SAG-AFTRA's 2023 film/TV contract sets consent rules for digital replicas
The deal required separate, informed consent and compensation before a studio could create or reuse a performer's AI-generated digital double.
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SAG-AFTRA’s national board approved a tentative agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, ending the actors’ union’s strike — at 118 days, the longest against the studios in its history — with members returning to work under the new terms while a formal ratification vote was organised for December.
Artificial intelligence had been a central strike demand alongside streaming compensation, echoing the Writers Guild’s parallel dispute that had ended six weeks earlier. The union’s account of the negotiation described the AMPTP’s initial position as seeking the right to scan background performers once, for a single day’s pay, and then reuse their likeness indefinitely across productions via generative AI. The ratified contract instead required a studio to obtain a performer’s clear, informed consent — separate from the general employment contract — before creating a “digital replica,” and further consent and compensation before reusing an existing one in a new context. It distinguished between “employment-based” replicas, generated from a performer’s work on a specific job, and “independently created” replicas built from other material, with somewhat different rules governing each, and it applied the requirements to background performers as well as principal actors.
The contract did not resolve every dispute the union had raised: it addressed use of performers’ own likenesses on set and in post-production rather than the separate question of whether AI models could be trained on performance data at all, an issue that remained contested. Members formally ratified the agreement in December by a wide margin. Together, the two 2023 Hollywood contracts were the first instance in the US of organised labour negotiating binding, contract-level rules on AI use, and both were cited repeatedly in subsequent arguments — including in other industries — for what negotiated AI guardrails could look like in the absence of legislation.