SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher Says AI Is A “Deadly Cocktail” That Threatens To “Poison” Hollywood

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Hollywood’s potential misuse of artificial intelligence is a “deadly cocktail” and a “poison” that needs to be strictly regulated, SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher said in the guild’s latest strike podcast.

AI isn’t new. It’s been used on countless films and TV shows when it was known as computer generated imagery (CGI). But Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) – which can write scripts and digitally duplicate the images of actors, stunt performers, and background players – has now become a strike issue for both SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild.

Many of Drescher’s members have also been the GAI victims of “deep fakes,” in which their faces and voices have been computer generated to appear on someone else’s body – often pornographically. “When you have a combination of Wall Street, greed, technology, and whizz kids that I am not seeing exemplify a great deal of empathy – it’s a deadly cocktail, in my opinion.

And I don’t want us to have to drink that poison anymore,” she said in conversation with Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the guild’s national executive director, and Ben Whitehair, the guild’s executive vice president. “So we need to put barricades around it,” she said. “And everybody has to know that we are dealing with a kind of dynamite, and it has to be handled with great care and safety regulations, which include a lot of communication with the artist and a lot of consent and a lot of compensation. “Compensate and consent.