SAG-AFTRA strike-call press conference (13 July 2023)

At midday on Thursday 13 July 2023, SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher and national executive director and chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland announced from the union's offices in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles, that the SAG-AFTRA National Board had voted unanimously earlier that morning to call a strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. The strike — the union's first against the film and television industry since 1980 and, alongside the Writers Guild of America's ongoing 148-day work stoppage, the first joint Hollywood writers-and-actors stoppage since 1960 — would take effect at midnight California time the following morning. The press conference is the opening event of camp-wga-sag-aftra-ai-provisions-2023 on the SAG-AFTRA side and, on the public record this corpus tracks, the moment at which generative AI moved from an arcane bargaining track inside the AMPTP negotiation into the most-cited public-facing labour framing of generative AI to that point in the technology's life.

Context

SAG-AFTRA's existing TV/Theatrical/Streaming Agreement had been extended past its 30 June 2023 expiration for 12 days of additional bargaining and expired at 11:59 pm PT on 12 July 2023 with no deal. The union's membership had on 5 June 2023 already authorised a strike call by 98% on a 48% turnout. Across May, June, and the first half of July 2023, the AMPTP was simultaneously refusing a settlement with the WGA, on strike since 2 May; the AI tracks of the two negotiations had visibly converged on the same set of categorical questions — who counts as an author or a performer, when and how AI-generated material could substitute for negotiated creative labour, and what consent and compensation studios owed performers and writers for the use of their work to train, or be replaced by, generative models. The proximate trigger for the strike call, as Crabtree-Ireland would later describe it from the podium, was the AMPTP's digital-replica proposal for background performers: under the studios' offer, background actors could be scanned for a single day's pay and their resulting digital likeness owned by the company in perpetuity and used on any project, with no further consent and no further compensation.

The press conference

The press conference was staged from SAG-AFTRA's offices in Sherman Oaks and broadcast as a livestream. Drescher and Crabtree-Ireland spoke from a podium flanked by union members including Frances Fisher, Ben Whitehair, and Joely Fisher. The two principals divided the public-facing argument between them along a clean rhetorical line. Crabtree-Ireland delivered the union's substantive case on AI, telling the room that "actors now face an existential threat to their livelihoods from the use of AI and generative technology" and walking the assembled reporters through the AMPTP's background-replica proposal as the proximate evidence that the studios were not prepared to bargain the technology in good faith. Drescher delivered the populist framing — what would become the day's most-clipped speech of the wider 2023 Hollywood strike cycle.

Drescher told the room she was "shocked by the way the people that we have been in business with are treating us" and that "I cannot believe it, quite frankly, how far apart we are on so many things." She framed the strike as a moment of history and the AMPTP as a body that "stand[s] on the wrong side of history at this very moment". Her most-circulated AI-adjacent line — and the one the wider public conversation has carried forward from the day — warned that "if we don't stand tall right now, we are all going to be in trouble. We are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines and big business, who care more about Wall Street than you and your family". She paired the technology framing with a sector-spanning labour one — "what's happening to us is happening across all fields of labor" — and told the room that the membership was "being victimized by a very greedy entity", the AMPTP. In a parallel same-day interview with Katie Kilkenny of the Hollywood Reporter released alongside the press cycle, Drescher gave the underlying argument its tightest formulation: "the digital age is cannibalizing us", with generative AI and streaming together a single technological pressure on the working life of the performer.

The AMPTP, in a same-day statement, described the strike call as "the union's choice, not ours" and claimed it had presented "a groundbreaking AI proposal that protects actors' digital likenesses" — a characterisation the union and the public press cycle that built on the press conference promptly disputed by reference to the background-replica terms Crabtree-Ireland had described from the podium.

Significance

The 13 July 2023 press conference is the corpus's first Event whose primary purpose is a labour-side public framing of generative AI as a threat to the working livelihoods of workers outside the AI industry, and the corpus's first creative-industry / worker-organising Event on the events side. Three structural features of the press conference have continued to shape the AI-and-labour conversation since.

The first is the rhetorical division between Crabtree-Ireland's technical-legal framing — AI and generative technology as "an existential threat to … livelihoods" — and Drescher's populist framing — "replaced by machines and big business", the digital age "cannibalizing us", and the strike as a fight on behalf of "all fields of labor." That division gave the campaign two anchored public framings — one inside the language of the union's bargaining brief, one inside the language of broader American working-class politics — that were repeated across the joint WGA / SAG-AFTRA picket lines from 14 July through 9 November 2023.

The second is the strike call's positioning of the AMPTP's background-actor digital-replica proposal as the proximate emblem of why the talks had broken down. The "scanned for a day's pay, owned in perpetuity" framing became the wider public's primary mental model for what the AI fight in Hollywood was about, and it was the categorical structure of the eventual contractual response — Employment-Based Digital Replicas, Independently Created Digital Replicas, Background-Actor Digital Replicas, Synthetic Performers, and Digital Alterations — that the November 2023 SAG-AFTRA / AMPTP tentative agreement built atop. The press conference is, in that sense, the moment the contractual taxonomy of the resulting MBA was first publicly named in negative form.

The third is the press conference's reception across adjacent US creative-industry organising and beyond. The Center for Democracy and Technology, the Authors Guild, the Concept Art Association, and the international trade-union press all later cited the 13 July framing as the moment at which generative AI's labour question entered US mainstream-press consciousness, and the strike-call press conference is the proximate referent for "the Hollywood unions' public AI framing" in the commentary that followed. Read alongside the 13 January 2023 Andersen v. Stability AI complaint on the federal-court track and the 4 October 2023 FTC Creative Economy and Generative AI roundtable on the federal-administrative track, the press conference is the labour-action node of the wider 2023 US creative-industry pushback on generative AI — the day on which the question moved from artist-community organising and federal court filings into a unionised strike on the major US studios and streamers.