The president of the Motion Picture Sound Editors just did something guild leaders rarely do: he put eleven specific craft job titles in print, in The Hollywood Reporter, inside an argument about AI.
The sound editors' president named eleven crafts in The Hollywood Reporter. Yours is probably on it.
On Sunday, the president of the Motion Picture Sound Editors published a guest column in The Hollywood Reporter. He is a working supervising sound editor. He is not a lobbyist.
His argument, in one line
If you prompt a movie or a song into existence, you shouldn't be able to copyright it, or profit from it.
Why, legally
Copyright needs a "spark and modicum of creativity" (Feist v. Rural Telephone). His words: prompt-driven outputs "are math."
The eleven he named
Cinematographer. Production designer. Prop master. Costume designer. Picture editor. Production mixer. Sound editor. Foley artist. Re-recording mixer. VFX artist. Writer.
What he's actually asking for
No copyright on prompted output, or on any work containing it. Mandatory labels: visible, audible, and in metadata.
The line that decides your workflow
He's targeting prompt-driven generation, where the engine picks the specifics. Tools where you still decide are explicitly not the target.
And the part nobody's fixing
Not one bill on the table covers AI scratch audio that quietly replaces a paid commission and never reaches a market. That's the one taking work now.
He wrote it down so it's on the record.
You can do the same thing on your next job.
Source: David Barber, CAS, MPSE, guest column, The Hollywood Reporter, 31 Aug 2026.