Newly-Elected SAG-AFTRA President Sean Astin: AI ‘an Absolute Threat’ to Actors

Actor Sean Astin, who was recently elected as president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), said that the union will seek to protect actors in the age of generative AI.

Speaking with Variety in a lengthy interview, the Lord of the Rings star called generative AI’s ability to make “synthetic creations” that fool the eye “an absolute threat,” adding that protections against it will require “absolute focus.”

“It wasn’t a threat in the way that it was being marketed, that agents were all of a sudden going to begin, I guess, moving out of the talent representation business and into the synthetic data management business,” he told Variety. “But the actual technology itself, the idea of artificial intelligence and synthetic creations that are lifelike and seem real — that’s an absolute threat.”

“We’ve seen that coming for a long time… At SAG-AFTRA, we are in the vanguard. We are the absolute industry leaders at helping to shape policy in this space, at least in the entertainment space. Our lawyers help draft the language that’s in some of these AI protection bills,” he added.

As Breitbart News reported earlier this year, actors expressed concern over the prospect of talent agents seeking to represent a digital actress named Tilly Norwood; Astin said those reports were all fake.

“It was framed as though this artificial construct, this fictional character that was created was going to cause some sort of uproar in the agency business, and whether or not the agents were going to be representing her. Because it’s an old school narrative. It’s a great trope, you know, a young ingenue is discovered and becomes a big star, and all this stuff. And it was, but it’s all fake. It was all fake, and it was all engineered,” he said.