Good morning. Collective bargaining has entered the AI era – more on that below, along with Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and Pierre Poilievre’s appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. But first:

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Have you heard about Tilly Norwood yet? She looks like the sort of twentysomething actress who got her start on a Disney Channel series: long brown hair, pert little nose, smattering of freckles, blinding white teeth. She has a modest Instagram following but lofty ambitions to be the next Scarlett Johansson. She’s also completely AI-generated.

When Norwood debuted in a short video at the Zurich Film Festival last fall – the efforts of a Dutch AI-talent studio – Hollywood immediately freaked out. A bunch of actors promised to boycott any agency that represented Norwood. Emily Blunt, shown a photo of the AI actress, exclaimed, “Good lord, we’re screwed.” The actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA, put out a statement with a pointed choice of pronouns, insisting Norwood wasn’t an actor at all because “it has no life experience to draw from.” The term “synthetic performer” was used instead.

Whatever she’s called, Norwood will be a sticking point in SAG-AFTRA’s contract negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which kicked off last month after both writers and actors went on lengthy strikes in 2023. For this deal, artists are demanding far more safeguards around the adoption of artificial intelligence. SAG-AFTRA has even floated collecting a fee any time studios use an AI actor. It’s known as the “Tilly tax.”

SAG-AFTRA isn’t alone here – unions everywhere are scrambling to negotiate collective agreements that protect workers against the threats of AI. But they’re up against two pretty big hurdles: employers hell-bent on using the tools to transform their work force, and technology that’s advancing much faster than contract timelines.

Setting the limits

Part of the challenge for unions coming to the bargaining table is that AI encroaches on so many aspects of the workplace. “You have issues of job transformation, layoffs, and issues of privacy and surveillance,” Sarah Ryan, a researcher at the Canadian Union of Public Employees, told The Globe. “So it’s tricky to address all of the risks of AI for workers.”

The Public Service Alliance of Canada is trying. The union, which represents roughly 245,000 civil servants, is currently negotiating with Ottawa on behalf of federal teachers, educators and librarians. PSAC asked for their new contract to include 15 different clauses on AI adoption, including one establishing that AI cannot be a “substitute” for public-sector employees. After nine months of bargaining, the union and government are still at an impasse.

It took five months of negotiations and multiple rallies for Carleton University’s teaching assistants to get AI protection into their contact with the school this year. CUPE said the first proposal, a clause stating their work wouldn’t be “reduced or replaced by AI,” was met with a blanket refusal. And the language they finally landed on has a telling caveat: It says Carleton does not have “any current intention to diminish the role of teaching assistants as the result of the use of AI tools.”

Big bets, small returns

Workers’ fears over this technology are understandable. Although the federal government’s AI strategy contends that automation will free civil servants to focus on high-value work, Chief Data Officer Stephen Burt publicly acknowledged that jobs will be cut as Ottawa adopts those tools. It’s just not clear when employers will figure out how exactly to do that. Late last year, KPMG polled more than 750 executives in Canada and found 93 per cent used generative AI in their companies. But only 2 per cent felt they’d seen any kind of return on investment.

Which brings us back to Tilly Norwood. Last week, in the run-up to the Oscars, the AI-generated actress dropped an AI-generated music video for her AI-generated single, Take the Lead – and it’s every bit as generic and forgettable as you’d imagine. It’s as if someone prompted ChatGPT with “Katy Perry pastel palette + Disney Princess power ballad,” then called it a day. Lyrics include “When they talk about me, they don’t see / The human spark, the creativity” and – in case that’s too subtle – “I’m just a tool / But I’ve got life.” Norwood can’t even muster a passable lip-sync. Perhaps SAG-AFTRA doesn’t need to introduce its Tilly tax quite yet.

Israel delivered sweeping new evacuation orders to southern Lebanon last night, turning built-up areas into ghost towns and terrifying the few residents who didn’t leave. Read more from The Globe’s Eric Reguly on the ground in Lebanon.