Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s upcoming summit on artificial Intelligence could have implications for Hollywood – and the continuing strikes which have shuttered the industry, On The Money has learned.
Each Writers Guild President Meredith Stiehm and the Motion Picture Association Chairman and CEO Charles Rivkin will attend the Sept. 13 event in D.C., which goals to ascertain a framework for regulating AI, a source confirmed.
Microsoft Founder Bill Gates has also RSVPd “yes” to the event, Schumer’s office confirmed to On The Money – joining a who’s who list of Silicon Valley titans that features Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
The addition of Stiehm, who’s fighting it out with the studios, and Rivkin, who isn’t directly involved in negotiations, signals the growing threat AI poses to upending the entertainment industry.
Using generative AI in entertainment has been a key point of contention by SAG-AFTRA and the Author’s Guild of America, which have been on strike for a lot of the summer.
Sen. Schumer is hosting an AI forum in D.C. next month.AP
Each unions have demanded that “AI can’t write or rewrite literary material; can’t be used as source material; and (works covered by union contracts) can’t be used to coach AI,” as a part of their key demands within the stalled negotiations.
The forum, nevertheless, represents only the start of a conversion and that forming laws will take a while, sources said.
One source with knowledge of the event described it as a “focus group” that’s attempting to generate ideas for the way to best regulate AI – and added the plan is to host multiple forums just like the one which will likely be held next month.
Other high-powered honchos expected to attend include Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Humane Intelligence CEO Rumman Chowdhur, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue, Aerospace Industries Association CEO Eric Fanning, Center for Humane Technology Co-founder Tristan Harris, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, Palantir CEO Alex Karp, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, Unidos US President Janet Murguía, UC Berkeley researcher Deborah Raji, AFL-CIO President Elizabeth Shuler, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, and Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights CEO Maya Wiley.
While tech moguls have been warning the fallout from the arrival of artificial intelligence may very well be on a par with “nuclear war” or “pandemics,” the forum represents the primary organized approach to create some form of blueprint for regulating AI.
