By Steve Wishnia

It was not an AI-generated crowd scene. It was all humans.

This week in New York City, hundreds of striking actors and screenwriters, joined by supporters from numerous other unions, packed two blocks of Tenth Avenue, across from the offices of HBO and Amazon in the plutocratic slab of Hudson Yards. It was part of a national day of solidarity with the strikes by SAG-AFTRA and the Writers’ Guild of America.

Yet the possibility that artificial intelligence could be used to generate crowd scenes, by replicating actors’ images and arraying them, is one of the main issues in the strikes. Others are the possible use of AI to write scripts and the drastic reductions in pay caused by another technological development, streaming.

“They want to pay us for a day of work to capture our likeness and use it in perpetuity without compensation,” says Purple Foenix, a gray-haired, lavender-bearded actor who played a cult member in the 2010s FOX TV series The Following. “There are people with talent who can do things better than machines, but machines are cheaper.”

“You can’t take a picture of somebody and keep reusing it and not pay them. What do you want to do, wipe out the human race?” asks Marie Gabrielle, a SAG-AFTRA delegate from Manhattan. “This is about the future of acting, singing, anything that has to do with film and television. It’s about our health care, equal pay.”

Lewis Edward Thompson is the type of actor whose work is most threatened by the possibility of AI crowd scenes. “I do a lot of background work, but I’m trying to get to speaking parts,” he says. “Even though I’m background, I’m a professional.”

He’s nicknamed “the celebrity waiter” at his restaurant job, and he’s also made a living as a foot messenger, securities clerk, and custodian. He’s got 10 years’ experience in live theater, he adds, and has done lead roles, voiceovers, singing, and comedy.

AI is “a very good tool in the right hands,” he says, but its use needs to be restricted. Copying actors’ likenesses into a crowd scene, he adds, is “just cloning. It’s not right.”

It’s also an “enormous issue” for writers, WGA East rally captain Suzanne Weber told Work-Bites. “Companies think they can feed something into AI and just hire a writer to punch it up.”

The writer in that scenario wouldn’t own any rights to the work, so they would get neither credit nor residuals, payments for when a film or a program is rebroadcast, she adds. And the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the trade group negotiating for the studios and streamers, has refused to address the issue, she says.

“AI can put the words together, but it doesn’t have the heart,” says Joelle Anthony, a Canadian screenwriter who was in the city and came out to support the American writers.

Streaming is also a huge issue, because residuals are a crucial source of income for both writers and actors, and unlike traditional TV, it pays negligibly. “The studios have taken advantage of the transition to streaming to underpay writers at all levels,” A Writers Guild flyer said.

One aspect of that, Weber says, is hiring fewer writers. A traditional TV sitcom might have 10 to 15 writers in a room, she explains, while a streaming series might have a “mini-room” with three or four. Those writers are also hired for shorter periods, which means they might not get enough work to qualify for health insurance.

The Disney Channel pays residuals, she says, but payments from its Disney+ streaming service are “almost nonexistent,” and studios are not releasing numbers about how they pay.

“Our residuals are not tied to success,” she continues, and only the platforms and their executives are making money. “It’s the tech model for TV. It’s basically destroyed the system. We have a contract that is not relevant to the system that has taken over. It needs to be completely redone.”

Actors are facing the same problem. “This streaming stuff just took food out of everybody’s mouths. We get paid on residuals. We are not seeing it. We can’t even afford all these streaming services,” says Linda Khumalo, who played a candidate for governor of California on the Netflix series The Politician.

That part was a featured role, but she got paid like a background actor, she says. “There’s a lot to fight for,” she adds. “Even though we have a union, the producers try to get away with a lot.”

Low residual pay means newcomers have a hard time staying in the industry, says Autumn Best, a SAG-AFTRA member for two years and a regular on a CW series. She won’t say its name because she doesn’t want to promote it during the strike.

“It’s ridiculous that they won’t change the payment,” she says. “I want the strike to end because I want to go back to work and talk about the movie I’m in.”

Jake O’Flaherty, a 28-year member of SAG-AFTRA based in Los Angeles, sounded a note of optimism. “If anybody’s going to step forward, it’s going to be Netflix,” he predicted. Its co-CEO Ted Sarandos often speaks about his union-electrician father, the actor notes, and the company reported $8.2 billion in revenue in the second quarter of this year, with $1.5 billion in net income.

“It would make him a hero,” O’Flaherty says. “Netflix is the only company that’s big enough to give us what we want and still be number one.”

Brooklyn actress Annika Connor, a SAG-AFTRA member since 2007, however, cited the anonymous studio executive who told Deadline in July that management’s strategy was to let the strike “drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.”

“They want to starve us out,” she said. “It breaks my heart that in a time when the whole world is watching the films and TV shows we made to entertain you during the pandemic, that the actors and writers are losing their health care, their livelihoods, and their jobs due to corporate greed. All we want to do is share our talent and joy and not be replaced by computers.”

The rally also drew union laborers and seafarers, nurses and electricians and retail workers, and one retired highway-maintenance worker from Long Island. The largest contingents came from the United Federation of Teachers, the Teamsters’ theatrical locals, and various International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees locals.

“Our local isn’t on strike, but we agree with them,” a member of IATSE Local 161—script supervisors, production coordinators, and production accountants—told Work-Bites, as a passing mail truck honked in solidarity.

“This strike is about what’s going on in a broader sense with labor and corporate greed,” says Weber. “Workers in many different sectors are fed up. Writing, acting, delivering the mail, picking up trash, working in a hotel, being a stewardess.”