Silicon Valley’s getting rich. Hollywood’s barely scraping by. And yet, tech companies are relying on actors and artists’ work to train its AI models and rake in profits — or at least that’s how some in the struggling film industry see it.

Now, after a disappointing outing for copyright protection efforts this past year, California’s entertainment workers are pleading with lawmakers to pass something aimed at protecting their industry before AI-generated movies, music and art run them out of their jobs.

"I don't know how many of you have come to LA recently, but it is bleeding out in front of my very eyes," Danny Lin, president of the Animation Guild, said Monday at a legislative hearing on AI copyright issues. "[AI's] not creating that problem, but it's absolutely exacerbating it."

The standing-room-only joint Assembly Privacy and Senate Judiciary committee hearing, held Monday at Stanford University, previewed how the AI copyright battle brewing between California's two most iconic industries is poised to boil over when lawmakers return to Sacramento next year. That fight will more than likely center around Assembly Privacy Chair Rebecca Bauer-Kahan’s pending AI copyright transparency legislation, AB 412.

Actors and creators want to know when their content is used to train AI, and to ensure their work isn’t used without their permission. Their concerns are underscored by anecdotes of AI-generated songs topping Billboard charts and a flurry of ongoing litigation, like a recently-filed case in which The New York Times accused AI startup Perplexity of illegally copying its writers’ work.

"I don't understand why their right to not go bankrupt supersedes all the artists' right to not go bankrupt," game developer and artist Brendan Mauro testified.

“I think all voice artists, in the next three to five years, are in trouble,” Jason George, a SAG-AFTRA national board member and actor who testified Monday, told Decoded in an interview. George is known for playing Dr. Ben Warren on ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy.”

“They’ll do the work that can be seen as more perfunctory, like joining the storyboards,” he said of AI models. “If those go away, then our movies are going to start looking really, really middle of the road. Mid, you know?”

George and dozens of creative workers who attended Monday’s hearing rallied around Bauer-Kahan’s bill as a potential solution. Her measure would require companies to publicly display certain AI training data online and allow copyright holders to request information about which works were used to train a model.

But identifying copyrighted work in AI model training data is challenging. Tech companies and industry groups have argued that Bauer-Kahan’s AB 412 is technically infeasible and near-impossible to implement without forcing firms to publish data that risks revealing trade secrets.

“The future of the way AI is being deployed within the enterprise space and the media space is one that gives you a significant collaboration between media technology companies,” OpenAI Copyright Policy Counsel Mark Gray testified Monday. “With that said, we do recognize that there are specific AI applications that raise concern."

OpenAI was the only company willing to show up at the hearing, Bauer-Kahan said Monday. Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft were invited to testify but didn’t respond. Of the four no-shows, none responded to a request for comment.

Industry sidestepped a copyright fight this year when Bauer-Kahan’s bill stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee. But it’s not over: the Bay Area Democrat told Decoded she wants to find a path forward next year, even as expert witnesses at Monday’s hearing suggested her plan might run afoul of existing federal copyright law.

“Copyright preemption rules actually limit what states can do,” said Pamela Samuelson, a copyright law professor at UC Berkeley. “I consulted with half a dozen of my copyright colleagues, and we think that [AB 412] is actually, probably, likely to be struck down.”

Bauer-Kahan told us she disagreed with the assessment and is pushing forward anyway, and that she’ll use information gathered at Monday’s hearing to inform how she retools AB 412 for the next session.

“The companies are going to sue on any bill I do,” she told us. “I believe I stand on strong grounds, as it relates to states’ rights.”

She has a potential ally: Senate Judiciary Chair Tom Umberg, who chairs the committee where AB 412 is currently parked, was adamant during Monday’s hearing that the Legislature should find a way to solve the issue.

“This is too important of an issue to not come up with some solution here,” Umberg told Decoded.

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