Published December 4, 2023 · By CampaignsLive · Industry
The SAG-AFTRA strike of 2023 ended in November of that year with a contract that, beyond its better-publicized provisions on streaming residuals, contained the most consequential AI labor language in commercial creative production. The clauses cover when and how performers can be scanned, replicated, synthesized, and reused. They have rapidly become the de facto standard that brand teams running their own talent end up either following directly or referencing in their own contracts.
Most brand-side creative teams have not read the actual language. The summary explanations in the trade press tend to be either too short to be useful or so legally cautious that they read as boilerplate. What follows is a working translation of what the clauses say and what they mean for brand work specifically.
What the contract actually covers
The relevant sections of the 2023 SAG-AFTRA TV/Theatrical contract are organized around three distinct categories of AI use, each with its own consent and compensation requirements.
Employment-based digital replicas. A performer who is hired for a job can be digitally scanned during that engagement. Use of the resulting scan for any purpose beyond the original engagement requires separate, informed consent and separate compensation. The studio cannot scan a performer for one production and reuse the scan in another without going back to the performer.
Independently created digital replicas. A studio can build a digital replica of a performer who is not currently in their employ — using AI generation, training, or any other technique — only with that performer’s consent and on a separately negotiated basis. The replica is treated as a contractual entity in its own right, not as a freely usable asset.
Synthetic performers. Wholly AI-generated performers — not based on any real person — can be used in productions, but must be disclosed to the union and counted in casting decisions in a way that informs the labor planning. They are not a loophole around the casting process.
Each of these categories carries its own consent, compensation, and use-tracking obligations. The contract creates a structure in which AI is not free; it is a contractual modality with its own price.
What this means for brand teams
A brand-side team running a campaign with talent — paid social, OOH, broadcast, anything that involves a person on camera — typically signs a usage agreement with that talent for a specific scope: this campaign, these placements, this term, these markets. The AI question changes the negotiation in three specific ways.
Scanning during a shoot is now a separate question. A traditional shoot day produces footage. A shoot day with body scans, facial captures, or voice samples produces those plus a scannable digital footprint. The talent agreement now needs to be explicit about whether scanning is part of the engagement. If it is, the scope of use needs to be defined: this campaign only, or future campaigns, or future productions involving the brand, or none of the above. Default-permissive language no longer holds up.
Voice-cloning and likeness reuse are separately licensable. A brand that wants to reuse a celebrity endorser’s voice across markets, in localizations, in seasonal refreshes, in next year’s campaign, can no longer assume that the original contract covers it. The voice clone is a contractually distinct asset. The reuse is a contractually distinct event.
Synthetic talent is not a workaround. A brand that decides to use a fully AI-generated talent — to avoid the scanning consent, the likeness rights, the union negotiation — does not get the free hand the framing implies. The synthetic talent decision is itself a contractual event in productions that follow union casting norms. The trade press coverage of this clause has been thin, but the practical implication for brand teams running their own productions is that synthetic talent is not a free lunch.
What changes about the production stack
The longer effect of the SAG-AFTRA clauses, and the parallel WGA language, has been a quiet restructuring of how brand-side creative production handles AI. Three changes have become visible since the strike.
Talent contracts now include AI scope. Standard talent agreements in the post-strike period include AI-use scope as a named line item. Brand teams that did not include this language in 2022 contracts have been amending or renegotiating in 2024 and 2025 to bring agreements into compliance with the emerging norm.
Production logs include AI provenance. Production companies have begun tracking which assets in a project were AI-generated, which were AI-augmented, and which were captured traditionally. This is partly a contractual requirement, partly a defensive posture against future disputes, and partly an emerging standard for clean handoff to brand-side rights teams.
The default has shifted toward disclosure. A campaign using AI tooling in 2022 could plausibly run without naming it. By 2025, the default expectation — within agencies, within talent agencies, within union shops — is that AI use is disclosed in production credits, in talent agreements, and in brand-side rights documentation. The contracts have caught up to the practice.
Why brand teams should care
There are two specific reasons this matters at the brand level rather than the agency level.
The first is rights cleanliness. A brand that signs off on a campaign produced by an agency that has not handled AI scope correctly is exposed to claims downstream — from the talent, from the agency, from the union — that the brand had to pay attention to. The clean version of the production handoff includes AI provenance documentation. The brand-side rights team needs this. The marketing team needs to know to ask for it.
The second is reuse. Almost every campaign asset is reused in some form after the campaign — sales decks, internal launch materials, brand guidelines, annual reports, anniversary content. Each of those reuses is governed by the original talent agreement. If the agreement was written before the AI clauses became standard, and if AI tooling was used in the production, the reuse may not be on the firmer ground the marketing team assumes.
For the related ownership question on the platform side, see Why Your Brand Should Own Its AI Creative. For the broader timeline of how disclosure norms emerged, see Marvel’s Secret Invasion AI Title Sequence.