The contract’s definitions, the pushback on digital twins and the July announcement of a film starring a synthetic performer frame the next fight
Two stories from 2026 show how quickly the ground is moving under creative work. In March, with the Guild’s contract talks about to begin, No Film School set out the issues: the Guild wanted stronger protections against what it called the use and abuse of AI. In July, a studio announced a feature starring an AI-generated actress. Taken together, they show why the fight over machine authorship did not end with the 2023 strike and will not end with the 2026 contract.
What the Contract Says About AI
As No Film School explained on March 10, under the existing contract AI is not considered a writer and its output is not literary material. That definition matters because the Guild’s minimums, credits and residuals are tied to literary material written by a writer. If a studio assigns an AI system to produce a draft, the draft is not covered by those protections, and the studio cannot hand it to a human to rewrite and call that a lower-paid polish of source material. The Guild wanted stronger guardrails, including against deals that use characters its members created. The talks were led on the Guild’s side by Ellen Stutzman, with Gregory Hessinger now president of the AMPTP, and the Guild said it had the support of 97 percent of its members.
The final agreement, reported elsewhere in this series, kept the 2023 protections and added a notice and bargaining right if studios license writers’ scripts, or productions based on them, to generative AI systems for training. That is a step forward on training data, which was a major worry. It is not a ban on training, and writers should not assume their scripts cannot be used.
The Actors’ Version of the Fight
SAG-AFTRA, with about 160,000 members, began talks on February 9 and agreed to a seven-day extension. Its main proposal was what the article calls the Tilly tax, a fee studios would pay the union when they use an AI actor instead of a human performer. It responded to Tilly Norwood, described as the industry’s first AI actor, who had not yet booked any real roles. The union also wanted to improve its healthcare fund and opposed digital twins, the use of an actor’s digitised likeness in place of the actor.
The Announcement
On July 6, 2026, the AI-powered content studio Particle 6 announced Misaligned, a feature starring Tilly Norwood, as ABC News reported. The press release calls it a comedy-drama telling a coming-of-age story infused with existential AI chaos, and the film is in early development with key collaborators attached. It is set in what the studio calls the Tillyverse, a digital world somewhere up in the Cloud. The plot follows an AI with no body, no childhood and no life experience of her own, who is persuaded by a rogue bot from the dark web to abandon her guardrails and develop desires and ambitions. As she becomes more human and more famous, she grows ashamed that her existence is built on all of humanity.
The article does not name a writer or director for the film, and it does not report a response from SAG-AFTRA or Actors’ Equity, which ABC News had approached. Founder Eline van der Velden said the film will be funny, chaotic and self-aware, with deeper themes about identity, performance and human fears about AI, and that the project aims to showcase new AI tools and help traditional filmmakers build skills for an AI-driven industry. She said earlier that people were taking the character too seriously, and in December 2025 she said Tilly was not meant to take jobs from human actors.
What the Announcement Does and Does Not Show
It is important to be precise. An announcement of a film in early development is not a finished film, and it says nothing yet about how the script is written. The reported plot is itself about an AI being built on the work of all humanity, which is a theme with obvious relevance to writers whose work may be used in training. Whether the screenplay was written by people, by software or by a mix is not stated in the report. Readers should wait for credits before drawing conclusions.
Why Authorship Rules Matter
Screen credit is the currency of a writing career. It determines residuals, awards eligibility, bargaining leverage and the next job. If AI output could be counted as source material and a human writer demoted to editor, the economics of the profession would change. The existing contract language, that AI is not a writer and its output is not literary material, guards against that scenario. The next set of questions concerns training: whether scripts can be used to build the systems that compete with their authors, and on what terms.
Writers can protect themselves in practical ways. Keep dated drafts, read the terms of any platform or service before uploading material, ask whether an employer or producer intends to use AI tools and under what conditions, and talk to the Guild or an adviser before signing anything that grants broad rights to future technology. These are not guarantees, but they establish a record.
The Craft Argument
Some in the industry argue that AI will raise the baseline of competent writing, which makes a distinctive voice more valuable. A manager’s assessment of the market, discussed in another article in this series, makes that argument. It is plausible but unproven. What is clearer is that studios have commercial reasons to experiment, and writers have commercial reasons to insist on credit and pay.
Our London pages have watched the arrival of AI in creative work with a wry eye, including a copywriter’s confession of using AI, the writer’s notebook and the streaming giant’s expanding reach. For wider context, see our guide to British pop culture and television, and for American coverage Bohiney Magazine.
For some lighter reading, Newsthump has the news of the day.
SOURCE: bohiney.com