NANDINI BAPAT IS NOT A QUITTER. Since starting her acting career in 2012, she has balanced full-time jobs while securing minor roles on TV shows like Fox’s *Scream Queens*, HBO’s *Barry*, and Apple TV’s *Physical*. Following last year’s nearly four-month-long actors' strike and production halt, Bapat remains committed to her pursuit of acting.
Landing her first post-strike gig on a Warner Bros. production, Bapat faced a studio contract clause asking for her consent to create a digital replica of herself. Firm in her stance, she wrote "no" and went to hair and makeup. After filming her scenes, a Warner Bros. representative contacted her agent, threatening to send Bapat home if she did not agree to the AI provision. Warner Bros. declined to comment on these allegations. A source familiar with the matter told *Rolling Stone* that "Casting considerations vary by specific roles and productions" and that digital replicas are used in various roles across the industry.
“I felt the entire force of Warner Brothers staring down on me to say yes,” Bapat shared with *Rolling Stone*.
On July 14 of last year, actors started picketing nationwide for fair pay, increased residuals, and protections against artificial intelligence misuse. After 118 days on strike and 35 tense days of negotiations, SAG-AFTRA members approved a multi-year TV and theatrical contract in December. This agreement was hailed as the “biggest contract-on-contract gains” in SAG-AFTRA’s history by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. It included higher minimum wages, increased residuals that reward successful streaming shows, and mandatory consent and compensation for AI replicas. However, almost a year later, many actors still view digital replicas as a significant threat.
Ecstatic to return to work alongside a supportive cast on one of her favorite shows, Bapat's excitement dwindled when she was required to consent to digital replicas as a term of employment. Her complaint reached Warner Bros.'s legal team, who initially refused to amend the standard contract language.
“My reps were basically saying, ‘If we walk away from this right now, that’s going to burn relationships with this casting office,’” Bapat explained.
After the SAG-AFTRA deal last November, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the union’s national executive director and chief negotiator, told *Rolling Stone* that studios and streamers could no longer include boilerplate provisions regarding digital replicas in their contracts. Producers are now required to provide a "reasonably specific description" of how replicas will be used, and actors have the right to approve or reject such uses, with compensation if they consent. Warner Bros. declined to comment on the AI language in their contracts.
“I love this work and have fun with it; consenting to let a computer do my job defeats the whole purpose,” Bapat said. After negotiations among her agent, union representatives, and Warner Bros. lawyers, the studio agreed to amend the AI contract clause and compensate Bapat for her days on set. However, she remains unsure if other actors received similar amendments. Bapat emphasizes that her battle wasn’t fought alone: “At the end of the day, if SAG isn’t behind me, I am just one person against a giant, mighty force that could crush me like a bug.”
Marie Fink, a stunt performer for actresses like Shailene Woodley, Cobie Smulders, and Sigourney Weaver, faced a similar situation. Hired in April for the third season of *The Sex Lives of College Girls*, Fink also refused to sign a document allowing the creation of digital replicas. According to a source familiar with Warner Bros. productions, the studio hasn’t conducted replica scans for the show. Fink noted that her previous contracts did not include AI replicas.
“I told the Warner Brothers [representative] that I’m afraid of retaliation, that I could miss future opportunities with this show, this coordinator, or even Warner Brothers,” said Fink, who has mainly worked on Warner Bros. films. Although she was assured she’d be welcomed back, Fink hasn’t worked on the show since nor received further requests.
While Fink was compensated for appearing on set, she’s missing out on future residuals and contributions to her health and pension.
A source knowledgeable about Warner Bros. TV productions stated that the studio hasn’t received any grievances from SAG-AFTRA. They affirmed the company’s compliance with all SAG-AFTRA rules, including those about digital replicas as per the latest 2023 agreement, asserting that Warner Bros. takes these responsibilities seriously.
Since the actors’ union struck the November deal, stunt performers have been especially concerned about the limitations of the new contract’s AI provisions. After all, if high-stakes car flips and complex combat scenes can be created with AI, who needs stunt doubles? SAG-AFTRA national board member Shaan Sharma, who has been a vocal critic of the AI provisions the union agreed to, says stunt performers are particularly vulnerable because producers can resort to replicas whenever a stunt double is doing something that could put their own life in danger, thereby significantly reducing liability costs.
To make matters worse, work opportunities have been few and far between since the strike ended. In 2023, new and returning programs had already plunged by 21 percent, in part due to the twin labor strikes, according to the 2023 Year-End Film and TV Report released by Luminate in January. In the first quarter of this year, both film and TV projects declined by about seven percent compared to the same period of 2023, according to research platform ProdPro. Feature films also experienced a 24-percent drop in production compared to the previous year, according to ProdPro.
“The people that double the A-list actors on all of their runs are working days on television shows, so it’s pretty slow,” Fink says, referring to stunt performers who’ve picked up episodic work to make up for the lack of big-budget, feature film gigs. “If you’re on the run of [a] feature, you’re not trying to get days on television shows.”
DIGITAL HUMANS ARE NOT a new invention, but the emergence of the technology has not been without controversy. In 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Lucasfilm producers used existing footage of the actor Peter Cushing, who had been dead for more than 20 years, to create a digital replica of him as Grand Moff Tarkin, from 1977’s Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope. Though the project was undertaken with the permission of Cushing’s estate, many decried the move as an ethical violation. The Huffington Post called it “sickening” and “a giant breach of respect for the dead.” Following the June 26 trailer release for the time-jumping Robert Zemeckis drama Here, which used generative AI tools to de-age Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, the BBC called the technology “unsettling” and a threat to the careers of young performers. Digital technology has also been used in less obvious ways in recent years — for example, to fill the audiences in Prime’s rock & roll drama Daisy Jones & The Six and the football stadium in Apple TV’s Ted Lasso with virtual avatars.
For actor and filmmaker Justine Bateman, who served as a SAG-AFTRA AI advisor in 2023 and has been outspoken about the perils the technology poses to working actors, digital scans have only worsened job scarcity in Hollywood. “It’s a replacement, insultingly assembled with human effort,” Bateman says.
Under SAG-AFTRA’s new TV and theatrical contract, even if an actor is deceased, their heir or a union representative may grant consent to create a digital replica. Artificial intelligence startup ElevenLabs announced in early July that fans of Judy Garland, James Dean, Sir Laurence Olivier, and Burt Reynolds can now listen to those Hollywood stars narrate books. (ElevenLabs reached agreements with the estates of the deceased actors.)
“All the dead actors are always available, via a digital replica of them,” Bateman says. “So for actors, your odds of getting a job just went way down. The competition just increased tenfold, a hundredfold.”
The rising threat is enough of a concern that even members of Congress have tried to tackle it. Last year, a bipartisan coalition introduced the Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act (NO FAKES) aimed at protecting actors, musicians, and ordinary people from the creation of unauthorized digital replicas. (Furthermore, a bipartisan group of U.S. House lawmakers introduced a similar bill, the No AI Fraud Act, in January, which defends Americans’ right to their individual likeness and voice against AI-generated clones or deepfakes.)
Crabtree-Ireland counters that the march of technology is inevitable, and the union’s aim in its strike-ending deal is to empower its members by requiring informed consent and fair compensation for digital scans and replication. “There are folks out there who wish that we lived in a world where we could simply prohibit digital replication completely,” Crabtree-Ireland tells Rolling Stone. “But that’s obviously not a realistic position. It wasn’t a realistic position for us to take before bargaining or something that we could have achieved even after many months of being on strike with the companies.”
Crabtree-Ireland adds that if a production violates SAG’s 2023 contract, the union’s contract departments and field representatives immediately address the issue and instruct production companies to modify their contracts.
“We did receive a few reports of companies attempting to demand consent for digital replication as sort of a standard practice across all of their projects,” Crabtree-Ireland says while declining to name the specific companies. “That was brought to our attention by several performers, and we immediately went to those companies and reminded them of how that’s not something that they’re permitted to do under the contract.”
Crabtree-Ireland notes that there hasn’t been a rush to implement an extensive amount of digital replication since the November deal: “It’s not like a light switch where it was flipped on and all of a sudden everything is being done using AI.” Rather, he says, “there’s a gradual increase in the use of the technology” that is, to his knowledge, “by the rules that we negotiated for.”
SAG national board member Sharma, meanwhile, along with other performers, has been developing an AI rider to the existing 2023 contract that tightens existing AI protections. With SAG-AFTRA’s TV and theatrical contract effective through June 2026, Sharma says he’s pushing against the replacement of performers.
Some performers are trying to remain optimistic. Duncan Anderson, who was recently hired as a day player on The Sex Lives of College Girls and consented to the creation of digital replicas, believes AI could never replace human storytelling.
“Do I think it’s going to be a life-changer, and do I think it’s going to take away my job as an actor, as an artist? I don’t think so,” Anderson says. “Humans are going to find a way to adapt through it.”