Dispatches From The Picket Lines: One Actor’s Tale Of A Recent AI Encounter, A Mandalorian Sighting & More

deadline.com:

It’s Day 13 of the SAG-AFTRA strike and Day 86 of the WGA strike. Actor Adam Faison took a break from marching outside Disney in Burbank on Wednesday to speak with Deadline, calling artificial intelligence one of his primary concerns for the future of his profession and the industry at large.

His trepidation was informed by an unnerving encounter with the technology that he had within the past year, before the launch of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes and perhaps before AI was even breaking so prevalently into the public discourse.

The project on which he was forced to grapple with AI was out of the “gaming world,” he said, and called for body scanning. “Without going into too much detail, there was a recent situation where I was in negotiations with a company and they were very, very ornery and very trepidatious about even talking about AI,” said Faison, whose credits include last year’s Hellraiser, Yes Day and Into the Dark and who is currently on an indefinite hiatus from the new Starz series The Venery of Samantha Bird.

While he said he and his reps “fought really hard” to secure a deal, offering protections as far as future uses of his likeness, Faison was, in the end, forced to walk away. “It was unfortunate because I was passionate about [the project] and would have really loved to do it, but they really didn’t want to budge on anything.