Hollywood vs. AI: Nathalie Kelley reports from the front line of the film industry strikes

We are officially in peak summer and I am suddenly realising that I have been so rude in not properly introducing myself to those readers who may not have had the pleasure of conversing with me at sunrise or sunbathing nude next to me at Cala Comte.  So, who exactly am I?

I am a thespian. A storyteller.  A born provocateur who loves to push buttons and challenge injustice wherever I find it.  When I was younger, adults would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I would look them in the eye and say with a straight face ‘an actress AND a lawyer.’  Invariably these adults would laugh and explain that I could not be both.  But the very fact that I held these two deep desires at a young age suggest that I was destined for the dramatic and would never back down from a righteous fight.

I eventually deferred that law degree and subsequently studied political science, but then as fate would have it, my acting career suddenly went from 0 to 100 when I was cast as the female lead in the third instalment of the (never-ending) Fast and Furious franchise.  It was not a genre I particularly loved, having grown up watching more art house and foreign films, but for some unknown reason destiny wanted me to breakout in a 100-million-dollar Hollywood blockbuster. I was just a humble university student at the time, on a small stipend, so I was as shocked as anyone when I was cast next to Bow-wow and Lucas Black in a huge role, and even more shocked when the work dried up for me immediately after that movie.

I was clueless as to how Hollywood worked, had no serious acting training and was not mentally prepared for the grind of constant auditions and soul-crushing rejections. The next decade and a half was a mixed bag for me. I fell into a depression, quit acting, came back, committed to studying my craft, took small roles in shows like CSI and several independent films that I hope never see the light of day. My residuals from my first big movie kept me afloat for those years, but I still had to supplement myself with extra work.  My pride stopped me from getting ‘a real job’, although for a few months I cleaned the apartment of a well-known DJ friend to pay for my acting classes. Finally around eight years ago, the classes and perseverance paid off and in 2020 I achieved one of my ultimate goals - the lead in a show that went to number 1 on Netflix. The Baker and The Beauty (please indulge me this once with some shameless self-promotion) is a smart, funny, heart-warming comedy directed by David Frankel of The Devil Wears Prada fame. You won't regret watching it.

So why am I giving you my IMDB resume and life story right now?  Because we are at a pivotal time in history for actors and storytellers with an unprecedented actors and writers strike ongoing now for almost two months - the likes of which have not been seen in a lifetime. For someone like me, this is an irresistible opportunity to connect the plight of actors and writers to the struggle of workers worldwide.  This is a familiar story of corporate greed stealing not just our labour but now our very human essence - our creativity!  It is a story at the intersection of drama and justice, the kind that the little girl in me was born to tell. You see we are who we are because of the stories we tell. Every single culture around the world developed their own myths and origin stories which became the framework for their society’s ethical code, preserving history, guiding them towards future versions of themselves. Human communication and language even evolved from the desire to tell these stories. Storytelling is what separates us from the other animals in the animal kingdom.

But in recent years with the rise of streaming and now AI, not only have the majority of actors and writers seen their salaries and residuals diminished, but the new technologies around AI are now posing an existential threat to our livelihoods and creative sovereignty. I’ll be the first to admit CHAT Gpt and similar technologies are clever little tools that could be excellent resources if used as such by creatives, but unless safeguards and protocols are put into place to regulate their use and negotiate fair compensation for the artistic works these technologies have been fed on - I would not put it past the penny pinching studios to find ways to replace writers and actors down the line. This is not a fight motivated by personal gain.  I am now in the privileged position to have agents, managers and lawyers to fight for my voice, likeness and past/future work to be protected from being cannibalised by AI - but this is about the vast majority of actors who need such protections put in place to avoid being used and then eventually replaced by such technologies. 

The long term fear a lot of us have is of a future where AI is writing our movies and acting in them by way of digitally created characters  - ‘human’ copies with none of our creativity, soul, imperfections or intuition….all of which were supposed to be untouchable and innate to our species.  And yet here we are on the precipice of watching AI take all that away from us!  Didn’t they tell us that  AI would only be doing the jobs we didnt want? Newsflash: we still want these jobs!  And they need to be ‘jobs.’  Work that pays the bills and allows us to feed our families and  pay our mortgages.  Not every actor has the privilege of flying to Ibiza every summer, and those are the actors we are fighting for.  The ones that started out as background artists, who still work multiple jobs to support their art, who suffer soul crushing rejections to stay in the business because their burning desire to tell stories compels them too.  This is an existential fight for our very existence and a plea for human creativity to be deemed sacred and protected with regards to AI for this and future generations. The fact that studios have been unwilling to even discuss AI protections says a lot about their future plans for these technologies, and their abysmal offers of wage increases would be laughable if the combined salaries of the CEO’s of the studios and streamers weren’t collectively making hundreds of millions of dollars.  Bob Iger the CEO of Disney, who is set to make 30 million this year, called our demands ‘unrealistic,’ but to the average actor who makes $56 000 by busting their ass on multiple shows to sometimes receive 1 penny* in residuals. - his salary might be considered unrealistic.  Especially at a time when these studios are ‘pleading poverty’ and claiming losses.  

And if that is the case (although streamers are purposefully opaque about their  numbers), maybe it’s time for these gatekeepers to wake up and realise that their algorithms were wrong about us.  It turns out that while few can resist those impulses to binge the latest true crime show, at the end of the day, much like junk food, it makes us feel sick and bad about ourselves, and many of us are cancelling our subscriptions as a result. Perhaps this is an opportunity for us to look at the recent 300-million-dollar movie flops and realize that bigger isn’t always better.  That the stories we tell today will shape the future we build tomorrow.  That storytelling is a privilege and a responsibility we cannot relinquish to AI and algorithms, and there is an opportunity here for a full creative and soulful reset of the whole industry.  

Ibiza would know. How many of you remember the days when non-A-list actors, real artists, farmers and hippies could afford to live on the island? Now unless you arrive on a super-yacht or private plane, there’s barely a place for you here unless you are shipped in as a seasonal worker. The global divide between rich and poor is hurting us all, especially the artists. We must come together to act now.

*This is an actual amount actors have received for residuals since streaming started. I have received checks for big shows for $20!