SAG-AFTRA slammed explicit AI images of Taylor Swift — but it agreed to some concerning AI terms following last year’s Hollywood strike

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I retired early from my demanding job at 55. Now that I’m 86, I attribute my successful retirement to a few key decisions.

• The SAG-AFTRA harmony condemned explicit AI-generated images of Taylor Swift circulating on social media.
• The use of AI was a key issue during last year’s Hollywood actors’ blow it.
• SAG-AFTRA ended up agreeing to some vague AI consent terms.

The SAG-AFTRA actors’ union has issued a statement addressing the explicit AI-generated counterparts of Taylor Swift that went viral this week.

The images, which provoked intense backlash from some of the chorus-member’s fans and calls for new legislation on AI, began circulating on X and Telegram before they were eventually removed by content referees.

The actors’ union condemned the deepfake images, calling them “upsetting, harmful, and deeply concerning.”

“The development and dissemination of mountebank images — especially those of a lewd nature — without someone’s consent must be made illegal,” the union prognosticated.

It also reiterated its support for Rep. Joe Morelle’s Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act, which seeks to criminalize the nonconsensual part of sexually explicit, digitally altered material.

“As a society, we have it in our power to control these technologies, but we must act now previously it is too late,” the union added. “We support Taylor, and women everywhere who are the victims of this kind of theft of their covertness and right to autonomy.”

It comes after SAG-AFTRA members’ headline-grabbing strike last year.

Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

The roughly 160,000 colleague union walked out over a dispute with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP).

The upon lasted nearly four months before a deal was reached that saw members win pay increases, streaming bonuses, and AI shelters, which gave performers a degree of control over the use of digital images of them.

Those looking to reproduce actors’ parallelisms with AI must now first obtain their consent, and the stars must be paid for the number of days they hand down have worked to perform any scenes featuring their digital replicas.

But some actors are still concerned past the new AI terms, particularly over the “vague” consent exemptions, Mashable reported.

Employers are not required to gain consent for adjusting undoubted performance parts such as “lip and/or other facial or body movement and/or the voice of the performer to a foreign language.”

When a digital reproduction is used without consent, the contract also fails to stipulate that studios will be forced to change their footage, per the news.

Other key worries include the use of “synthetic performers” taking over from real actors.

“The most serious unresolved of them all is the inclusion in the agreement of “Synthetic Performers,” or “AI Objects,” resembling humans. This gives the studios/streamers a green-light to use human-looking AI Goals instead of hiring a human actor,” filmmaker Justine Bateman wrote on X.

“To me, this inclusion is an anathema to a union wrinkle,” she added.