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The Daily Beast calls Hacks “Truly exquisite,” while TV Insider declares, “Jean Smart shines more brightly than ever.” Led by Emmy® winner Smart in a career-defining performance, the acclaimed comedy also stars Emmy® winners Hannah Einbinder and Paul W. Downs, alongside Megan Stalter and Emmy® nominee Carl Clemons-Hopkins.

From Universal Television and HBO Max, Hacks is for your Emmy consideration in all eligible categories, including Outstanding Comedy Series. TV Academy members can catch up on the series at UniversalFYC.com. Don’t miss the series finale on Thursday, May 28.

And now, the main event...

Considering that Hollywood has spent the past few years spiraling about an A.I. jobs apocalypse—and torched half of 2023 in a pair of strikes largely centered on that very issue—it’s honestly a little surprising that this bargaining cycle has been so civilized. Reading through the 18-page summary of SAG-AFTRA’s tentative deal with the studios, I was somewhat startled to see that the union, pending membership approval, had left open the door to “synthetic” actors—i.e., fully A.I.-generated digital performers, not based on or performed by identifiable human actors. After years of warnings that studios wanted infinitely reusable performances, Hollywood has effectively agreed to that future.

To be fair, union leadership was understandably focused on stabilizing pension and health plans while also securing meaningful streaming residual gains. Still, it’s hard not to wonder what comes next. Producers now need only an “articulable business reason” to scan actors they hire. They don’t need to disclose that reason, either—they can merely notify the union and engage in discussions before licensing films and television shows for third-party A.I. training. SAG-AFTRA has no veto. As for deploying fully synthetic performers like Tilly Norwood, it’s all good as long as producers can demonstrate that A.I. actors offer “significant additional value” beyond what could be achieved using an ordinary digital replica or, you know, an actual human being.

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NPR calls All Her Fault “a gripping thriller” with “exceptional performances,” while Collider praises Sarah Snook and Dakota Fanning as “incredibly charismatic on screen together,” with both actresses “delivering powerful performances.”

From Universal International Studios and Peacock, All Her Fault is for your Emmy consideration in all eligible categories, including Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series. All Her Fault is streaming now, only on Peacock.

And so what exactly counts as “significant additional value”? That’s where things get hazy fast. The language is squishy enough to suggest both sides were deeply motivated to keep the A.I. issue from blowing up the deal altogether. Better, perhaps, to preserve the right to object and the right to gather discovery than to force a clean answer today. That leaves the hard conversations for a later fight—whether that arrives in arbitration or during the next bargaining cycle, now four years away instead of the usual three.

Still, I can’t help but wonder whether Hollywood’s latest labor peace is really just an advance payment on years of lucrative legal work built around a fresh crop of ambiguities. If the agreement effectively requires studios to show they considered—and rejected—using actual performers before deploying a synthetic one, what does that process look like in practice? Is there a paper trail? A memo? A PowerPoint explaining why a flesh-and-blood actor simply couldn’t cut it? And who ultimately decides whether the justification is persuasive enough? Was “significant additional value” left intentionally elastic because SAG-AFTRA didn’t want to inadvertently legitimize certain uses by defining the term too narrowly? Or was ambiguity simply the price of getting the concept into the contract at all?

One wonders whether negotiators ever traded hypotheticals behind closed doors: Would saving money qualify as a sufficient reason? Avoiding scheduling conflicts? What about creating a synthetic performer who conveniently never ages out of a franchise? Or did everyone avoid specifics for fear of accidentally blessing the next industry nightmare?

I pressed SAG-AFTRA chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland on how any of this is actually supposed to be policed. He pushed back on the idea that the contract language is especially murky, insisting that the “significant additional value” standard will be “very hard” for producers to satisfy. He also told me he has trouble imagining what kind of documentation a studio could realistically assemble to justify deploying a fully synthetic performer in lieu of a human one. Translation: Nobody in town seems quite ready to storm the barricades over synthetics stealing jobs just yet, but the union is very much reserving its right to take up arms later. As Crabtree-Ireland put it, “Ultimately, it is the arbitrator who must determine whether there was, in fact, significant additional value achieved by using a synthetic.”

Of course, studio executives tend to be profoundly risk-averse, so even if the new rules are a blessing for Tilly Norwood’s agent, there are still plenty of unresolved questions swirling around this new A.I. era. Beginning with the basic issue of ownership: Who, exactly, owns what? The question occupies the center of a developing case I’ve been watching, one so strange and under the radar that it has escaped even the obsessives maintaining public spreadsheets tracking A.I. litigation.

The dispute concerns Steal a Brainrot, one of Roblox’s biggest hits—a treasure-hunt game that has amassed tens of billions of visits and already has a feature-film adaptation in the works. The game allows users to “steal” various brainrot characters as they move through the game’s world. Until recently, one of the most popular characters was Tung Tung Tung Sahur, an A.I.-generated meme figure allegedly created by an Indonesian TikToker known as “Noxa.” Tung Tung resembles a humanoid wooden “stick drum” wielding a bat. Mementum Lab, a French startup that bills itself as a talent agency for brainrot characters, licensed Tung Tung Tung Sahur on behalf of Noxa. (Yes, that is the most 2026 sentence I have ever written.)

Last fall, Mementum sent Spyder Games, the publisher behind Steal a Brainrot, a cease-and-desist letter essentially inviting the parties into licensing negotiations. Instead, Roblox briefly pulled the character from the game, tempers escalated, and now we have a fascinating lawsuit sitting at the intersection of A.I., internet culture, derivative works, and the surreal economics of digital intellectual property.

Spyder’s opening gambit was to sprint to California federal court seeking declaratory relief that Tung Tung Tung Sahur wasn’t entitled to copyright protection because the character was generated by A.I. and lacked the human authorship that copyright law requires. Mementum responded by bypassing copyright altogether. Rather than defending ownership through copyright law, the company asserted trademark rights over Tung Tung Tung Sahur’s name and likeness. The theory here is that consumers could mistakenly believe an unauthorized digital double is officially connected to its creator. (Matthew McConaughey, Taylor Swift, and all those preparing for the A.I. age by trademarking, take note.) Mementum says it holds a registered trademark in France and a pending application through the World Intellectual Property Organization and already licensed Tung Tung into other games including Fortnite, Plants vs Brainrots, and Pudgy Party.

On Friday, Spyder—represented by noted Mitchell Silberberg partner Aaron Moss, squaring off against his former firm Greenberg Glusker, the Hollywood boutique whose clients include Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks—moved to dismiss. Spyder’s argument is that there is no legitimate trademark here because fictional characters are not supposed to function as source identifiers under the Lanham Act. Even if they could, Spyder argues, the Supreme Court largely foreclosed this maneuver in Dastar v. Twentieth Century Fox, the 2003 decision involving a war documentary series that had fallen into the public domain. There, the Court held that trademark law’s concern with “origin” refers to the producer of the tangible goods being sold (e.g., a video game) rather than the creator of the ideas or expressive content embedded within those goods. Put differently, trademark law is not supposed to serve as a backdoor substitute for copyright protection. More bluntly, trademark claims cannot revive rights that copyright law declines to recognize in the first place.

That is where the matter now stands: a case likely destined for law school casebooks; a dispute Hollywood should study carefully as synthetic characters move deeper into the licensing economy; and perhaps a clear indication that A.I. will not eliminate legal work so much as generate entirely new categories of it. The Gen Z associates arriving at firms this summer armed with ChatGPT prompts and Zyn addictions should probably feel secure. If anything, the machines appear to be creating a bigger mess for lawyers to clean up—one brainrot character at a time.

Thanks, Eriq. WIH returns for a special issue on Wednesday, and I’ll be back on Thursday.

Matt

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