RESPONSIBLE AI
Studio bodies including the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers have also confirmed that AI cannot be credited as a writer or primary creator.
The potential downside is that these agreements have a structural weakness: they only cover union members working with signatory studios in specific territories. Filmmaking is a global industry, and production companies can easily shift post-production or visual effects work to hubs with no equivalent rules on data ethics or synthetic likeness.
While a lead actor in Los Angeles enjoys strong legal protection, a background performer scanned by an overseas effects house may not – and could be duplicated and reused across multiple projects with little oversight.
The training data problem Meanwhile, a bigger battle is playing out over the data used to train these aforementioned AI models, with independent AI firms facing costly lawsuits from copyright holders over the scraping of material from the open internet.
Major studios have a different option. They hold vast, legally-secure libraries built up over the course of a century of filmmaking, and many are now using them to train closed, in-house AI systems immune to outside copyright claims.
Disney’ s tie-up with OpenAI was one such example – until the latter shut down its video-generation app Sora, prompting Disney to cancel its planned US $ 1bn content partnership.
60 August 2026