Performers' contract made consent the price of a digital replica

The process wall

Before a filmmaker can put a synthetic face into a scene, there is now a scheduling and paperwork wall specific to performers. SAG-AFTRA members approved the 2023 TV/Theatrical agreement on 5 December 2023, and its own summary of the tentative agreement gives artificial intelligence a dedicated section that a production must clear before any digital replica work begins. The document requires forty-eight hours' advance notice before services to create a replica, which means the process cannot be sprung on a performer during an unrelated shoot day.

What the documents show

The summary of the tentative agreement separates an 'Employment-Based Digital Replica,' made with the performer's physical participation to portray scenes the performer did not actually perform, from an 'Independently Created Digital Replica,' built to play a role without any employment arrangement for that project. Consent for the first must be clear and conspicuous and separately signed; for use outside the original picture, consent must be obtained again, at the time of that later use, with a description of the intended use, though a project already named at initial employment can be pre-cleared. The guild's own account of the ratification, recorded on its member approval page, ties these terms to the wider deal that ended the 2023 strike.

Authorship and limitation

The governing distinction is between a replica made with a performer's participation and one that is not, because the second category is what the agreement is chiefly trying to price and gate rather than the first. Consent granted during a performer's lifetime survives death unless the performer explicitly limited it, which is a mechanism for estates, not a general licence: a deceased performer's authorised representative, or the union in their absence, must still grant it. None of this reaches replicas built entirely outside SAG-AFTRA-covered production, and the agreement is a contract right, not a standalone right of publicity.

What survives

A performer keeps notice, a specific-use description, and, in most cases, residuals calculated as though the scenes had been performed in person. Editorially, a maker generating a synthetic performer likeness outside a covered production should still expect consent and description requirements to be the reasonable floor, not the ceiling.

• Check whether a likeness use was described specifically enough to match the scene actually produced.
• Ask whether consent was given at initial employment for a named future project, or only at the time of that later use.
• Look for the residual calculation the summary describes when only a replica, not the performer, remains in the finished picture.

The contract does not resolve what a digital replica means outside a union production, and it says nothing about training a general-purpose model on a performer's past work. Within its own scope, it turns 'consent' from a courtesy into a defined, paid, revocable-by-description transaction.