UpTrajectory Review

Charles Pulliam-Moore's piece for The Verge zeroes in on a split that is becoming impossible to ignore: while tech CEOs issue open letters about hypothetical existential risk from AI, the unions representing Hollywood's actors and writers are asking everyone to look at the damage already being done. The Verge reached out to Disney, Netflix, Amazon, Lionsgate, and a crop of generative-AI film startups for their reaction to the recent alarm-sounding. None responded. SAG-AFTRA and the WGA East did. That silence from the studios is itself the story, and it tells you exactly where the power sits in this negotiation.

For a small-business operator outside the entertainment industry, this might look like a distant labor dispute. It is not. The template being set in Hollywood — what counts as consent, what counts as compensation, whether a company can train a model on your work or likeness without paying you — will migrate into every creative and service industry. If you run a design shop, a marketing agency, a photography studio, or any business where your output is digital and replicable, the rules negotiated on a film set in Burbank this year will shape what is legal and normal for you within three.

What is genuinely useful here is the framing. The existential-risk conversation, however sincere, functions as a convenient smokescreen for companies that would rather debate hypothetical robot overlords than the very concrete question of whether they owe the people whose data built their tools. SAG-AFTRA and WGAE are doing the unglamorous work of insisting on present-tense accountability. We are sympathetic to that position, with one caveat: the piece is thin on what the unions are actually proposing beyond attention. Naming harms is necessary but not sufficient; enforceable contract language is the harder fight.

The second-order effects cut in both directions. If the unions win meaningful restrictions and residual-style compensation for AI use of likeness and writing, that raises the floor for every other knowledge worker — and raises the cost of AI tooling for businesses that assumed training data was free. If they lose, the precedent runs the other way, and small operators will have even less leverage than the studios' employees do now. The startups building generative film tools, meanwhile, are betting they can outrun the regulation. Their non-response suggests they know the optics are bad and are waiting for the news cycle to move on.

Watch two things. First, whether the studios break their silence with anything more substantive than a press release — actual contract language at the bargaining table is the only signal that matters. Second, whether any state or federal legislator picks up the consent-and-compensation framework the unions are sketching and turns it into law, which would take it out of the realm of collective bargaining entirely. In the meantime, if your business uses generative tools, audit what you are training them on and get written agreements from any contractor whose work feeds the model. The studios are about to learn that lesson expensively. You do not have to.

None of this means the long-term risks are imaginary. It means the short-term ones are already here, already costing people work, and already being litigated in contract rooms where nobody is issuing open letters. The Verge's piece is a reminder that the most consequential AI policy fight of 2024 is not happening in a Senate hearing. It is happening at a negotiating table, and the people with the most to lose are the ones talking while the people with the most power stay quiet.

“As the tech sector sounds alarms about AI's potential to destroy humanity, entertainment labor groups are urging the public to stay focused on what's already happening.” — The Verge

Takeaway: Audit what your AI tools are trained on and get written consent from any contractor whose work feeds them — Hollywood's fight will set your liability standard.