on the technology’s development . While president Donald Trump has dismissed these concerns as overreactions, some other US politicians have felt pressured to take legislative action . Hollywood unions’ fight for strict rules around gen AI’s use did not stop the entertainment industry from embracing AI, but they have given Hollywood’s laborers a way to fight back in instances when they feel that AI tools are being used to harm them.

When I recently spoke with the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists’ (SAG-AFTRA) chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree Ireland, he told me that the union recognized early on how AI could impact its members’ livelihoods. Most people might not have been familiar with the idea of studios completely replacing human actors with digital replicas, but SAG-AFTRA understood that it had an opportunity to shape public opinion about AI in Hollywood by “ speaking out about it at the earliest possible point we could.”

“We bargained for and achieved enforceable, meaningful guardrails around how this technology can be implemented by the major employers in our industry,” Crabtree-Ireland explained.