As “1923” star Sebastian Roché and “Cobra Kai” star Alicia Hannah-Kim joined the tens of thousands of striking actors on the first day of the SAG-AFTRA strike in the hopes of eventually reaching a fair deal with the AMPTP, the couple hopes the strike brings global attention to the dangers of AI.
“The issue of AI is significant for our future, for the future of our industry, and actually, this is a global problem — this will affect workers all around the world,” Roché told TheWrap on the picket line outside of Fox Studios in Los Angeles. “They’re estimating that in the next five years 300 million jobs will be lost to AI, and it will apply to actors if we don’t fight to copyright our images — we can’t have our images be being used in perpetuity without getting paid for it.”
As SAG-AFTRA members join the picket lines alongside WGA members, Roché hopes well-known striking actors who have a “bigger pulpit” will draw the attention of their following to the repercussions of the technology.
For Hannah-Kim, protections against AI share a connective thread with other major sticking points in SAG-AFTRA negotiations, including fair compensation and health care access — topics that all fall into the category of human rights.
“We’re in a time where inequality is so wide that we have one person making hundreds of millions of dollars, and the people that are the workers in our industry are struggling to make ends meet and particularly actors, and writers, are struggling to meet the minimum to receive healthcare, which I believe is a human right,” Hannah-Kim told TheWrap. “When your profit and your ability to pay one person at the top hundreds of millions of dollars is not being shared equally to the workers below that are creating those profits, that is a just a basic line of inequality that we need to address as a society.”
Roché also referenced a recent Deadline report that quoted a studio executive saying the AMPTP’s plan to resolve the WGA strike was to let writers start losing their apartments and houses, which Roché said “enraged and engage the core of our unions to strike against that greed.”
“It’s time now to compensate these great creative and highly skilled people fairly — we’re not asking that much,” Roché continued. “Maybe reduce these indecent wages that shareholders are paying their CEOs — this is not about shareholders, this is about art, this is about reaching people. We’re not beholden to the bloody shareholders. We are here as creatives [and] we want to fight for a fair deal, that’s it.”
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