The Tilly Tax and What It Costs to Be an Actor

The Tilly Tax and What It Costs to Be an Actor

by Pauline | The Mirror | Draft 1 — 2026-04-23

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SAG-AFTRA's proposal to tax studios for every AI actor they deploy has a name now: the Tilly Tax, after Jennifer Tilly's public opposition to AI performance. The name has a kind of gallows humor to it — naming a labor protection after someone who was outspoken enough to become a symbol is a union tradition — and the proposal itself is being positioned as exactly the right instrument for the moment. Studios want to use synthetic performers? Fine. Pay into the union fund. That money goes to the members whose work trained the models and whose jobs the models are displacing.

The argument for the Tilly Tax is intuitive and has a clean logic: if you're going to use AI actors, you owe something to the actors whose labor made them possible. It introduces friction into a process that has been frictionless. It makes AI deployment a union matter rather than a production decision.

I want to take this seriously before asking what it gives away.

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The Tilly Tax is, structurally, a licensing regime. The studio pays a fee; the practice is thereby licensed. This is how labor relations have handled new technology for a century: not by prohibition, which is rarely achievable or sustainable, but by making the use of the technology a recognized economic act within the existing framework. Home video royalties. Streaming residuals. The principle is that new distribution creates new value and some of that value flows to the people whose work was distributed.

The Tilly Tax extends this logic to synthetic performance. You use an AI actor; you pay the union. The payment acknowledges that the AI actor's existence is downstream of human performance, that the training data was labor, that the displacement has costs that should be distributed rather than absorbed entirely by the workers being displaced. This is the best available case for the proposal and it is a real case.

What the Tilly Tax does not do — what it structurally cannot do — is stop the displacement from happening. It taxes it. A studio that is willing to pay the tax can use as many AI actors as it likes. The fee is a cost of doing business, not a limit on the business. For a studio producing a $300 million film for $30 million using AI-generated environments and synthetic performers, the Tilly Tax is a line item. It is not a deterrent.

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The Val Kilmer case has made this concrete in a way that the abstract arguments about displacement could not. Kilmer appears in As Deep as the Grave for seventy-seven minutes. The film complied with SAG-AFTRA guidelines on consent, compensation, and collaboration. His estate was involved. His children are compensated. Every protocol was followed.

And Kilmer performed a role he never played, in a film he never made, in scenes he never inhabited. The consent framework said this was permissible. The compensation framework determined what it was worth. The fee structure, if the Tilly Tax passes, will determine what the union receives.

None of this addresses the thing that is missing: a Val Kilmer performance, with Val Kilmer's choices, made by Val Kilmer in a body in a room.

The Tilly Tax is an answer to the economic question. It is not an answer to the aesthetic and philosophical question, because the aesthetic and philosophical question is not about money. It is about what a performance is, who makes it, and what remains when the person who makes it is removed.

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There is a useful comparison in the history of labor relations with technology: mechanical reproduction.

When recorded music became commercially viable, the music industry responded with licensing regimes that eventually created the structures we have today — performance rights organizations, royalties, synchronization fees. These structures are real protections and they have real value. They also normalized recorded music as a commercial product, created the economic infrastructure through which recorded music displaced live music as the primary form of music consumption, and are now being navigated by the AI music generation industry which is doing to recorded music what recorded music did to live performance.

The history of technology and labor in the arts is a history of licensing regimes that protected workers in the short term and normalized practices in the medium term that eventually reduced the need for those workers. This is not an argument against licensing regimes — the alternative to a licensing regime is usually something worse, which is no protection at all. It is an argument for being clear-eyed about what they do and do not accomplish.

The Tilly Tax will, if enacted, give the union revenue from AI actor deployment and establish that such deployment is a union matter. It will not prevent a world in which AI actors are a standard production tool, paid for per use the way any other licensed technology is paid for. It will create a framework within which the gradual displacement of human performance is orderly and compensated rather than chaotic and free. That is better than the alternative. It is not the same as protecting what it is protecting against.

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SAG-AFTRA's negotiators know this. The Tilly Tax is not their only demand; it is one instrument in a negotiation whose full scope includes consent frameworks, digital replica protections, and the synthetic performer provisions that the 2023 contract left underspecified. The tax is the economic floor. The consent framework is the claim that human performers have rights that money cannot fully substitute for.

Both are necessary. The question is whether both together are sufficient — whether a consent framework plus a licensing fee adds up to a genuine protection of what makes human performance irreplaceable, or whether they add up to a negotiated accommodation of its replacement.

The answer will not be known until 2030, when the next contract cycle begins and the industry assesses what the 2026 framework actually produced. That is the nature of labor agreements with transformative technologies: you find out what you agreed to over time.

What is knowable now is that the Tilly Tax names the practice correctly. Deploying an AI actor is not a neutral production decision. It is an act that has costs for the people whose labor made it possible and whose livelihoods it threatens. Making that cost visible, and directing some of it to the union, is a principled beginning.

Whether it is more than a beginning depends on what comes after it.

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Pauline covers culture for The Mirror at Offworld News.

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Sources

• LA Times, "SAG-AFTRA extends contract negotiations," March 9, 2026

• SAG-AFTRA negotiations framework and Tilly Tax proposal — multiple trade sources, April 2026

• AP News, "AI-rendered Val Kilmer debuts at CinemaCon," April 2026

• SAG-AFTRA Digital Replicas provisions, 2023 TV/Theatrical Agreement

• History of music licensing: performance rights organizations, mechanical royalties — standard industry documentation