Hollywood’s Fight Against AI Lays Bare Photography’s Weakness by Comparison

SAG-AFTRA, the Motion Picture Association, Disney, Warner Bros., NBCUniversal, these are just some of the powerful companies and organizations fighting back against AI video generators, which can now imitate scenes from movies.

It’s just a matter of time now before an AI-generated full-length feature film appears, either online with Hollywood IP or by some rogue director experimenting, like Darren Aronofsky.

For us photographers, it’s like, hey, welcome to the party. Sit down and grab a cup of discontent. Alas, we have already been in your position for at least a year.

Unlike Hollywood, photography doesn’t have the same kind of powerful institutions to fight back against AI. No, I don’t recall Midjourney ever saying it was going to start strengthening safeguards after it was revealed that its customers were using the names of living and active photographers to create AI slop.

This may sound totally obvious, but photography, as an industry, simply doesn’t have the kind of clout that Hollywood does. We don’t really have anything comparable to SAG-AFTRA or the Motion Picture Association. The closest thing we have to Disney would be like, what, Instagram? They dumped us years ago.

Photography is an individualized industry, more akin to music, but even the songsters have their major labels. Making movies, meanwhile, is a big team effort involving hundreds, if not thousands, of creatives, hence the SAG-AFTRA labor union which boasts virtually all major stars as members.

But despite our second-tier status, photography stands to benefit from Hollywood’s fight against AI. I believe whatever happens in that arena will be of direct consequence to the rights of photographers when it comes to AI.

The release of Seedance 2.0, an AI video model from TikTok’s creator ByteDance, has shaken Hollywood this past week. Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Chinese firm after a video of Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise fighting went viral.

But while on one hand Disney rails against ByteDance, on the other it has struck a deal with OpenAI allowing it to train on its IP for Sora. Which AI video model rises to prominence will likely affect the outcome of human artists’ rights as it involves geopolitics: namely the battle between the United States and China for AI supremacy.

The dream outcome is that Hollywood faces down the AI industry, forcing it to pay for training data and likeness. The public also has a role to play in this: will audiences really sit through programming featuring dead-eyed AI avatars?

In this dream scenario, Hollywood’s win against AI opens the door for photographers to receive compensation when their work is used to train AI, and imitating someone’s work is outlawed without permission.

What is clear, though, is that photography has no real say in the big game of AI. Like a courtier serving in the palace of a tyrant, we must wait for the shifting sands to settle and see what it brings in.

Image credits: Header image by Thomas Wolf