In a press conference held Friday during San Diego Comic-Con, a panel of voice actors and SAG-AFTRA representatives provided more detail about why talks with major video game companies broke down, and the guild declared a strike.
After 18 months, negotiations ended when the guild and a consortium of developers covered under the interactive media agreement — which covers both voice acting and motion capture — were unable to resolve a range of issues related to the use of so-called artificial intelligence. As negotiation committee chair Sarah Elmaleh put it Thursday, the final counteroffer from those companies was “partially but dangerously incomplete.”
Elmaleh (“Hi-Fi Rush,” “Fortnite”) was also on hand for the Comic-Con press conference Friday, where she elaborated on that point, declaring that the offer had “as many AI loopholes… as there are characters that a person has played.”
Joining Elmaleh for the conference were Ray Rodriguez, SAG-AFTRA’s chief contracts officer and the interactive media lead negotiator, Ashly Burch (“Mythic Quest,” “Horizon Forbidden West”), Noshir Dalal (“Red Dead Redemption II,” “Star Wars Jedi: Survivor”) and Shannon Woodward (“The Last of Us Part II,” “Westworld”).
According to Rodriguez, the video game companies taking part in negotiations — including Activision, EA, WB Games, Disney and Take Two as well as voiceover production companies Formosa Interactive and VoiceWorks Productions — were “explicit about excluding everything but voice” from any protections against abusive use of AI — meaning all forms of motion capture performances were excluded.
After that offer was rejected, the industry negotiators made another offer that appeared to account for motion capture, Rodriguez said, but included provisions that effectively neutralized those protections. Among them, actors would have only been protected if the digital replica looked identifiably like them, which would rule out the majority of video game motion capture performances. More commonly video games use motion capture performances as a frame on which to build designs looking nothing like the actor; also common is the practice of using different actors for facial modeling and for motion capture.
According to Rodriguez, this also extended to voice actors, who would only be protected if their characters’ voices sounded recognizably like their natural speaking voice.
Elmaleh then elaborated on the impact to voice actors. “One of the things that the employers gave us as a counter was that they couldn’t put our names into a generative AI system,” she said. The catch, Elmaleh went on, is that they would be permitted to input an actor’s roles into AI, allowing them to access and duplicate the voice without using their name.
“There are as many AI loopholes, as protection holes in this counter as there are characters that a person has played.”
In a statement released Thursday on behalf of the video game producers signed on to the Interactive Media Agreement, spokesperson Audrey Cooling said they were “disappointed the union has chosen to walk away when we are so close to a deal, and we remain prepared to resume negotiations.”
“We have already found common ground on 24 out of 25 proposals, including historic wage increases and additional safety provisions. Our offer is directly responsive to SAG-AFTRA’s concerns and extends meaningful AI protections that include requiring consent and fair compensation to all performers working under the IMA. These terms are among the strongest in the entertainment industry,” Cooling said.
Meanwhile, on Friday, Emaleh argued, “There are as many AI loopholes, as protections holes in this counter, as there are characters that a person has played.”
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