Hollywood executives said writers’ and actors’ strike demands like raising wages and protecting actors’ likenesses from AI was “unrealistic.”

While striking actors are seeking to protect their own IP from AI — among the union demands that Iger deemed “just not realistic” — so is Disney.

“It seems clear that the entertainment industry is willing to make massive investments in generative AI,” Zhao said, “not just potentially hundreds of millions of dollars, but also valuable access to their intellectual property, so that AI models can be trained to replace human creatives like actors, writers, journalists for a tiny fraction of human wages.”