Donald Trump's latest move could potentially make serious waves in Hollywood and affect countless other industries across the country. On Thursday, Dec. 11, the president signed an executive order that is meant to block states from regulating the use of artificial intelligence. It's a move the White House claimed was part of an effort to "sustain and enhance the United States' global AI dominance through a minimally burdensome national policy framework for AI," according to the official statement.
Additionally, Trump, 79, has tasked Attorney General Pam Bondi with starting an "AI Litigation Task Force" that will be responsible for finding and fighting against state AI laws. The president backed his controversial decision by suggesting that many AI developers want to make their company homes in the United States, but if they "had to get 50 different approvals from 50 different states, you could forget it," per NBC News.
"My Administration has already done tremendous work to advance that objective, including by updating existing Federal regulatory frameworks to remove barriers to and encourage adoption of AI applications across sectors. These efforts have already delivered tremendous benefits to the American people and led to trillions of dollars of investments across the country. But we remain in the earliest days of this technological revolution and are in a race with adversaries for supremacy within it. To win, United States AI companies must be free to innovate without cumbersome regulation. But excessive State regulation thwarts this imperative."
AI Fears in Hollywood Continue to Grow
This comes amid rapidly growing worries that the excessive use of artificial intelligence could harm the entertainment industry and its professionals as a whole. Whether it's concerns about copyright infringement, loss of control over one's voice or image, fears of displacing actors and actresses from their jobs, or even just losing that special touch of human creativity in day-to-day content, many major players in the industry have spoken out against unregulated AI in film and television.
After it was announced that AI-generated actress Tilly Norwood -- who was created by Particle6 Productions -- was reportedly in talks to be signed to a real-life talent agency, SAG-AFTRA released a statement slamming the AI creation.
"[Norwood] is not an actor, it's a character generated by a computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performers," the statement read. "It has no life experience to draw from, no emotion and, from what we've seen, audiences aren't interested in watching computer-generated content untethered from the human experience."
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law star Jameela Jamil said the concept of AI performers was "deeply disturbing," and Mara Wilson, who famously starred in Matilda as a child, shared a social media post that read: "And what about the hundreds of living young women whose faces were composited together to make her? You couldn't hire any of them?"
Meanwhile, Academy Award winner Morgan Freeman bluntly stated that "nobody likes" Norwood because she's "not real."
"It's not going to work out very well in the movies or in television ... The union's job is to keep actors acting, so there's going to be that conflict."