A London-based AI company called Realeyes has been hiring striking actors for Meta to help it train AI models – which could in due course be used to replace human actors. Between July and September this year, when the Writers’ Guild of America and the Screen Actors’ Guild were on strike, Realeyes was paying actors $150 an hour to be filmed expressing a range of emotions to be captured as data and fed into Meta’s generative AI models. According to the MIT Technology Review the actors were required to sign a data licence agreement recognising Realeyes’ full right to “licence, distribute, reproduce, modify, or otherwise create and use derivative works” generated from the data, “irrevocably and in all formats and media existing now or in the future”. A-list stars like Tom Hanks and James Earl Jones have been able to make individual deals with AI companies to monetise their digital likenesses and voices. But for below-the-line talent and extras, AI’s threat to their livelihoods is “existential”, SAG’s chief negotiator said this summer. The more data the models have, the more realistically they can portray the humans who provided it. Simples.