Hollywood Actors Take the Fight Against AI to Sacramento

It’s no secret that artificial intelligence developers train their models on books, music, movies and other copyrighted materials without obtaining consent or providing credit and compensation.

Just last week, OpenAI and Google publicly argued copyright protections should not apply to AI development because the software uses existing works to create something new and different. Both companies were seen to be signaling to the Trump administration that they wanted disruptive changes to copyright law, some form of which existed since 1790 when it was signed into law by President George Washington.

“We’ll need the right policy frameworks to secure America’s position as an AI powerhouse and support a new era of opportunity,” wrote Kent Walker, President of Global Affairs for Google and its parent company, Alphabet.

A Bay Area lawmaker, backed by the union that represents Hollywood actors, is wading into the fight over copyright.

The AI Copyright Transparency Act, AB 412, introduced by Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan (D-Orinda), doesn’t promise to address the fundamental disagreement over what constitutes fair use, which is still working its way through the courts in multiple lawsuits.

The legislation would require AI developers to disclose when copyrighted materials are used to train generative artificial intelligence models.

AB 412 “merely provides the copyright holder with notice,” Bauer-Kahan said in the measure’s first legislative hearing before the Privacy And Consumer Protection committee she chairs in the California Assembly.

“When Scarlett Johansson’s voice is coming out of an AI model, the people that own the copyrights to the movies and the works she was in have a right to know, ‘Is that why it sounds like Scarlett Johansson?’” Bauer-Kahan said, referring to the widely publicized battle between the actor and OpenAI for allegedly copying and imitating her voice after she refused to license it to the company.

The bill is sponsored by the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and co-sponsored by the Creative Artists Agency and the National Association of Voice Actors.

Joely Fisher, SAG-AFTRA Secretary-Treasurer and chair of its government affairs and public policy committee, said the fight over AI was at the heart of the union’s strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers that ran 118 days in 2023. The language about AI in the contract wasn’t approved until the 11th hour, she said, “always knowing that we needed legislation to enforce some of the things that we talked about and our studio partners agreed to.”

The technology is advancing rapidly, she added. Just a few years ago, it was remarkable that her half-sister Carrie Fisher appeared posthumously in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker with a composite of unused footage from The Force Awakens and archival footage from the original trilogy. In that case, there was consent and compensation for the family.

“They were able to use a synthetic performer, which is, like, terrible to even have that come out of my mouth,” Fisher said. But now, she continued, the more likely threat to creative artists is a synthesis of their work and others’ work. “We could all be put into one of the blenders, and they could spit out a character that is a little bit of all of us.”

Electronic Frontier Foundation and the California Chamber of Commerce oppose the legislation.

“AB 412 imposes an impossible new regulatory regime that would cause devastating collateral damage for research and innovation,” said Becca Kramer of Kaiser Advocacy, testifying on behalf of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She also warned the bill could unintentionally advantage Silicon Valley’s reigning giants. “Big Tech can afford the content licensing and legal teams to handle litigation over whether they made the reasonable efforts required by, but not defined, in the bill.”

The Assembly Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee approved AB 412, passing it to the Assembly Judiciary Committee.

As chair of the consumer privacy and protection committee, Bauer-Kahan is in a pole position to push her bill and others regulating AI through to the governor’s desk. She and other California lawmakers, like state senate budget chair Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), have fired off a salvo of 30 bills since the start of the legislative session.

It’s a follow-up to last year when Gov. Gavin Newsom signed more than 20 AI laws but vetoed others, including the most high-profile bill by Wiener.

At the time, Newsom convened the Joint California Policy Working Group on AI Frontier Models, which has just released an interim report presenting a framework for the governance of AI models in California.

“This report affirms with cutting-edge research that the rapid pace of technological advancement in AI means policymakers must act with haste to impose reasonable guardrails to mitigate foreseeable risks,” Sen. Wiener wrote in response, indicating another fight is underway between two of California’s most successful homegrown industries, with state lawmakers in the middle.

KQED reporters and producers are represented by SAG-AFTRA.