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Hollywood’s Video Game Performers Protest Unregulated AI Use at Warner Bros. Studios

August 1st, 11:00 PM EDT

By NEWSnet Digital Team

SAG-AFTRA union video game performers strike outside Warner Bros. Games, part of the Global Streaming and Interactive Entertainment unit of Warner Bros. Discovery, in Burbank, California, on August 1, 2024.

Photo by Chris DELMAS / AFP) (Photo by CHRIS DELMAS/AFP via Getty Images

LOS ANGELES (NEWSnet/AP) — More than 300 video game performers and Hollywood actors picketed in front of the Warner Bros. Studios building on Thursday to protest what they call top gaming companies' unwillingness to protect union voice actors and motion capture workers equally against the unregulated use of artificial intelligence.

The protest marks the first large labor action since SAG-AFTRA game workers voted to strike last week.

The work stoppage came after more than 18 months of negotiations with gaming giants, including divisions of Activision, Warner Bros. and Walt Disney Co., over a new interactive media agreement stalled over protections around the use of AI. Warner Bros. Games is the publisher behind games including “Hogwarts Legacy” and “Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.”

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“Signs up, games down, LA is a union town,” the crowd chanted Thursday morning, many of them holding up signs emblazoned with a fist holding a video game controller.

Members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and the Writers Guild of America also attended the protest in solidarity.

Union leaders have billed AI as an existential crisis for performers.

Game voice actors and motion capture artists’ likenesses, they say, could be replicated by AI and used without consent and fair compensation. The unregulated use of AI, the union says, 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.

Concerns over AI helped fuel the union’s four-month film and television strikes last year.

SAG-AFTRA’s negotiating committee argued that the studios’ definition of who constitutes a “performer” is key to understanding the issue of who would be protected.

The global video game industry generated nearly $184 billion in revenue in 2023, according to game market forecaster Newzoo, with revenues projected to reach $207 billion in 2026.

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