The Decibel - B.C. might become a haven for movie studios using AI

Episode Date: July 31, 2023

The ongoing actors and writers strikes in the U.S. are having huge implications for film production – including here in Canada, as productions slow to a trickle. Film unions in B.C. just signed an agreement that some worry could lead to ripple effects in the industry as well – because there aren’t any new stipulations around the use of generative AI.Josh O’Kane covers the intersection of arts and business for The Globe. Today, he tells us about this agreement in B.C., and why some are worried it could have long term consequences for the film industry.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

The writers' and actors' strikes in the U.S. are having huge implications for TV and film production, including here in Canada. But a recent agreement with film unions in B.C. could also lead to ripple effects in the industry, especially around the use of A.I. Josh O'Kane covers business, technology, and arts here at The Globe. Today, he tells us the details of this agreement in BC and the consequences it could have in the long term. I'm Manika Ramanwelms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Josh, thanks for being back on the podcast. Thanks for having me, Manika. I want to start with the strikes in the U.S. because I think those are the backdrop for what we're hearing about what's going on in B.C. So what are the unions in the U.S. striking over? major issues that the uh writers guild of america and sag after which is this massive actors union

uh in the united states are striking over um the first is just compensation in general um and then there's the sort of long tail of compensation which is around streaming the idea of making sure you get these things called residual payments which are literally just residually kind of coming in. It's like royalties kind of in a way. Yeah, exactly. And then, you know, and that's particularly around streaming and making sure they're compensated from streaming

in the same way that you might've gotten if your movie was played at 2 a.m. on some channel over and over again, and suddenly you get this check for $17,000. You know, they want to make sure they have similar compensation from that. And then the other major factor is around artificial intelligence. Because back in November, when out of nowhere, all of a sudden these major consumer-focused AI tools appeared after years of being incubated by the sort of startup world and the big tech world, suddenly they're in the hands of consumers and many, many creative industries, not just film and

TV are starting to wonder, well, what happens to our actual human creation? And you're talking about the kind of thing like chat GPT, essentially, right? Exactly. Yeah. Chat GPT or BARD or, you know, in sort of photography of things like Lenza. And the idea of the end of deadlines for contract negotiations. And so they really are looking to get protections for their labor, their labor unions after all. And so that's why they're hoping to get provisions baked into their contracts that will guarantee the continued ability for human creativity in film and TV.

Okay. Okay. So there's two groups striking, as you said, writers and then also actors. But let's talk about this AI piece that you mentioned, because this is quite interesting. So when we're talking about AI translating to TV and film production, how would this work? How would AI kind of creep in there? There's a couple of ways that it could creep in. So the Writers Guild of America is basically concerned that, you know, AI could seep into script writing. But it's really interesting because the Writers Guild

is not completely against AI. What they want is provisions that say like a writer could use it as a tool the way they use their laptop or a pen as a tool, but they are imbuing their creative work. You can already write scripts with chat GPT. If you want to, you can propose ideas and create, have it create scenarios. And this is what writers are afraid of. They're afraid of being fully replaced. If you're stuck in a writer's room and you're banging your head and you try to get it to create some scenarios, and then you elaborate upon them, they're arguing that that would be okay. But what if you got rid of the writer's room entirely?

Then this – and you're just sort of an executive producer has an idea and you just get it to write the script. And then some non-unionized person comes in and maybe just makes a couple changes to it. And they're in the executive office and they hand it off and it gets shot. The concerns that actors have is around being replaced functionally. Basically, as the U.S. Actors Union was preparing to strike at a press conference, their chief negotiator, Duncan Crabtree Ireland, he issued a warning about what the studios were trying to propose to them. And this is what he said. He said, they proposed that our background performers should be able to get scanned, get one day's pay, and the company should own that scan, their image, their likeness, and should be able to use it for the rest of eternity on any project they want with no consent and no compensation.

That's a quote. That's the end of the quote. The studios have said that they disagree with that characterization. It largely would be for the motion picture in which that person is employed. And listen, AI is not perfect right now. We're trying to recreate, you know, human beings and their mobility and walking around and making it look realistic in the foreground. But in the background, if someone is sort of fuzzed out during the background of a stadium, I'm thinking about the first couple of seasons of Ted Lasso and you see CGI crowds and they really look kind of fake.

They did that in Ted Lasso as an example, basically because they couldn't shoot in the actual stadium where things were supposed to be playing. And so they had sort of more physical restrictions there. But this technology is getting more and more sophisticated over time. So why wouldn't, you know, you try to save costs by replacing background actors with perhaps AI-generated background actors? Because if you do full body scans of human beings and then replicate them across different situations, right now you could easily fuzz them out, kind of make it look like they're out of focus. That could save you not just a lot of cost of background actors themselves, but the entire support system across many unions

for background actors. And the Actors Guild is very, very concerned about this because they want to make sure that working actors get their due. Because when we're thinking about actors, we're thinking about extremely famous actors. But an enormous piece of the membership of SAG-AFTRA are just regular working people who often depend on background work for their living. Yeah. Okay. So the writers have been on strike since early May.

The actors who are part of this union have been on strike since early May. The actors who are part of this union have been on strike since mid-July. How have these strikes actually impacted production of films and TV in Canada, Josh? So things started slowing down pretty quickly, particularly in Vancouver, which is the biggest film hub in North America outside of the US. Normally, I was talking to some folks from the technical union IATSE. And they were telling me that, you know, maybe there'll be 30 to 40 productions in various stages at any given moment in the Vancouver area. And, you know, when we spoke just on the cusp of the actor strike, they said it was down to about four in various stages. There were a few more productions

going on in Toronto that the scripts had been finished and therefore that they could move on in spite of the writer's strike. But now with the SAG After Strike, a lot of major productions that are filmed in Canada, you know, featuring these major US actors can't go on. Like examples would be like The Handmaid's Tale or The Umbrella Academy, which are filmed in the Toronto area and Hamilton area. And then, you know, The Good Doctor, which films in and around Vancouver, it's already been pushed to mid-season next year. It's going to miss the sort of fall debut. And so we're already seeing some pretty major changes to, you know, not just production schedules, but release schedules, because we don't know when these strikes are going to end. Yeah. Okay, so there was an agreement that just happened in BC. Can you tell us,

Josh, what exactly was that? And how does this all relate? So a significant number of the film unions in BC negotiate at the same time. And so out of nowhere in late June, they announced that they had been made an offer by the same group of studios that are currently in negotiations with the American unions and dealing with striking American unions. So this is the group called the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. You'll see it in every news story as AMPTP. It's been negotiating collective agreements with dozens of unions on behalf of, you know, slash MGM to Discovery, HBO, Netflix, Apple, just about everyone. It's been negotiating collective agreements for that studio system since 1982. the BC branch of the Canadian Media Producers Association put down an offer that was very

similar to what was being offered to the Directors Guild of America, which avoided a strike and had some really interesting terms in their own new collective agreement with the studios, including a 5% wage increase for the first year of their new collective agreement. That's a pretty good increase. It is. And so they put the 5% on the table as an extension of the existing collective agreements to a handful of BC unions, including actors and including directors, and as well as technical staff and a couple of other ones as well. This was, according to the Union of BC Performers, the biggest one-year offer that they'd received in the history of their collective agreement.

And this was then put to a vote for most of these unions earlier this month, and they voted in favor for it. There was a letter signed by several prominent Canadian actors, including Elliot Page and Martin Short, and they were suggesting that, you know, in solidarity by voting that down, they could, you know, be advocating for more and on similar terms to what is being fought for in the United States. In the broader scheme of things, what they're hoping to push for is as much of a unified front as possible. And they're worried that that won't be the case if, and this did happen, that the BC unions did vote in favor of what the studios were offering them.

We'll be back in a minute. So Josh, just to be clear here, what the BC unions agreed to was an extension on an existing contract, right? This was not new negotiations? Correct. This is a one-year extension that takes their collective agreement from ending in March 2024 to March 2025. And that's where things get interesting because the collective agreements, well, no generative AI is the thing that our sort of larger union comrades are discussing in the US. discussing that now. And so there was some dissent within the ranks of the BC film unions, suggesting that maybe we shouldn't be actually saying yes to this, because we need to think about should we be trying to stipulate terms around generative AI and create protections for the labor that we do that they do? Yeah, so it sounds like the concerns are around the fact that

there's going to be no negotiation regarding anything AI until 2025 in BC then. And as you said, AI, like it changes really quickly. We don't know what issue and that the major U.S. unions will set what will likely be precedents around generative AI for the entire industry. That has not really satisfied all of the rank and file. But I guess that's one argument for people to wait and be see. They want to see the precedents set in the states and then you can basically take similar guidelines and put them in Canada then, right? Correct. And that is what the union executives are hoping will be the case. But what the rank and file folks that I've been speaking to are concerned about are that this could create a vacuum in policy around generative AI that could turn BC into a destination for using artificial intelligence for background actors because they don't have those protections. And so just a few days ago,

the unions did vote in favor of taking the contract extension, which doesn't include any stipulations around generative AI. And so what these folks fear is, is that why wouldn't studios, even if there were protections gained amid the labor negotiations in the United States, why wouldn't they just go to BC and turn BC into a low cost jurisdiction where you don't need background actors? productions in BC, but at what expense? And that is what some of these folks in BC are telling me, that they're worried that it kind of creates a strange little exemption that could be taken advantage of for the sake of reducing costs on these productions. So what are the consequences if AI does get used to make background characters? Background characters are one part of an ecosystem in the world of filmmaking. In order to put background characters in a shot, you need them to have hair and makeup. They need costumes. You need people who are

wrangling them like coordinators or production assistants. You need assistant directors. You need so much more than just the actors themselves to get the actors on the screen. That's a lot of human labor. That's a lot of the workforce in the film industry that jurisdictions like BC talk about as a major portion of their economy. And people in the labor movement are worried that all of those jobs could disappear once you start getting rid of background actors. Yeah, this is an important point. It's not just the actors who might be losing their job. It's the whole ecosystem of people around them as well, then. Exactly. And that's why people from various unions multiple times have described to me is background actors are just the canary in the coal mine. They're the first cost you can save,

but there are more to come if you get rid of them. Yeah. Yeah. I think about something like, like Lord of the Rings, right? From 20 years ago and how everything was, the makeup was done, all the props were made, like that where there was a lot of people involved in that kind of production. And you could essentially eliminate a lot of that if And they're worried that if they don't fight for the human element now that it could be lost someday soon. So we're already seeing CGI used to create crowds and things like that in movies. So what's the difference between AI doing that and CGI? like for most of its history, was still drawn by human beings using the power of software to augment their creative vision. Even when there's people in motion capture suits, it's still people who are involved, who need to put on those motion capture suits every time they're not getting full body scans to go through their emotions, so that software can just spit them out and then no longer require humans in the future,

which is sort of what the concerns that these unions have around AI really comes from, which is the idea of no longer needing humans in these creative process, because, you know, the whole point of generative AI is to take the existing body of knowledge about something and to repeat it in a new situation, which removes humans from the equation. Do we have any sense of how close we are to this actually becoming a real concern? Because right now it seems like it is hypothetical, right? But how close could we be to using AI for background characters?

So a few weeks ago, someone put this very strange video on YouTube where they claimed they used a generative AI service. It's not clear which one to do a movie trailer. And it's very uncanny and unsettling for the people in the foreground and how they move around and how they sort of, you know, act towards one another. But again, when you remove the focus and you've got folks sort of in the background and some of those shots, it doesn't look real, but it's not far off. And it's real enough to make you think that maybe in a few years, you know, these large models could create something that looks increasingly more and more human, especially when they're just sort of in the distant background of various shots. Yeah. Yeah. That's an important part to remember. Cause I think about like that,

that Toronto Blue Jays little commercial that was done by, right. A few months ago, and we were all horrified because it is, it is terrifying, especially like with the shots in the foreground. But if you're talking, as you're saying, you're talking about background characters, there's, you focus a little bit less on those for sure. Just lastly here, Josh, we talked about a whole bunch of different things. But what is this? What does this all mean? Do you think for the future of the film industry and the television industry? I think all creative industries are at a point right now where they're wondering how the human element can be retained. You know, I'm writing, you know, similar stories about the publishing industry and people are

worried that their novels are being digested by these sort of large language models and accurate summaries are getting spit out and what does that mean about what's being digested and who owns what who owns your writing who owns your writing style because style isn't something you can copyright in most cases nowadays. And so we are entering what's going to be a very, very tense period of a battle over power over what exactly is considered human creativity and how do we guarantee humanity when we're telling those stories. This is fascinating and a little bit scary as well. Josh, thank you so much for chatting with me today. Happy to be here. Thanks. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wells. Our summer producer is Nagin Nia. Our producers are

Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.