Video game industry workers are on strike. Here's why

ANGELS — Hollywood video game industry leaders voted to strike Thursday after negotiations with gaming industry giants over artificial intelligence protections broke down nearly two years ago.

Leaders of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists have called labor disputes and AI in particular an existential crisis for artists. The voices of video game actors and motion capture artists, 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, if not greater, threat to artists in the video game industry than it does to those in film and television, because the ability to cheaply and easily create convincing digital replicas of artists' voices is widely available.

“We will not accept a contract that allows companies to abuse AI to the detriment of our members. Enough is enough. When these companies get serious about proposing a deal that our members can live and work in, we will be there, ready to negotiate,” SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher said in a statement Wednesday.

Here are five things to know about the strike, which begins at 12:01 a.m. Friday:

The agreement covers more than 2,500 off-camera voiceover artists, on-camera performers (motion capture, stunts), stunt coordinators, singers, dancers, puppeteers and background performers, according to SAG-AFTRA.

The union was negotiating with an industry-wide bargaining group of signatory video game companies, including divisions of Activision and Electronic Arts. The companies are Activision Productions; Blindlight; Disney Character Voices; Electronic Arts; Productions Inc.; Formosa Interactive; Insomniac Games; Take 2 Productions; VoiceWorks Productions; and WB Games.

The gaming companies said they were negotiating in good faith and had reached tentative agreements on the vast majority of the proposals.

Wednesday’s labor action marks the second strike by SAG-AFTRA’s video game actors. Their first work stoppage, in October 2016, began after more than a year of failed negotiations. The union and the video game companies reached a tentative agreement 11 months later, in September 2017. At the time, the strike that won a bonus pay structure for voice actors and performance capture artists was the longest in the union’s history, following the merger of Hollywood’s two largest actors’ unions in 2012.

Some of the key issues, according to SAG-AFTRA, include ensuring wages that keep pace with inflation, protecting against misuse of artificial intelligence, and safety precautions that take into account the strain of physical performance as well as vocal stress. Union negotiators told The Associated Press they had made gains in negotiations over wages and job security, but game studios have refused to provide an equal level of protection from the dangers of AI for all of our members.

The signatory companies refused to extend AI protections to on-camera performers, the union said.

“They say we need to protect voice artists, but we’re not going to protect anybody else,” Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, executive director of SAG-AFTRA, said in an interview last month. “At the end of the day, if you have artists who work for you and help you create the content for your game, whether it’s voice content, stunts, movements … all of those artists deserve the right to have informed consent and fair compensation for the use of their image, their likeness or their voice, their performance. It’s that simple.”

While the unchecked use of artificial intelligence is a sticking point in the negotiations, voice actors and members of the union’s negotiating committee said they are not against AI. The actors, however, worry that unchecked use of AI could provide game makers with a way to supplant them by training an AI to mimic an actor’s voice or create a digital replica of their image without their consent.

Some also argue that AI could deprive less experienced actors of the opportunity to land smaller supporting roles, such as non-playable characters, where they typically cut their teeth before landing larger roles. Actors say the unchecked use of AI could also lead to ethical issues if their voices or images are used to create content they don't morally agree with.

In February, SAG-AFTRA created a separate contract that covers independent and low-budget video game projects. The Independent Interactive Media Scaled-Budget Agreement contains some of the AI ​​protections that the video game industry’s negotiating group rejected.

The union also announced in January a side deal with artificial voice company Replica Studios, which allows major studios to work with union actors to create and license a digital replica of their voices. It also sets terms that allow performers to opt out of using their voices in perpetuity.