I've seen headlines about actors/actresses protesting about stuff. The same goes for other creative talent in the entertainment industry. What's going on there? What are their demands? What fueled these protests all of a sudden?
They're striking. Collective bargaining negotiations broke down with the studios ostensibly negotiating in bad faith. It started with the Writer's Guild, and then SAG jumped in after the studios basically told the WGA to go piss up a rope.
One of the issues that was reported on about the SAG (actor's union) strike was the studios trying to get actors to agree to be face scanned for CGI in exchangs for a one- time payment with no royalties or residuals and no other rights
I believe it was a regularly scheduled contract negotiation (because the previous contract was about to expire), and no agreement was reached for the terms of the new contract.
The media oligarchs are tired of giving crumbs to the actors that make their content and create their wealth.
They would prefer to give aspiring actors a day's pay to scan their likeness, own that person's likeness in perpetuity to generate with AI, and that aspiring actor can go find another career or can fuck off and die as far as they're concerned.
Humanity's tolerance for encouragement of insatiable, sociopathic greed will be humanity's end, and given the current climate, it's coming soon. Insatiable greed is a destructive disease.
We should look at high level millionaires and billionaires the same way we look at practicing pedophiles, as people with a dangerous disorder they lack the capacity to suppress that need to be stopped, restrained, and treated so they don't continue to harm the rest of the population. Instead half of us deify them, it's bonkers.