The Brief

Striking actors on the picket lines are demanding studios ask for consent and compensate them fairly when it comes to digital replicas.

Duncan Crabtree-Ireland is the chief negotiator for SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union supporting the strike. During a press conference last week, he said actors faced “an existential threat to their livelihoods, with the rise of generative AI technology.”

It all sounds a little bit like the Black Mirror’s “Joan is Awful” episode, but actor Erik Passoja told LAist he has a real-life cautionary tale from his experience working in the video game industry.

Passoja said he did motion capture work back in 2014 for the video game Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. He said he got a daily rate to play a Belgian geneticist, one of the bad guy’s henchmen.

But after the game was released, Passoja got an unexpected call from a friend. “He said ‘Hey Erik, my son just shot you!,’” Passoja recalled.

Turns out Passoja’s digital likeness was also used in a multiplayer version of the game, something he said he didn’t consent to.

“I found out that someone had plastered my face on a playable character, so now you can shoot me, blow me up, burn me, throw me off a cliff,” Passoja said.

Passoja said he never saw a penny of residuals, which actors don’t typically receive on video games.

The SAG-AFTRA strike order does not include work under its Interactive Media Agreement, which covers video game work.

But Passoja said he’s concerned Hollywood studios could do the same thing.

The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) said in a statement that its contract offer includes a “groundbreaking” requirement to ask for a performer’s consent before using a digital replica.

But according to Crabtree-Ireland, the AMPTP had proposed “that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get paid for one day’s pay, and their company should own that scan, their image, their likeness and to be able to use it for the rest of eternity in any project they want with no consent and no compensation.”

“If you think that’s a ‘groundbreaking’ proposal, I suggest you think again,” Crabtree-Ireland added.

“If we don’t stand tall right now, we are all going to be in trouble. We are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines,” SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher said at the press conference announcing the strike.

For his part, Passoja said he believes in the power of AI and technology if it’s used ethically, but he feels exploited by the situation, especially when you consider that Call of Duty is a multi-billion dollar franchise. Passoja said he's running to be a SAG-AFTRA local union delegate, in part because of this very issue.

Call of Duty developer Activision did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.

Timeline: SAG-AFTRA strike

Some things to note: This is the first SAG strike since 1980. The 1960 strike, which took place while the WGA was also striking, was led by Ronald Reagan, then the president of SAG. Current events:

• May 17: Union leaders ask for and receive a strike authorization vote ahead of contract talks.
• June 7: SAG-AFTRA begins negotiations with the AMPTP; contract due to end June 30.
• June 30: Both sides agree to extend talks through July 12.
• July 12: Federal negotiator is brought in.
• July 13: The national board of SAG-AFTRA authorizes its 160,000 members to go on strike.
• July 14: Picketing begins at 9 a.m. at major studios and streamer HQ’s across the city.

The issue: Actors

Minimum earnings: SAG is asking for an 11% general wage increase to reflect inflation. The AMPTP is countering with 5%.

Share of revenue: Actors feel they haven’t received their fair share of revenue from hit streaming shows.

• Traditionally compensation has been linked to ratings. Streamers like Netflix, however, don’t release how many people watch their shows, so it’s difficult to know which ones are major hits. SAG-AFTRA proposed bringing in a third-party company to measure ratings and devise residuals. The AMPTP rejected this. 
• Executives at studios and streamers maintain they’re still recovering from pandemic losses and have spent billions of dollars creating and buying content for new streaming platforms, some of which are far from profitable.
• While some streamers are thriving (Netflix recently reported $1.71 billion of quarterly operating income), The Walt Disney Co. has announced the firing of 7,000 employees to save money, having lost close to $10 billion to date on its streaming platforms. Warner Bros. Discovery is making deep cuts because of its $50 billion in debt. 

Artificial intelligence: There is deep concern about how artificial intelligence will be used, with particular anxiety about the use of a performer’s image and likeness. The union wants to prevent studios from training AI programs on actors’ work without permission, and for actors to consent and be paid if AI is used to replicate them. The AMPTP offered what it called a "groundbreaking" proposal that it said “protects performers’ digital likenesses." The union rejected this.

Self-taped auditions: Since the pandemic, self-produced audition tapes have become the norm — meaning actors light and film themselves. It’s labor intensive, with no pay, and widens an already competitive pool of performers. The union says it understands self-taped auditions can be useful, but wants to put restrictions around them.

• Read SAG-AFTRA’s summary of negotiation points 
• And what the AMPTP has to say about the negotiations

Go deeper

• TV And Movie Writers Strike Over 'Gig Economy' Conditions. What’s At Stake In The WGA Walkout
• From Gas Stations to Restaurants: How The WGA Strike Will Hit The LA Economy
• This Hollywood Writers Strike Could Have Massive Economic Impact. An Economist Explains What We Can Learn From 2007
• How The WGA Strike Of 2007 Strike Brought Donald Trump To Power
• A History Of Strikes: How The WGA Has Played Catch-Up As Emerging Technologies Made Others Richer

Yosemite. Yellowstone. The Grand Canyon.

RAT Beach in Torrance?

Maybe. An announcement from the National Park Service on Thursday — that beaches from San Pedro to Santa Monica are being studied to someday become a national park — is making the rounds and raising lots of questions.

Chief among them: Huh?

The proposal appears to come from Biden-era appropriations legislation.

The Park Service website sets out four criteria for studying whether an area should be recommended to become a national park. It must:

1. Contain nationally significant natural and/or cultural resources.
2. Represent a natural or cultural resource that is not already adequately represented in the national park system or is not comparably represented and protected for public enjoyment by another land-managing entity.
3. Be of sufficient size and appropriate configuration to ensure long-term protection of the resources and visitor enjoyment and capable of efficient administration by the National Park Service at a reasonable cost; important feasibility factors include landownership, acquisition costs, life cycle maintenance costs, access, threats to the resource, and staff or development requirements.
4. Require direct NPS management that is clearly superior to other management approaches.

We’ll let you decide whether the Venice Boardwalk, say, meets the brief.

The Park Service is holding two virtual meetings, the first of which is next week:

Feb. 11, 1 p.m to 2:30 p.m. PT

• Webinar link: https://bit.ly/4t8oWXW
• Join by phone: 1-202-640-1187, Conference ID: 990571600#

March 11, 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. PT

• Webinar link: https://bit.ly/4akUPVE 

• Join by phone: 1-202-640-1187, Conference ID: 362420885#

LAist will dig deeper into this idea in the coming weeks. Until then, just imagine park rangers … playing volleyball in Manhattan Beach.

The coming Olympic Games in Los Angeles have been under a harsh spotlight, as LA28 head Casey Wasserman faces calls to resign over his recently released racy emails with convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell and the U.S. brings ICE agents abroad for the Winter Games.

Now, a community organization is reiterating calls on Los Angeles elected officials to seriously consider canceling the Olympics altogether.

Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, or SAJE, issued a report Thursday focused on L.A.'s financial exposure as host city. The city and state of California are the financial guarantors for the Olympics, meaning if they go into the red, L.A. taxpayers will foot the bill.

"L.A. city leaders must put the option of cancellation on the table now," Chris Tyler with SAJE wrote in the report. "They must urgently take up the work electeds failed to do in 2017, when they committed L.A. to hosting the Games without first having an informed, public conversation to weigh costs and benefits."

Calls to cancel the Olympics in Los Angeles go back as far as L.A.'s Olympic contract, which was inked in 2017. The group NOlympics LA launched that year, arguing that hosting the Olympics was a bad deal for the city. After the fires of 2025 and ongoing immigration raids, calls to halt L.A.'s Olympics plans have gained steam in public discourse.

But the cause has had little traction with public officials. If the city pulled out now, it could face billions of dollars in legal fees. None of the 15 City Council members have backed the idea, and plans for the Olympics continue full steam ahead.

As several City Council members and other prominent L.A. politicians call for Wasserman to step down, the report urges public officials to put cancellation on the table — even if only as a bargaining chip to win concessions for the city of L.A.

How likely is it that the L.A. Olympics wouldn’t go forward?

It’s extremely rare for host cities to pull out of the Olympics. Denver is the only city to withdraw from the International Olympic Committee after being chosen to host the 1976 Winter Games. Colorado voters rejected using public money for the mega-event, forcing the I.O.C. to relocate the Olympics to Innsbruck, Austria.

Even when the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, the Olympic Games moved forward in Japan, although they were delayed a year. The Games went on despite massive public discontent due to the ongoing public health crisis.

“Does the IOC have the power to decide that the games will go ahead?" one Japanese businessman tweeted ahead of the 2021 Games, according to a report from the Council on Foreign Relations. "There’s talk about huge penalties [if the games are canceled] but if one hundred thousand people from two hundred countries descend on vaccine-laggard Japan and the mutant variant spreads, I think we could lose a lot more.”

According to the Los Angeles Times, Japanese taxpayers ended up spending $7.1 billion on the Games.

Canceling the Olympics would come with high costs to the city of L.A. Like in Tokyo, only the International Olympic Committee has the legal authority to pull out of a host location, according to its contract with L.A. The legal fees for L.A. canceling could be billions of dollars.

But the SAJE report questions if L.A. risks even greater exposure playing host than pulling out of its contract with the I.O.C.

"L.A. is looking at a potential fiscal disaster either way, and the decision on whether to try to cancel or renegotiate the terms of Olympic hosting depends on which you prefer to risk: billions of dollars in losses on hosting the Games, or billions in penalties for not hosting them," Neil deMause, the report's lead author, wrote.

What are some of the expenses tied to the Games?

LA28 currently has a $7.1 billion projected budget. The federal government has agreed to chip in $1 billion to pay for security and is being asked to contribute another $2 billion to pay for Games-specific transit plans.

The Olympics are intended to be mostly privately financed and "no cost" for Los Angeles. But the city of L.A.'s financial exposure is essentially unlimited. The city is on the hook for the first $270 million in losses, if they occur. The California Legislature has agreed to make statewide taxpayers pick up the next $270 million. After that, any additional financial burden will fall on Los Angeles taxpayers.

SAJE is calling on L.A. leaders to compile a list of all Olympics expenses that won't be covered by private organizing committee LA28, demand that LA28 provide detailed spending and revenue projections, and strategize over how to cancel the Games if necessary.

The report points to potential security expenses that could fall on the city of L.A. Details on how federal funds will be allocated for security aren't yet clear — leaving the city exposed to potential unexpected expenses. A contract between LA28 and the city also states that the Olympics organizers, not L.A., will pay for extra costs for public services in support of the Games, including policing. The details of that agreement are also still up in the air, though.

Negotiations between the city and the Olympic committee have dragged on more than four months past deadline. And some are concerned that if that deal isn't comprehensive, the city will be left with unexpected costs.

How can the city raise issues with LA28?

The city has little legal leverage to force new negotiations with LA28, but it does have the bully pulpit. The main public forum for the city to raise issues with the Olympics organizers is the ad-hoc City Council committee meetings on the Olympics.

That committee has seven members. At recent meetings, City Council members have demanded details on President Donald Trump's security task force for the Olympics and asked organizers to increase the contingency fund for the city as its budget grows. Three members of that committee have now called for Wasserman's resignation.

LA28 leadership are currently in Italy for the 2026 Winter Games. The next L.A. City Olympic Committee meeting has not been scheduled.

Laylah Rivers had already been a paratrooper in the U.S. Army and worked at various tech companies across the West Coast. But when she enrolled at a Los Angeles community college at 31, she was just another freshman — alongside students nearly half her age.

Luckily, West Los Angeles College has a program that acknowledges students’ prior work experience. The college gave her seven credits, the equivalent of about two classes, after she provided a copy of her military transcript and evidence of computer courses she took while working at Amazon. “Of course, with 13 years of experience, I should get more credit for what I’m doing,” she said. “But I’m grateful.”

Since 2017, California’s community colleges have slowly expanded the number of ways that students can get school credit for their prior work experience, and Gov. Gavin Newsom has made it a priority, in part by approving over $34 million in related state funding in recent years. By 2030, the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office wants at least 250,000 students to have earned college credit for their work or other “prior learning" experience, and in January, Newsom proposed putting an additional $37 million toward it.

But many colleges use their own internal methods to track the credits they award, so there’s no authoritative system showing how many students across the state have actually been served. The chancellor’s office operates a public dashboard, which says that over 40,000 students in California have received at least one credit for pre-college work or education in the past few years. Samuel Lee, a senior adviser to the community college chancellor who oversees the dashboard, said the real total is roughly twice that, though he couldn’t provide any exact figures.

Laylah Rivers at West Los Angeles College in Culver City, on Jan. 29, 2026.

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Ariana Drehsler

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CalMatters

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Among the students who count toward this 2030 goal are those who gain credit by taking Advanced Placement, or AP, exams — which have existed for decades. What’s new is awarding students credit for work experience, such as computer courses or military training. Because it’s so new, “it’s taking the colleges a while,” Lee said. “Some are nowhere and some are really down the road.”

Historically, veterans have benefited the most from these credits, but students with professional experience in plumbing, first aid, foreign languages and hundreds of other skills can also qualify, either by showing an industry certification or taking an exam. At Cabrillo College in Santa Cruz, for instance, students can get college credit for wine courses if they can prove sufficient knowledge in French, Italian or Spanish wines.

Just a few additional credits can save students over $14,000, according to one California study. These students are more likely to graduate, too.

Because she’s a veteran, Rivers’ education and living costs are supported by the federal government, including through the GI Bill. These benefits only last a few years so every class she can skip saves her time — and ultimately money that she can put toward her future education.

Want to get ahead in tech? Get a degree

Even without a college degree, Rivers was doing well in tech, making over $70,000 a year, first at Amazon Web Services and later as a support engineer at a startup.

California’s tech industry has been vocal about dropping degree requirements for jobs, but research by the Burning Glass Institute shows that employers still prefer college graduates, even when college education isn’t a requirement.

“Computer science is really male-dominated, white-dominated,” said Rivers. “I’m a Black woman, but it’s hard to get my foot in the door. Even though I have 13 years of experience, they move the goalpost.” When the startup she was working at was sold to another company in 2024, she enrolled at West Los Angeles College, hoping to eventually transfer to a four-year institution, get a degree and land a management job in the tech industry.

But Rivers didn’t know that any of her prior work could translate into college credits until months after enrolling, when a college dean noticed her military and computer science experience.

“I think it should just be built into the registration process instead of people having to find out about it,” she said. “It took me a whole semester to figure it out.”

Laylah Rivers at West Los Angeles College in Culver City, on Jan. 29, 2026.

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Ariana Drehsler

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CalMatters

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The Technology Learning Center building at West Los Angeles College in Culver City, where Laylah Rivers has taken computer and IT courses.

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Ariana Drehsler

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CalMatters

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Starting last fall, West Los Angeles College made it a requirement that all transfer-oriented students learn about opportunities to get credit for prior work experience, either during meetings with a college counselor in the first semester or at orientation, said Allison Tom-Miura, the dean of academic affairs and workforce development for the campus. “This is a big equity issue,” she said. “How can we help students from repeating courses that they do not need?”

In 2018, the state Legislature passed a law that would eventually mandate that every college adopt a policy for awarding students credit for prior learning or work experience, but colleges received little or no funding to implement it. They scrambled to create systems to assess students’ work experience and streamline the process of petitioning for credit, according to interviews with community college leaders across the state.

Administratively, the process is still tricky today. Students need to submit evidence of their work experience, which faculty then evaluate and translate into an equivalent course at the college. Most students gain credit by showing a military transcript, a certification or by taking a test, but sometimes, in more subjective fields such as photography, faculty assess a student’s portfolio.

Lee’s statewide system lists the skills and certifications that community colleges already recognize so that students can petition for credit more easily. But he said that only about half the state’s 116 community colleges are actively participating in the effort.

Getting all colleges on the same system

Often, Lee is on tour, visiting colleges across the state, sometimes meeting with a school six or seven times in an effort to promote his credit tracking system or otherwise improve the way they log students’ credits.

Last month, he sat on stage at a conference in Sacramento to present about the benefits of a shared tracking system alongside the interim president of Palomar College, Tina Recalde. Like many schools in the San Diego metro area, Palomar College has a high number of enrolled veterans and was an early advocate for awarding additional credit to them. In their joint presentation, Recalde said her college has given over 3,600 students credit for work or other prior learning experiences.

But that data doesn’t appear on Lee’s platform or any other public dashboard. Palomar College has its own system for processing the additional credits, which it created before Lee’s platform existed, said Nichol Roe, the college’s dean of career technical and extended education.

Soon, nearly all schools will have to begin logging information on the same platform. The Legislature approved a budget last year that guarantees $50,000 to every community college campus that wants it. In return, the colleges that receive the money agree to use certain aspects of Lee’s data system and to screen all veterans and incoming students for potential additional credits.

College of the Sequoias in Visalia said it doesn’t need the money and chose not to apply, according to its president, Brent Calvin.

Lee said that every other college applied for the funding by the deadline and that he would “gladly” make an exception for College of the Sequoias. “Our goal is not for them to meet the deadline,” he said. “Our goal is to get people funding and support.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

This story was originally published by Boyle Heights Beat on Feb. 3, 2026.

Boyle Heights artist Robert Vargas unveiled a new mural Tuesday titled “Songs My Father Taught Me,” depicting a handcuffed mariachi and a child as the Eastside continues to grapple with the effects of ongoing immigration raids.

The mural, located at the corner of 4th and Mathews streets, shows the wrists of a mariachi handcuffed, the red, white and green colors of the Mexican flag are visible on his charro suit. Beside him, a child wearing a T-shirt featuring a patriotic cartoon bald eagle looks on while holding a guitar.

It’s one of five murals Vargas plans to paint this week as part of his “#WeAreHuman” initiative, which he said features images that show “truth and resiliency in our culture, and hopefully empower us and give us strength,” according to an Instagram Reel announcing the unveiling.

At the unveiling on Tuesday, about two dozen people watched as Vargas put his finishing touches on the painting. In attendance was East LA-born actor Edward James Olmos, who called the work “a great statement to who we are as a people.” “We will rise way beyond this,” he said.

For Vargas, the full message lies in the small details of the painting, including the wedding band on the mariachi’s finger, the eagle on his jacket facing the cartoon eagle on his son’s shirt, the guitar the boy is holding and the somber look in his eyes as he watches his father being detained.

“When I see this image, I see myself. I see brown faces, I see representation…but I feel heartbreak,” said Michelle Lopez, who was at the unveiling. “Seeing his father hand off that guitar to him, the passing of the torch. …To see the two eagles facing each other, ‘How is one eagle illegal?’” Lopez said.

The mural at 2426 E. 4th St. was unveiled about a week after the Eastside was hit with some of the heaviest immigration activity it had experienced since the raids began last June. A few blocks north on Mathews Street and Cesar Chavez Avenue, a man identified by his family as Abraham was detained by four masked agents in a driveway. According to his nephew, Chris, who witnessed the incident, Abraham had been standing on the sidewalk when agents approached him. Two days later, his family said, Abraham was back in his hometown of Puebla, Mexico.

Vargas is known for his large-scale murals across LA and internationally. In Boyle Heights, his giant, three-panel mural near Mariachi Plaza immortalizes the late Dodger legend Fernando Valenzuela. In Little Tokyo, a 150-foot-tall mural of Shohei Ohtani honors the Japanese baseball star. Vargas also painted a second mural of Ohtani in his hometown of Ōshū, in the northern prefecture of Iwate.

The intersection of 1st and State streets in Boyle Heights has been dubbed “Robert Vargas Square” in recognition of the artist’s work and ties to the neighborhood.