Somewhere in the archive of a television show that ended its original run in 2022, a teenage Margot Robbie is still arguing with her screen family on a suburban Melbourne cul-de-sac, her face filmed in the wide, horizontal frame that television took for granted for seventy years. Soon she will reappear on a screen turned on its side: RoseBerry Media, a company that specialises in what it calls "vertical television", is using an AI-assisted tool named RedSnapper to cut two of her storylines as Donna Freedman, a role she played from 2008 to 2011, into roughly 150 minutes of micro-episodes for its Epis platform. The technology, it seems, is the easy part. The harder question is who was consulted.

Stefan Dennis, who has played Paul Robinson for decades, told the Herald Sun that the project felt "unbelievably invasive, morally and legally wrong", adding that his agent, the actors' union MEAA and the Australian Writers' Guild were all being drawn in, though he doubted they could halt what he called "a very big machine". Matthew Werkmeister, who played Zeke Kinski opposite Robbie, said he learned of the deal only when a journalist phoned him for comment. His objection is not mainly financial. Guardian Australia understands that residuals will be paid under the original agreements, as is normal, but Werkmeister points out that he signed his first contracts at thirteen, in an era when vertical streaming, let alone generative AI, was not even imaginable.

A contract written for one world is being stretched to cover another. That gap is not peculiar to Australia; Hollywood's strikes of 2023 turned on the same fear, and archives from Lagos to Seoul now sit waiting to be mined.