Hollywood's AI war cools off

Three years after strikes put A.I. at the center of Hollywood’s labor battle, studios and creatives are shifting from resistance to cautious adoption

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When the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA walked off the job in 2023, artificial intelligence was on the picket signs. Studios wanted to scan background actors and reuse their likenesses indefinitely. They wanted the right to feed scripts into models that could spit out drafts or do edits on human-written versions. The unions came back with contract language designed to contain it all, and the strikes were, in part, framed as Hollywood's stand against an industry-changing technology.

Three years on, Sandra Bullock can stand at an industry summit and tell colleagues to "lean into" AI, and the line lands more like common sense than betrayal.

AI joins a crowded list of problems

The early resistance was loud. Family Ties star Justine Bateman, who has a computer science degree from UCLA, became the public face of the........

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