Comment on SAG-AFTRA Approves AI Voice Actors, Enrages the VA Community

• uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Represented everyone. When animators were adequately represented yet the CGI techs weren’t, Disney just stopped making drawn animated films and resorted to CGI, which is all we get now.

  Essentially, however unions fail to provide for the working class gets exploited by the owning class.

  And it’s fair if labor unions can’t fix everything, but then let us admit that our capitalist system is broken beyond what labor can do to fix it. Let’s stop pushing unions as a solution, except as a short-term one that is going to leave some people cold and hungry.

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  • mindlight@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I can’t speak for how unions work in the US but over here in Sweden they work because of member engagement. Of course, the opposite is true too: they doesn’t work when there is no engagement shown by the members.

    If unionmembers don’t show up on the meetings, especially the annual one, where the board election take place each year, the board doesn’t know what the members want. Furthermore, if members do hint show up on election day they are getting the board they deserve. (The same goes for government and elections)

    My experience is that most of the people complaining about the union not representing them, being corrupt and/or being toothless, are people who never visited an annual meeting. They never participated in the election of representatives and they most often think of the union like it’s their personal legal team.

    Unions are positive and bring good things, not only to workers/members but also to the “area of business”, when the members are active in the discussions and understand the issues. Unions are bad, almost cancerous, when members just pay the monthly fee and aren’t really engaged…

    I don’t know if the persons complaining are super engaged in the union work but tweets like “you don’t represent me but happily take my money” smell a little bit of “you’re the worst legal team I’ve ever had”.

    When it comes to the issue here I wonder what the alternative would be? SAG-AFTRA saying no to AI voice overs? Going out on strike?

    In what way would that not end up in the companies just use more AI VO AI is an investment and a recurring cost you can calculate. Human labor is not. There is all sorts of unknowns connected to human labor and AI never make threats about going out on strike (yet!?)

    So, a little more in detail, what do you think will be the result of what they did here? What should they have done differently and what result would they have gotten then?

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    • General_Effort@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      This is a very unusual union, though. It’s more like a chamber of commerce. A normal union represents employees who expect to work for years and decades in the same job and mainly rely on an hourly wage, right? IDK how many employees like that are in SAG-AFTRA.

      Many people represented here function more like independent trade people. They take on specific jobs for a negotiated pay. The big names, mainly screen actors, function more like capital owners. They have fame and fans, which they rent out for money. By licensing their voices they can do exactly that. It gives them an additional source of income, without having to do extra work.

      Basically, I want to say that you can’t judge what’s happening here in terms of Swedish union politics.

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    • uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I can’t speak to Sweden, as I don’t know the full range of resources that exist there for the common worker. For example, here in the US, lawyers and legal teams are a thing that only the wealthy can afford (so typically the ownership class) and their job is specifically to end run the law so as to evade legal consequences, hence breaking the rule of law. As the union is the laborer’s recourse against an adversary that totally outclasses them, yes, the union does serve the individual worker as their legal team.

      Also, this is not to say there aren’t limits to what unions can do, rather to submit that union action is a stopgap to let the capitalist structure work for a little bit longer. I assume ultimately the union will fail, that through automation and exploitation of unregulated labor forces, the companies and their management will be able to discard the laborers, and leaving them to the elements, which is essentially what they’ve declared they want to do if AI provides them the means to do it. If it doesn’t eventually some other technological advancement will.

      But that means Marx’s communist revolution is not permanently deferred by the labor union. It means ultimately it will come down to class warfare, since (despite calls for measured, well-regulated capitalism by some voices like Nick Hanauer) the ownership class cannot help itself but see the labor class as adversaries rather than partners in a mutual plan, and the companies that are exploitative succeed more in the short term and then engage in anti-competitive measures to edge out the more ethical companies.

      And this affirms that unions are a temporary stopgap. It’s a way for actors (including voice-actors for video games) can keep their jobs for a little longer, knowing the publishing companies and studios are still looking to replace them with robots, and ultimately will, and when that day comes, either they get shoved into a concentration camp or they seize the studios for their own by force, since they’re not going to quietly starve to death or look for service work in fast food. Again, the problem is not solved.

      We also can’t blame the individual laborer for insufficient engagement. Firstly, the common worker just wants to work. They are actively not informed (sometimes disinformed) what they must do to get representation in the labor union. If the union doesn’t automatically represent their interests, and all their interests, then it fails to serve its function, in making the exchange between worker and company fair. Again, the owning class sees labor as antagonistic, and seeks to exploit them maximally to maximize profits, so something is necessary to represent the laborer. If the union isn’t that then nothing is, and we’re back to Marx’s revolution (or starve, or menial work, or concentration camps…)

      So I can’t speak to the circumstances of the union in Sweden of which you speak, but from here it sounds like you don’t understand the gravity of what’s going on. It may be that laborers in Sweden have access to legal council separately, are informed of their duty to voice concerns at union meetings (or, I presume, electronically or through mail) and are trained to give expression to their specific needs (or have access to experts to do that for them). This is not the case in the US, let alone in the SAG-AFTRA affair, in which any concession is a permanent loss that will cause suffering and loss of life, and excuse industry abuses.

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  • General_Effort@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    When animators were adequately represented yet the CGI techs weren’t, Disney just stopped making drawn animated films and resorted to CGI, which is all we get now.

    Weren’t the old school animation movies all outsourced to low wage countries anyway?

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    • uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      According to the granddaughter of a (late) disgruntled Disney animator they found plenty of low-wage animators here in the states. That was the fist age of Disney animation. The second age began with The Little Mermaid and unionization efforts began around The Lion King

      Hollywood is notorious for short-changing talent and crew, which has been cause to disregard its grievances about piracy. The studios also routinely pirate media, themselves when they have a mind to.

      Regardless, there really isn’t room to negotiate, especially if striking is the only bullet the unions have chambered.

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