When I interviewed writers and actors on the picket lines of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes last year, there was a mix of feelings around AI that, while largely negative, included anxiety, uncertainty, ambiguity and anger.
The crowd in Burbank was the most uniformly and passionately anti-AI I’ve ever seen. When I asked what he thought about AI’s impact on his industry, one animator said, “AI can go fuck itself.” I asked storyboard artists Lindsey Castro and Brittany McCarthy what they thought about AI, and they both just booed.
A year after the WGA strikes, AI was, for the animation workers I spoke to, not something to be questioned or experimented with, but something to be opposed. One animation worker walked by with a sign referencing the work of master animator Hayao Miyazaki. comment that the use of AI in the arts is “an insult to life itself.”
It was stiflingly hot, Even at 5 p.m., when Rianda took the stage to introduce the show, she introduced a host of writers, directors and animation legends like Rebecca Sugar, Genndy Tartakovsky and James Baxter, as well as union leaders, politicians and rank-and-file workers. “We’re not going to let a computer, a soulless program, take your jobs away from you,” said California Assemblywoman Laura Friedman. The mayor of Burbank, the president of IATSE and actor and podcaster Adam Conover took turns at the microphone.
Organizers and speakers commented on the size of the event: “I’ve never seen so many people from the animation world together; we like to stay in our dark caves,” one commented. Halfway through the event, Rianda declared that it was the largest gathering in the history of the animation industry. Rianda kept the energy level high throughout the afternoon, telling jokes and singing, while her pale skin turned pink under the sun and tension.
Hundreds of animators cheered; it was easy to see these “indoor kids,” as several animation workers called themselves, as lovable underdogs, standing up to bosses who wanted to use cutting-edge technology to erase them. In reality, they were, in a comparison Rianda encouraged at the rally, not unlike his Mitchells, who were at first caught off guard by the cartoonish robot apocalypse but then were able to stop it.
“I’m trying to do this because I’m very worried that if people aren’t informed about what could happen, the worst will happen,” Rianda told me. “I see this just starting and it will be very mild at first, like with the supermarket kiosks. Suddenly, everyone in the city won’t be able to work. They’ll be wondering, ‘What the hell is going on? Why can’t I get a job? ’ I think literally thousands of jobs will be lost.”
Like many of yours Fellow artists and creative workersRianda has come to see artificial intelligence as a technology that is not without merit in itself, but is being used for the wrong reasons and by the wrong people. Ultimately, that is why she is fighting, she says, to try to ensure that AI remains in the right hands.
“He concept “AI is great – you can use it to solve climate change and cure cancer and do a lot of other weird stuff,” he says. “But in the hands of a corporation it’s like a chainsaw that will destroy us all.”
