AI Tools and Workflows · The record
What the industry and the unions have actually said.
Nothing here is our view. It is the published record: who said what, when, and whether it binds anybody. Where a position is contested we say so. Where a body has published nothing, we say that too.
Last checked September 2026. Re-checked monthly, and the date moves even when nothing has changed. Nothing on this page is legal advice: it is a record of what other bodies have published, with a route to each document.
Pact
Five principles from the producers’ body, and they are not contract terms.
Published with practical guidance in March 2024. The only published position from the UK employers’ side, and every UK indie is nominally working to it.
| Principle | What it says |
|---|---|
| Respecting copyright | “Copyright works should be protected from being used illegally in contravention of UK copyright law.” |
| Valuing human creativity | “Human creativity and artistic talent in the production process. This cannot be replaced by AI.” |
| Responsibility and accountability | “Transparency over the use of generative AI tools within the production process.” |
| Diversity and inclusion | “Minimising and mitigating bias in AI models.” |
| Data privacy | “Privacy must be protected and promoted throughout the AI lifecycle and production process.” |
They impose no consent requirement, no compensation and no disclosure obligation on a producer, and Pact called the guidance iterative. Quoted from Televisual’s and Screen’s reporting; Pact’s own guidance page did not resolve in September 2026.
Equity and Pact
The UK’s sharpest dispute, and it is still open.
01
The open letter, June 2025
Signed by Tamsin Greig, Alan Davies, Emma D’Arcy, Nicola Walker and Wilf Scolding among others. Equity’s case: thousands of performers on Pact–Equity productions have been digitally scanned on set without informed consent.
02
The indicative ballot, December 2025
Asked whether they were prepared to refuse to be scanned on set, 99.6 per cent said yes, on a 75.1 per cent turnout of an electorate of 7,732 actors, stunt performers and dancers. Indicative, not binding.
03
The deadline, January 2026
Equity gave Pact until the 19th of January to table acceptable terms or face a statutory ballot. Paul W Fleming: “Pact, when scrutinised, can’t really tell us how that data is being used.” Pact: “Cast are informed when and why they are being scanned – most commonly for editing purposes.” A strike would reach roughly 95 per cent of British productions.
04
The benchmark moves, June 2026
After SAG-AFTRA ratified, Fleming said UK members “will accept no less than the global industry standard on AI protections”, naming no-scan protections, consent for dubbing, replica security and transfer protection, a commitment to favouring human performances, and remuneration.
Equity’s AI Toolkit of 2023 remains its practical product: sample clauses for cloning and digitisation, and a template takedown letter. The legal point underneath matters more. Section 182(1) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 does not clearly reach synthetic reproduction, because a new performance can be generated without the original being copied. In the UK a performer’s stronger route is data protection law and the right to erasure, not performers’ rights.
No AI agreement between Equity and Pact has been publicly confirmed
Position as at September 2026
Bectu
Policy demands, and no member-facing guidance on AI.
Bectu’s published position is about regulation and data ownership, not set practice: implement the TUC’s AI and Employment Bill in full, introduce a right to disconnect, and give workers ownership of their data — “any data collected by employers on their workers should be agreed to by those workers and owned by them.” Its Intellectual Property Office response, March 2025, argued that “a copyright exemption for AI training would fundamentally harm the UK’s world-leading creative industries”, and backed opt-in mining, training-data transparency, fair compensation and an independent regulator.
A correction to our own earlier pages. We could find no Bectu member-facing AI toolkit, model clause or on-set guidance document; its published output on AI is policy advocacy, and its Big Survey of August 2025 contains no AI findings at all. If you are told Bectu has issued crew guidance on AI use, ask for the document. We will change this the day one is published.
The American agreements
Many UK units are contracted under these, which is why Equity argues the UK should not sit below them.
| Agreement | Date | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| SAG-AFTRA TV/Theatrical | Ratified December 2023 | The floor. Digital replica terms on three principles: clear consent to create one, fair compensation, control over performances and their usage. Codes for animation, sound recordings, commercials and interactive media followed. |
| SAG-AFTRA TV/Theatrical | Ratified June 2026, 91.42 to 8.58 per cent | The current standard. A producer needs an “articulable business reason” and consent before scanning for a replica. Synthetic performers are not to take human roles unless they provide “significant additional value”, under a stated principle of “strongly favoring human performances”. No replica may replace a performer during a strike. Added protection for minors. No guaranteed payments into an actor fund when synthetics are used. |
| WGA agreement, Article 72 | September 2023 | Absolute rather than procedural. “Written material produced by traditional AI or GAI shall not be considered literary material”, and is not source material for credit. “A Company may not require, as a condition of employment, that a writer use a GAI program.” Material handed to a writer must be disclosed as generated. |
| WGA memorandum of agreement | April 2026 | Transparency, not new prohibitions. Companies must meet the Guild at least semi-annually on request to review their use of generative AI, and give written notice if they license covered literary material to a third party to train a public-facing system. |
SAG-AFTRA’s contract language is member-gated, so the current terms above are trade-press paraphrase rather than read from the agreement. The WGA memorandum is public.
The commissioners
Union agreements set a floor. This is what a line producer is held to.
Netflix, August 2025
Five principles. No output replicating identifiable characteristics of unowned or copyrighted material. Tools “cannot store, reuse, or train on production data inputs or outputs”. An enterprise-secured environment where feasible. Generated material “temporary and not part of the final deliverables”. No replacing or generating talent performances or union-covered work without consent.
Netflix: what needs approval first
Written approval before proceeding: training a model in another artist’s style without cleared rights; generating main characters, key visuals or central story settings; prompts referencing copyrighted material or a public figure’s likeness; digital performers, voices or likenesses of real talent without documented consent; anything mistakable for real events. Ideation, moodboards, reference and rough compositions are generally allowed without legal review.
BBC, January 2025
“Any use of AI by the BBC in the creation, presentation or distribution of content must be transparent and clear to the audience.” The line that matters to an indie: external producers must discuss any AI use potentially requiring disclosure with their commissioner. Human oversight throughout.
Channel 4 and BAFTA
Channel 4 broadcast a Dispatches with a wholly AI-generated presenter in October 2025, revealed on screen, and called it a stunt it would not make a habit of. BAFTA’s rules for the 2027 Film Awards, published in July 2026, recognise human achievement “regardless of the tools used” and reserve the right to ask about AI use. On an AI performer winning: “It’s going to be a human that collects a BAFTA.”
The BFI, and a gap
The BFI has published. The British Film Commission has not.
AI in the Screen Sector: Perspectives and Paths Forward, from the BFI with the CoSTAR Foresight Lab, June 2025, is the first UK-wide study across film, high-end television and games. Its primary concern is the use of copyrighted material, including more than 100,000 film and television scripts, to train generative models without payment or the permission of rightsholders. Its nine recommendations run from a world-leading IP licensing market and carbon guidelines to skills complementary to AI, public understanding of AI use in screen content, and investment in creative technology.
The second correction. The British Film Commission has published nothing on AI. Its guidance index, opened in September 2026, carries Covid guidance, the BFI Diversity Standards, visas, filming regulations, skills and training, European relations and FAQs, and no AI, digital likeness or emerging-technology guidance at all. The only BFC statement on AI we could verify is chief executive Adrian Wootton’s remark at the time of the Equity ballot that all parties “are committed to developing fair, effective guardrails and provisions for the use of AI in film and TV”. The absence is a real gap in UK infrastructure and it is worth naming.
The law
What the law does, and what it deliberately declined to do.
UK copyright: status quo, on purpose
The government reported on copyright and AI in March 2026 and made no legislative change. The text-and-data-mining exception with opt-out was abandoned, statutory licensing rejected, and transparency not mandated despite more than 90 per cent of respondents supporting disclosure of training sources. Existing law already applies: most commercial AI training on copyright works requires a licence in the UK, and there is no exception to shelter behind.
UK labelling: nothing
There is no UK legislation specifically requiring AI-generated content to be labelled. A Commons Library briefing in January 2026 surveyed the techniques and created no obligation. Transparency expectations come instead from platform policies, advertising standards, consumer protection and the commissioner guidance above.
EU AI Act, Article 50: live now
Transparency obligations apply from August 2026, with machine-readable marking on pre-existing systems by December 2026. Deepfakes must be disclosed; clearly fantastical content falls outside the definition. Inside a creative work the duty reduces to disclosure “in an appropriate manner that does not hamper the display or enjoyment” — an end credit, not a burn-in. A UK production delivering into an EU territory is inside this today.
The short version
Permitted, and not permitted.
| Permitted | Not permitted, or needs more | |
|---|---|---|
| Performer likeness | Scanning with informed consent and an articulable business reason; scanning for editing and VFX, which Pact says is the common case. | A replica without consent. A replica replacing a performer during a strike. Scanning a minor without the added protections. In the UK, informed consent is contested in practice. |
| Performer voice | Cloning with documented consent. | Generating new talent performances without consent. A general release almost certainly does not cover cloning. |
| Synthetic performers | Where they provide significant additional value. | As the rule rather than the exception. And they cannot win a BAFTA. |
| Writers’ material | A company may use generative AI; a writer may choose to. | Requiring a writer to use it. Crediting its output as literary or source material. Withholding disclosure that supplied material was generated. |
| Crew’s work | AI tools alongside union-covered work. | Replacing union-covered work without consent. |
| Third-party material | Ideation, moodboards, reference. | Training on another artist’s library without cleared rights. Output replicating identifiable characteristics of unowned material. Uploading production data to a tool that trains on inputs. |
| The audience | — | Misleading them. |
What we could not verify
Four things we could not confirm, stated rather than smoothed over.
Whether the Equity and Pact dispute has been settled
No settlement, statutory ballot result or new agreement reported after June 2026. Equity’s own site and two trade titles did not open for us.
Unresolved
The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain’s documents
The Guild’s site refused connection. It is reported to have published an AI policy, member guidelines and a call for an independent regulator. We will not quote any of that from a headline, so there is no WGGB quotation on this page.
Unverified
The UK consultation on digital replicas and personality rights
Promised for the summer alongside the copyright report in March 2026. It is the mechanism by which a UK performer might get a likeness right — the thing Equity is bargaining for in its absence.
Unknown
Bectu branch guidance
We record above that Bectu has published none. We cannot rule out an internal branch document that is not on the public site.
Open question
Where this comes from
The documents themselves.
Equity gives update on its AI dispute with Pact
C21Media, January 2026, carrying both sides verbatim.
Source
AI in the Screen Sector: Perspectives and Paths Forward
BFI and CoSTAR Foresight Lab, June 2025.
Source
British Film Commission guidance index
Opened September 2026. Listed for what is not on it.
Source
