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When I interviewed writers and actors on the picket lines of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes last year, the sentiment around AI, while largely negative, was a mix of anxiety, uncertainty, ambiguity and anger.
The Burbank audience was the most uniformly vehemently anti-AI I’ve ever seen: “AI just goes away,” one animator said when asked how AI was affecting the industry, and when I asked storyboard artists Lindsay Castro and Brittany McCarthy for their thoughts on AI, they both just booed.
A year after the WGA strike, to the animators I spoke to, AI was something to be opposed, not questioned or experimented with. One animator walked by holding a sign by master animator Hayao Miyazaki that read, “AI is superior to humans.” comment Using AI in the arts is “an insult to life itself.”
It was hot, Rianda took the stage as host well after 5 p.m. He introduced writers, directors, and animation legends like Rebecca Sugar, Genndy Tartakovsky, and James Baxter, as well as union leaders, politicians, and everyday workers. “We’re not going to take your job with a computer or a soulless program,” 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 remarked on the size of the event — “We’ve never had so many people in animation in one place. We like to stay cooped up in dark caves,” one said — and midway through the gathering, Rianda proclaimed it the biggest gathering the industry has ever seen. Rianda kept his energy high all afternoon, yelling jokes and chants, his pale skin turning pink from the sun and tension.
Hundreds of animators cheered. “Indoor guys,” as several of the animators there called themselves, it was easy to see them as lovable underdogs, facing down bosses intent on wiping them out with cutting-edge technology. In a comparison encouraged by Rianda at the gathering, they were not unlike the Mitchell brothers, who were initially blindsided by a cartoonish robot apocalypse but then managed to thwart it.
“The reason I’m doing this is because I fear the worst will happen if people don’t know what’s coming,” Rianda told me. “I see it starting, but it’s going to be really gradual at first, like the supermarket kiosks. Suddenly, everyone in town can’t work. They’re like, ‘What the hell is going on? Why can’t I get a job?’ I think literally thousands of jobs will be lost.”
His many Fellow artists and creative peopleRianda has come to believe that while artificial intelligence isn’t inherently worthless, it’s a technology that’s being used by the wrong people for the wrong reasons. That’s ultimately why he fights, he says: to get AI in the hands of the right people.
” concept “AI is great, it can be used to solve climate change, cure cancer, and lots of other weird things,” he says, “but in the hands of corporations it’s like a buzz saw that will destroy us all.”
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