What is the current and imagined future role of GenAI in the Canadian screen industry? How are screen workers negotiating the use of GenAI in production, both individually and collectively? Finally, how can regulatory frameworks and union policies adapt to safeguard creative labour in this evolving landscape?
The ongoing rollout of GenAI tools presents both opportunities and challenges for workers in the screen industries, including in areas like screenwriting, voice synthesis, and actor likeness replication. These tools raise critical questions about creativity, intellectual property (IP) rights, labour protections, and compensation. Yet there remains a significant gap in understanding how screen workers are addressing GenAI, both on an individual and collective level.
This project extends earlier findings on how the rise of global streaming has altered content production in Europe, shifting power away from traditional studios toward data-driven corporations (Idiz 2024; Rasmussen 2024).
Since February 2025, CLCF postdoc Daphne Rena Idiz has been conducting empirical research focused on the Canadian context. It includes “interface ethnography” (Ortner 2010), i.e. observation of the public facing discourses at industry events, and a “production cultures” (Caldwell 2008) approach through qualitative interviews with screen industry professionals.
The initial phase of this research focuses on individual creatives (screenwriters, showrunners, directors, producers) and their encounters with, uses of, and beliefs about genAI. The second phase starting in fall 2025 will engage with collectives (WGC, WGA, CMPA…), streamers and broadcasters (Netflix, Amazon, CBC, CTV…), and policymakers. These findings will be triangulated with an analysis of current legal frameworks in Canada to understand the links to more “top-down” AI governance (e.g. around authorship and copyright).
This project uses a temporalities framework to examine continuities with past evolutions and negotiations in the screen industries (especially around streaming); present practices and beliefs; and the ways in which futures are imagined and actively shaped.
Themes addressed by this project:
