Hollywood honchos to join Chuck Schumer’s AI summit amid strike

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s upcoming summit on artificial Intelligence could have implications for Hollywood – and the ongoing strikes that have shuttered the industry, On The Money has learned. 

Both Writers Guild President Meredith Stiehm and the Motion Picture Association Chairman and CEO Charles Rivkin will attend the Sept. 13 event in D.C., which aims to establish a framework for regulating AI, a source confirmed.

Microsoft Founder Bill Gates has also RSVPd “yes” to the event, Schumer’s office confirmed to On The Money – joining a who’s who list of Silicon Valley titans that includes Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. 

The addition of Stiehm, who is fighting it out with the studios, and Rivkin, who isn’t directly involved in negotiations, signals the growing threat AI poses to upending the entertainment industry.

The use of generative AI in entertainment has been a key point of contention by SAG-AFTRA and the Writer’s Guild of America, which have been on strike for most of the summer. 

Both unions have demanded that “AI can’t write or rewrite literary material; can’t be used as source material; and (works covered by union contracts) can’t be used to train AI,” as part of their key demands in the stalled negotiations.

The forum, however, represents just the beginning of a conversion and that forming legislation will take some time, sources said.

One source with knowledge of the event described it as a “focus group” that is trying to generate ideas for how to best regulate AI – and added the plan is to host multiple forums like the one that will be held next month.

Other high-powered honchos expected to attend include Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Humane Intelligence CEO Rumman Chowdhur, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, Hugging Face CEO C​​lément Delangue, Aerospace Industries Association CEO Eric Fanning, Center for Humane Technology Co-founder Tristan Harris, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, Paltir CEO Alex Karp, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, Unidos US President Janet Murguía, UC Berkeley researcher Deborah Raji, AFL-CIO President Elizabeth Shuler, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, and Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights CEO Maya Wiley.

While tech moguls have been warning the fallout from the advent of artificial intelligence could be on a par with “nuclear war” or “pandemics,” the forum represents the first organized approach to create some sort of blueprint for regulating AI.