Video game performers protest unregulated AI use at Warner Bros. Studios

abcnews.go.com:

Hollywood’s video game performers are picketing at the Warner Bros

LOS ANGELES — More than 300 video game performers and Hollywood actors picketed in front of the Warner Bros. Studios building on Thursday to protest against what they call an unwillingness from top gaming companies to protect union voice actors and motion capture workers equally against the unregulated use of artificial intelligence.

Standing before the crowd, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, national executive director of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, said that AI has become the most challenging issue in many of the union's negotiations.

“We’ve made deals with the studios and streamers. We’ve made deals without a strike with the major record labels and with countless other employers, which provide for informed consent and fair compensation for our members," he told The Associated Press. «And yet, for some reason, the video game companies refuse to do that and that’s what’s going to be their undoing.”

The protest marks the first large labor action since SAG-AFTRA game workers voted to strike last week. The work stoppage came after more than 18 months of negotiations with gaming giants, including divisions of Activision, Warner Bros. and Walt Disney Co., over a new interactive media agreement stalled over protections around the use of AI. Warner Bros. Games is the publisher behind games including “Hogwarts Legacy” and “Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.”

“Signs up, games down, LA is a union town,” the crowd chanted Thursday morning, many of them holding up signs emblazoned with a fist holding a video game controller. One man, dressed in a skull mask reminiscent of a “Call of Duty” character named Ghost, waved a