SAG-AFTRA member Zachary Luna participates in a kick-off picket line for the SAG-AFTRA video game strike at Warner Bros. Games headquarters on Thursday, Aug. 1, 2024, in Burbank, Calif. Hollywood's video game performers are currently on strike, throwing part of the entertainment industry into another work stoppage after talks for a new contract with major game studios broke down over artificial intelligence protections. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)

LOS ANGELES (AP) — More than 300 video game performers and Hollywood actors picketed in front of the Warner Bros. Studios building on Thursday to protest against what they call an unwillingness from top gaming companies to protect union voice actors and motion capture workers equally against the unregulated use of artificial intelligence.

Standing before the crowd, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, national executive director of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, said that AI has become the most challenging issue in many of the union’s negotiations.

“We’ve made deals with the studios and streamers. We’ve made deals without a strike with the major record labels and with countless other employers, which provide for informed consent and fair compensation for our members,” he said. “And yet, for some reason, the video game companies refuse to do that and that’s what’s going to be their undoing.”

The protest marks the first large labor action since SAG-AFTRA game workers voted to strike last week. The work stoppage came after more than 18 months of negotiations with gaming giants, including divisions of Activision, Warner Bros. and Walt Disney Co., over a new interactive media agreement stalled over protections around the use of AI. Warner Bros. Games is the publisher behind games including “Hogwarts Legacy” and “Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.”

“Signs up, games down, LA is a union town,” the crowd chanted Thursday morning, many of them holding up signs emblazoned with a fist holding a video game controller. One man, dressed in a skull mask reminiscent of a “Call of Duty” character named Ghost, waved a poster that read, “Don’t ghost us for AI. It’s your call of duty to pay actors.” The first-person shooter game is published by Activision.

Members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and the Writers Guild of America also attended the protest in solidarity.

Union leaders have billed AI as an existential crisis for performers. Game voice actors and motion capture artists’ likenesses, they say, could be replicated by AI and used without consent and fair compensation. The unregulated use of AI, the union says, poses “an equal or even greater threat” to performers in the video game industry than it does in film and television because the capacity to cheaply and easily create convincing digital replicas of performers’ voices is widely available.

Concerns over AI helped fuel last year’s film and television strikes by the union, which lasted four months.

On the picket line, Konstantine Anthony said that most people want humans — not AI — to be their storytellers.