Anika Begay
When I interviewed writers and actors at the picket lines of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes last year, I noticed a mix of opinions about AI that, while largely negative, also included anxiety, uncertainty, ambiguity, and anger.
The crowd in Burbank was the most uniformly and passionately anti-AI I’ve ever seen. When asked what he thought about how AI was affecting his industry, one animator said, “AI can 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 question or experiment with, but something to resist. One animation worker walked by with a sign referencing animation maestro Hayao Miyazaki’s comment that the use of AI in the arts is “an insult to life itself.”
It was stiflingly hot, also at 5 p.m., when Rianda took the stage to emcee. He 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 job away,” said California Assemblywoman Laura Friedman. Burbank Mayor, IATSE President, and actor and podcaster Adam Conover took turns at the mic.
Organizers and speakers commented on the size: “I’ve never seen so many animation people in one place before; we like to be in our dark caves,” one commented, and halfway through Rianda declared it the largest gathering in the history of the animation industry. Rianda kept the energy high throughout the afternoon, singing jokes and chants, his pale skin turning pink in the sun and tension.
Hundreds of animators cheered; it was easy to see these “indoor kids,” as several animators called themselves, as the lovable underdogs, competing with bosses who wanted to use cutting-edge technology to obliterate them. They were indeed, in a comparison Rianda encouraged at the rally, not unlike his Mitchells, who had initially been blindsided by the cartoonish robot apocalypse but had managed to stop it.
“I’m trying to do this because I’m very worried that if people aren’t informed about what’s going to happen, the worst thing will happen,” Rianda told me. “I see it starting and it’s going to be very soft at first, like with the kiosks in the supermarkets. Suddenly everyone in the city can’t work. I’m like, ‘What the fuck is going on? Why can’t I get a job?’ I literally think thousands of jobs are going to be lost.”
Like many of his fellow artists and creatives, Rianda has come to see AI as a technology that is not inherently without merit, but is being used for the wrong reasons, by the wrong people. That, ultimately, is why he fights, he says. To try to ensure that AI stays in the right hands.
“THE concept AI is great: Use it to solve climate change and cure cancer and do a lot of other weird things,” he says. “But in the hands of a corporation, it’s like a buzzsaw that’s going to destroy us all.”
