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Sag-AFTRA votes unanimously to expand its strike to include the games industry
- aurizon 3y agoA bridge too far for the catherds...
- gremlinsinc 3y agoI wonder if this might backfire. In the age of ai when animated characters can be almost created wholly by ai, actors can be replaced by AI, the age of the movie star might be over. I think in the future live performances will be more sought after just to know you're actually watching a real person, at least until life like ai androids are indistinguishable from real humans. I'm saying this as someone in support of unions in general, but also in support of our ai future, if a little fearful of the Terminator scenario playing out. I don't think unions can stop ai from taking jobs, I think maybe all unions should ban together for a general strike to force a ubi vote, so that when ai does take jobs people can still eat and pay rent.
- c4mpute 3y agoI guess it won't backfire because the AI revolution will come anyways. I rather think that this strike is a last-ditch effort to contain the AI revolution and squeeze out the last bucks before the flow of money dries up.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoLike the self driving car revolution?
- rqtwteye 3y agoThat is coming too. It may take a little longer than expected but it will come for sure.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- couchand 3y agoI'm still waiting on that sufficiently advanced compiler they've been talking about.
- satvikpendem 3y agoWhat compiler? I'm out of the loop on what you're referring to.
- wolfgang42 3y agoA “sufficiently smart compiler” is a (frequently mythical) one that can implement some difficult optimization on its own, rather than needing hints from the programmer. (See e.g. https://prog21.dadgum.com/40.html?0 https://prog21.dadgum.com/40.html?0 for some discussion on the topic.)
- satvikpendem 3y agoAh interesting. I wonder if LLMs can help solve that, although if they don't know the programmer's intent, they likely won't be able to optimize any better either.
- couchand 3y ago/s?
- satvikpendem 3y agoOnly half
- Ekaros 3y agoDifference is that AI can generate good-enough content most of the time. And that is often enough. It is not like what is sold now produced by humans is especially spectacular.
- c4mpute 3y agoExactly. Self-driving is a far more complex problem. The car has to get it right, right here on the road, little to no margin for error. The script-writing AI, voice AI, actor-image AI will be used to create a multitude of options, and all but one will be thrown away anyways. Perfection isn't necessary, realtime isn't necessary, and a human correcting things here and there is always still an option. Compute resources are also far less limited, it doesn't have to fit in a "car" form factor and power consumption.
- mcny 3y ago> human correcting things here and there is always still an option Isn’t that what we are asking for though? We know there will be fewer people working in the industry. We want to ensure those who will work will be paid fairly.
- c4mpute 3y agoAsking to be paid fairly is of course possible and sensible. But I'm not sure that it will be successful. Fewer people working will create a huge overhang of qualified experts, at least initially, driving down prices.
- Edman274 3y agoNo one gets killed by a car or sued by a pedestrian if an AI generated episode of "Love Death and Robots" underwhelms the 17 year olds that put it on while looking at something on their phone. This will spur studios to try to make it work even though it'll probably say no time and money and result in worse outcomes for their catalog of media.
- zug_zug 3y agoMaybe the AIs will take the studio's jobs before they take the artist's jobs (enabling much higher pay for creatives). After all the script is just 5% of the cost [1]. I'm sure there are pieces of the multi-hundred-million dollar movie-production process that are easier to automate that script writing and acting. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0611/why-movies-cost-so-much-to-make.aspx https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0611/why-movies-...
- phpisthebest 3y ago>>I'm sure there are pieces of the multi-hundred-million dollar movie-production process that are easier to automate that script writing and acting. You assume that is not already happening? How many physical effects people where displaced or had to find different things to do when CGI automated large amounts of physical effects? How much bigger would be budgets need to be to do physical effects instead of CGI? I am sure their are tons of other examples of automation and technology that allows a movie to be made with far less people. That is the natural progress of things.
- jimbob45 3y agoI think maybe all unions should ban together for a general strike to force a ubi vote The Trump checks/Biden checks caused too much inflation for that to be politically tenable.
- tehwebguy 3y ago[flagged]
- pfranz 3y ago> I wonder if this might backfire. In the age of ai when animated characters can be almost created wholly by ai, actors can be replaced by AI, the age of the movie star might be over. From what I've seen the conversation is a lot more nuanced. It's not "yes AI" vs "no AI." It's more around can you use my likeness, writing, or artwork to train AI with minimal to zero compensation (what studios want) or with compensation structure both sites negotiate (what unions what). Or can the result of AI be used to undermine labor. Currently, the output of AI isn't up to expected standards for much of anything. Studios are obviously trying to use that output to replace "writing credit" which has a historical structure with higher compensation. The person they pay to go "punch it up" won't get that. The resulting product would be mostly the same, but the person polishing and finishing it does a lot more work with less compensation. AI is also just a relatively minor part of what unions are trying to negotiate.
- jncfhnb 3y ago> I think maybe all unions should ban together for a general strike to force a ubi vote, so that when ai does take jobs people can still eat and pay rent. Pit the old creatives against the young ones. Nice.
- kyriakos 3y agoMost definitely it will backfire. As a gamer I care very little if a character in a game has the likeness or voice of a big name actor.
- terminatornet 3y agoNot all unionized actors are "big name".
- Zigurd 3y agoIndeed. The "big name" actors need the union the least. The fact they support the union indicates they know how tough it is for most actors.
- terminatornet 3y agoExactly, I think stories like this one might surprise people a bit https://ew.com/tv/mandy-moore-pennies-for-this-is-us-streaming-residuals/ https://ew.com/tv/mandy-moore-pennies-for-this-is-us-streami... tl;dr - Mandy Moore (a very big name celeb) talks about receiving residual checks of 81 cents for her show that streams on Hulu. I'm not interested whether or not she's rich and doesn't need the money, but if she's being paid fairly with regards to value she's providing. Personally, if my contributions were bringing my company an incredible amount of revenue, I would be annoyed if I wasn't being paid accordingly.
- aaomidi 3y agoGood thing valve has made it clear that if you’re using AI generated content that you don’t have fully copyright over it they’re not going to accept your game. UBI will not stop landlords from sweeping it all. UBI won’t work until we either have rent control or abolish private ownership-for-rent of housing. When Microsoft increased their housing stipend for interns, all the surrounding temporary housing and Airbnbs went up by that amount a few months after.
- Shekelphile 3y ago> Good thing valve has made it clear that if you’re using AI generated content that you don’t have fully copyright over it they’re not going to accept your game. Valve isn't really a good example to use here... they have a policy of not hiring union VAs (and the few they have worked with in the last 5 years or so have been publicly mistreated, see how they treated Merle Dandridge) and have definitely made new lines by piecing together old recording sessions in cases where the actor wanted more money or in cases where the actor was deceased.
- KingMob 3y agoA lot of people have half-joked that startups are essentially a convoluted method to funnel VC cash to SF landlords...
- crazygringo 3y ago> actors can be replaced by AI Actors' appearances can be replaced by AI. Their voices can be too. Actors' performances cannot. Not now and not any time in the near future. Not vocally, not facially, not physically. AI can map one vocal performance to another voice. It can't produce a vocal performance full of emotion that nails exactly what the scene is about, in the first place.
- mcpackieh 3y ago> Actors' performances cannot. Not now and not any time in the near future. Not vocally, not facially, not physically. AI can map one vocal performance to another voice. It can't produce a vocal performance full of emotion that nails exactly what the scene is about, in the first place. Oh sure these computer programs can play chess, but can they beat a grandmaster? Not now and not any time in the near future! - some guy in the early 90s probably.
- dbish 3y agoWhy not?
- crazygringo 3y agoI mean, why don't we have GAI? I don't know how to describe it except that performing a role in a fully believable way is akin to writing an engaging believable novel, which AI can't do, and is nowhere near doing, either. If you try taking a beginner's acting class at an acting studio in e.g. LA or NY, you'll quickly see how difficult and artistic good screen acting is. How hard it is to perform lines in a way that seems like real life, as opposed to seeming like bad acting (melodramatic exclaiming of lines). Of course, a lot of people don't understand just how difficult and skilled screen acting is, because the entire point is that you're not supposed to notice acting at all. You're supposed to be fooled into thinking these are somehow real characters.
- dbish 3y agoEh, I think anything that we have a lot of data on (ex: recorded acting) will and can be replicated in the very near future. Sure, you will have the occasional Oscar worthy actor that is some level of creativity that doesn’t work, but vast majority of acting is not finding new ways to show something in a script, the creativity came from the writing and directing choices. Art was also thought to require human creativity until recently. We’re not going to produce a new paradigm of art or Picasso level impact, but the median artist can be replaced today in most ways imho.
- polski-g 3y agoI thought writers were using video game jobs as an income source during the movie strike. So how are they going to pay their rents with zero income, now?
- orange_joe 3y agoThis is the actors union.
- mistercow 3y agoSAG-AFTRA is actors, not writers. You’re thinking of WGA.
- btown 3y agoThis is an incredibly editorialized headline that blurs the distinction between SAG-AFTRA leadership and membership, and the article itself contradicts the title in the very first paragraph: > In a statement posted to its official website, the union confirmed its board had "voted unanimously" to "send a strike authorisation vote to SAG-AFTRA members" in interactive media ahead of its "forthcoming bargaining dates with video game companies". https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/02/business/sag-aftra-strike-strike-video-games/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/02/business/sag-aftra-strike-str... has more details that this is just one of multiple steps: > While a strike authorization does not launch a strike, it can be a useful tool at the bargaining table because it gives the union the ability to declare a strike if negotiations break down. Eligible SAG-AFTRA members will be able to vote on authorizing a strike until September 25 at 5 p.m. PT, the evening before discussions resume. If and when membership does authorize a strike, we would see language akin to this announcement: https://www.sagaftra.org/sag-aftra-members-approve-strike-authorization-9791-yes-vote https://www.sagaftra.org/sag-aftra-members-approve-strike-au...
- crazygringo 3y agoCalling it "incredibly editorialized" is generous. The headline is just flat-out 100% completely false.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoI'm surprised eurogamer would stoop so low for clicks, I thought they were a reputable publication...
- xtirpation 3y agoFor disclosures sake, I used to work in the games industry and don't anymore but I hold a huge bias against "games journalism" sites. At times like this I think it's good to remember Knoll's law, that other pieces you've read on Eurogamer are similarly flawed and inaccurate.
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- CM30 3y agoNot sure how well this will work compared to their strike against Hollywood and the film industry. Many video game developers don't work with union actors at all, with plenty of games either not having voice acting period or hiring whatever random staff they have around to fill those roles. For instance, many of Nintendo's games have very little voice acting, or have it done by random internal staff rather than professional actors. So most of the Mario, Kirby, Donkey Kong, Pikmin, Metroid, Animal Crossing, etc series could probably keep on going without any issues. And those franchises that did use voice acting recently (mostly Zelda) could probably just go release a few games in the old style where voices were limited to the odd grunt or yell and it wouldn't make much of a difference. Heck, Pokemon doesn't really have voice acting in its games even now, and that's the biggest media franchise in the world. Add that to how the industry worked fine up til about the N64/PlayStation era without any voice acting (or at best, very limited acting) and how a large percentage of lower budget and indie games don't have it at all, and it's a lot less important than acting is in the film or television industry. Hollywood actors go on strike and don't appear in films or TV shows? Those industry comes to a screeching halt, since the cast is an essential part of the medium. Actors don't appear in video games? Well, guess the number of silent protagonists goes up significantly this year. I do wish them the best of luck here and I do understand their concerns, it's just that games need actors a lot less than films do, and that gives them far less leverage as a result.
- watwut 3y agoI think that games that don't use voice actors at all are just not relevant to the issue. Just like banking software is not relevant. There are games that do require it, those are relevant.
- crazygringo 3y agoExactly. This is about games like GTAV and RDR2. These games don't exist without whole casts of talented actors, and they're SAG-AFTRA because every working actor at that level belongs to the union.
- mcpackieh 3y agoMost of the games that 'require' voice acting actually don't, and could work with text. The reason they have voice acting is because mass audiences expect it, but consumer expectations are malleable and subject to change.
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- galleywest200 3y agoI fully support people getting paid for their work, and these actors deserve it. However -- when it comes to video games I personally do not mind if there is no voice acting, and I often will play the game on silent with some other source of audio playing alongside. Unsure of the impact of this one.
- capableweb 3y agoThat's great, but do you think that's how the majority of people play video games? If all voice actors disappeared, people would just be "huh, oh well"?
- Ekaros 3y agoMay be not all. But certainly if those under SAG-AFTRA did certainly. I don't remember specific actor adding much to my experience ever. I don't even recognize their voices or names, so can't be bothered.
- capableweb 3y agoAgain, fun to hear your personal experience, but you think this is how majority of people playing video games would react?
- Ekaros 3y agoYes absolutely. Majority could not care less about these actors. And no one should. Just find comparable or superior talent outside this pool.
- ceejayoz 3y agoIf this were really a widely held opinion, the Halo series wouldn’t have shilled out for Nathan Fillion. These orgs don’t spend money on voice acting for the artistic purity of it.
- JCharante 3y agoIt’s a free country, but I don’t think most people care about voice actors. Lots of people skip cutscenes and turn down the dialogue volume.
- giantg2 3y agoI wonder if a lot of the money issues could be fixed by the union implementing a better distribution of income. Seems like inequality in Hollywood is even worse than other industries.
- aaomidi 3y agoThat’s what the union is seeking.
- dbish 3y agoShouldn’t they start with the actors in their union then if that’s what they really care about? Some of the people protesting make crazy amounts of money themselves, if they want to show equality matters to them, should they start by redistributing the big actors’ income?
- giantg2 3y agoExactly what I was getting at. Many of the people struggle and make very little. Then you have some A listers making obscene money.
- zenexer 3y agoSome of them are at least giving back a little: https://archive.ph/CMpee https://archive.ph/CMpee
- TheCoelacanth 3y agoNo, pitting members of the union against each other would be an absolutely stupid idea. The union is supposed to be working to benefit all of their members.
- giantg2 3y agoIf you have 10% of the members essentially eating the lunch of the other 90%, then it seems there should be some attention on this. Perhaps a maximum pay multiplier between members on the same project. It'd be stupid not to address the unfairness. Who gives a shit if the studios toss another 10% to the workers if it mostly ends up at the top earners.
- jncfhnb 3y agoThe AI debate is pretty dumb imo. It’s not a winnable fight. Background actors and stunt people and minor voice actors are ultimately fungible. The tech will soon arrive that such things are easily generated at an extent and quality that it’s cheaper to do it with an all digital pipeline without models that are trained on these people or are perhaps trained on them in countries where any hard won battles here are ignored. You won’t have 30 background actors. You’ll have one digital artist with tools. You might have 30x as many movies if you’re lucky.
- Avamander 3y agoI'd say it's an obvious negotiation tactic.
- deegles 3y agoI just watched Oppenheimer, and I remember thinking how this would be much better as an HBO style multi season drama. But there's no way they'd be able to sign actors consistently for the many seasons it would take to cover all the material... using AI actors however, they would be able to keep consistent characters even as the actors switch out. Of course it's a race to the bottom, but think of all the talented actors who can't work because they don't have the right "look" and didn't get a lucky break.
- add-sub-mul-div 3y agoIt's uncanny how much nuance and craftsmanship there is to Oppenheimer you need to just... discard in order to make it into an example of a property that would benefit from AI. If ever there was a movie that could only have been made by one person. If ever there was a movie that if it had been made by anyone else would have fallen along so much more standard and predictable lines. Ask an AI to create a talky 3 hour biopic with as few explosions as Oppenheimer, and people would flock to it at blockbuster levels. Go ahead. Keep clicking the generate button. Use the Nolan preset. There are so many movies you could argue wouldn't lose anything for being AI. I wouldn't even trade those for AI, but I acknowledge they exist. Marvel has about 30 alone. And if ever there was a technology more analogous to the bomb in terms of the need for their creators to have been more humble and prepared and less naive about their effect on the world before rather than after the invention, it's generative AI. Even if Murphy was a nepo baby, you're right there's unfairness in Hollywood, still we can't overlook how much we still need people and we can't be so naive as to think the same unfairness in human nature would just go away rather than simply start to benefit a different set of privileged people.
- donatj 3y agoBeing a quite literal Luddite is never in your self interest long term. History has taught us that technology will and should replace jobs, and we are better for it. We should roll with it gracefully rather than trying to dig our heels in fighting the inevitable. Asking technology companies to not use AI in building their games is simply absurd. It’s hilarious to me that people on HN whose literal job is to build things that replace menial jobs can’t see this. How many of you are working on a SaaS that replaces hundreds of paper pushers?
- terminatornet 3y agoThe luddites were not against technology or progress. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.” https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-really-fought-against-264412/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-rea... In a parallel here, the SAG-AFTRA actors are not against AI, per se. They're against their likenesses being scanned for 1 days pay and then being used in perpetuity forever without their consent or further payment.
- donatj 3y agoOne days pay for one days work seems fair. The electrician that wired the building did far more important work, their work is evident in every single frame of the film, but doesn’t expect payment in perpetuity.
- terminatornet 3y agoDo you think people go to movies to see a building or are they going to see an actor? Estimates show that movies may be losing up to 15% of potential revenue due to lack of promotion by actors. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/box-office-ninja-turtles-star-campaigns-1235568835/ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/box-offi... Something tells me having the electricians show up on the red carpet may not have recovered that loss
- mcpackieh 3y agoRPGs are ruined by traditional voice acting but naive consumers demand it anyway. The problem is that voice acting places practical constraints on the scope of dialogue in RPGs, rendering the RPGs shallow by necessity. I see three possible ways forward: 1) Generative AIs are used on the fly by games to create NPCs the player can truly roleplay with 2) VA strike re-calibrates consumer expectations so we can go back to RPGs with text dialogue only, possibly with LLMs instead of scripted conversations. Either way, an improvement over: 3) Continue with the status quo. Listed in order of preference. From an RPG gamer perspective, the worst outcome is that both human writers and human VAs keep their jobs.
- davidg109 3y agoSounds desperate on behalf of SAG-AFTRA. I call bullshit.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y agoDo it! Strike! Remove the worst 3 features of modern games: hollywood celebrities, motion capture, voice acting.
- ugh123 3y agoSAG leadership also wants to start including YouTube and other online creators in union membership. Is this really what we want? Maybe it's time for Hollywood to change and grow away from unions and not proliferate into other areas of creative production. https://deadline.com/2023/07/sag-aftra-making-moves-to-enlist-more-online-content-creators-wapo-report-1235445921/ https://deadline.com/2023/07/sag-aftra-making-moves-to-enlis...
- mjhay 3y agoWhy would SAG workers want to "grow away from unions" when management doing their best to screw them over and impoverish them? You do realize that their interests are not the same as managements, right?
- stevehawk 3y agoIt is what I want. Youtube has no value with content creators. But content creators have zero power and steer constantly bullied with DMCA requests for policy violations that are never explained to them.
- ugh123 3y agoSo all YouTube creators would be forced into unemployment during these strikes too. That's what they want?
- bluescrn 3y agoAs somebody who's worked in games as a programmer, it's hard to have too much sympathy for voice actors, when all the (almost entirely non-unionised) artists, animators, programmers, QA, and more have put up with so much overwork ('crunch periods') and undercompensation, along with constant threat of sudden lay-offs (usually studio closures) since, well, before games had voice acting. A strike could be an additional threat to the projects and therefore jobs of those non-unionised workers. (Yes, maybe the rest of the industry should have unionised a long time ago, but it hasn't happened) Voice actors are important these days, but they aren't the 'movie stars' of gaming. The real stars of game development are usually unknown individuals developing internal tools and asset workflows, endlessly tweaking numbers to try and make a game 'feel' just right, doing CPU/GPU profiling and optimization, or doing tedious-but-essential QA work, tracking down those hard-to-replicate bugs. And not everyone is in agreement on the whole AI issue. The hype/fear bubble is likely to deflate, and IMHO, AI-based tools are more likely to empower creators than replace them.
- badwolf 3y agoYou should consider unionizing.
- komali2 3y agoPerhaps instead of anger at people trying to improve their material conditions, you could choose instead to ask the unionized people for helping setting up a union for your profession?
- vore 3y agoI don't think the answer to mistreatment is for non-unionized workers to pull the unionized workers down into the crab pot with them -- at the end of the day, we are all labor (unless you control the capital), and infighting instead of solidarity only makes labor's bargaining position worse.
- alickz 3y agoI could see infighting happening between the unions Some fictional programmer union wants AI, actors union does not want AI Both strike, who wins?
- samstave 3y agoI may be in a minority, but could not care less of the strife of the Hollywood writers, but that's hypocritical of me because saying that all their current crops of movies are microplastics garbage, while also not caring about their strikes, detracts from the core of the problem, which is the metastasized cancer of American DNA ; greed. Keep Hollywood writers away from games. I have not been negatively impacted by this strike in any meaningful sense. But it is striking to see just how puppet-like every talking head on TV is, to the point they have nothing themselves to say unless they have a gaggle of writers pumping all the lines you hear. For a really good insight on just who becomes these writers, the documentary about the creation of national lampoon out of Harvard shows you all the smart nerds that truly write your content
- dharmab 3y agoThis story is about an actor's union, not a writer's union.
- pyrophane 3y agoLike commercials, a lot of VA work is non-union, so the impact of this would most likely be felt by the absence of "stars" from the big AAA titles.
- yieldcrv 3y agoDespite this being clickbait, its a nice space to have this discussion I also find this to be a losing battle, and its kind of rich too, since Hollywood only grew by disregarding all the entrenched interested in NYC. To think the same won't happen to Hollywood or this current incarnation requires being stuck in every stage of grief, specifically bargaining and denial. Its not apathy if some of us can skip straight to acceptance of the terminal illness of being superceded.
- extraduder_ire 3y agoIf this does happen, I'm assuming Kojima Productions will attempt to get an exemption to work under the demanded terms, like a few A24 movies have in the film strike. (if that's even possible with how they do texture scanning/motion capture of so many people) I don't know of any other studios who include so many "big name" actors.
- kepler1 3y agoLast I heard, Hollywood actors and writers weren't being abused, deceived, or coerced into working in this industry. They're not working under hazardous conditions or agreeing to false terms of work. It seems that there are people who want to work for the wages that are offered, the group just isn't happy with what they're being paid. Aside from the consequences of their collective ability to withhold labor and ability to penalize those who don't join their union, can anyone explain why we should support them? Why should I be glad to see actors strike for more $, any more than I would be happy to see plumbers strike so that they can charge me even more for work?
- sammyteee 3y agoIsn't this similar to worries about machines taking over human jobs in other areas? Just like machines changed many industries and made people question the need for humans, why should acting be any different?
- _V_ 3y agoHonestly I believe that Hollywood and film industry needs to change. The sooner the better. And I also don't really care about those people - most of them seem to lost any connection with outside world and passion for the craft. The only motivation for most of them is feeding their overgrown egos.
- WeylandYutani 3y agoI agree somewhat but is it any different from professional athletes? They are being paid a hundred million dollars for kicking a ball.
- _V_ 3y agoI'd say there is a difference - even though they get paid millions for kicking a ball, they do what you would expect then to do. Writers/actors/directors are kind of different - I would expect them to take a source material and create a show that is true (as much as possible given the media format) to the original source. Ideally without showing contempt for said original material. Either that or create something original - something that has new and fresh ideas. And blindly replacing one sex for another or one color of person for another is not my idea of "new" or "fresh". To me it seems like they decided that these things don't matter anymore. So I don't mind if they go belly up.
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