The actors’ anti-AI protests are much, much stronger than the writers’ (and I say this as someone who is nevertheless 100% supportive of the writers’ demands vis-a-vis AI). Because the actors are literally talking about studios demanding to have the right to use their likeness. That’s not a technological hurdle that has to be overcome, it’s literally just profiting off of someone else’s image without having to pay them. A mere $200 to hire an actor for one day, and they own their likeness in perpetuity; that’s what studios are supposedly asking for.
The writers’ case is still very strong, in my opinion. Because their fear (and I think it’s very founded) is not that their jobs will be replaced by AI. Not in a real sense. But that they’ll be forced to do like 90% of the work for like 50% of the pay because of studios’ use of AI. The way studio credits/payment works for writers, “revising” an existing script pays less than writing a script fresh. So if the studios can create a really shitty script with AI and hand it to a writer who has to do a significant amount of work editing it to be in an actually-usable state. But because they’re being paid to revise it, not write it, they don’t get paid commensurate to the amount of work actually being done.
In theory, the writers’ case could eventually be harmed by actual use of AI in a way that the actors’ simply cannot (an AI could theoretically eventually replace an actor entirely, but that’s not the debate on the table right now). I think that “eventually” is much further away than most techbros seem to suggest, because frankly LLMs are just not as close to AGI as it seems they usually get thought of as. But that eventually could happen, and then the nature of a writers’ job will have to change more substantially in a way that does hurt them quite a bit more. Though it’s worth noting that AI is even further away from doing the less-obviously-“writery” work writers do, which often sets them on the path to becoming directors and producers, and without that pipeline for creating the higher-level roles, film studios are going to struggle to keep making films.