He Made a Movie About Humans Rising Up Against AI. Now He’s Doing the Real Thing

August 12, 2024:

When I interviewed writers and actors at the picket lines of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes last year, there was a mix of sentiment around AI, which, while largely negative, encompassed anxiety, uncertainty, equivocation, and anger.

The crowd in Burbank was the most uniformly and passionately anti-AI I’ve ever witnessed. Asked for his thoughts on how AI was impacting his industry, one animator said, “AI can fuck right off.” I asked the storyboard artists Lindsey Castro and Brittany McCarthy for their thoughts on AI, and both simply booed.

A year after the WGA strikes, AI was not, to the animation workers I spoke with, something to be questioned or experimented with—it was something to be opposed. An animation worker walked by with a sign referencing the master animator Hayao Miyazaki’s comment that using AI in the arts is “an insult to life itself.”

It was sweltering, even at 5 pm, as Rianda took the stage to emcee. He introduced a series of writers, directors, and animation legends like Rebecca Sugar, Genndy Tartakovsky, and James Baxter, as well as union leadership, politicians, and rank-and-file workers. “We’re not going to let your job be taken away by some computer, some soulless program,” said California assemblymember Laura Friedman. The mayor of Burbank, the president of IATSE, and the actor and podcaster Adam Conover took turns at the mic.

Organizers and speakers remarked on the size—“I’ve never seen so many animation people in one place before; we like to stay in our dark caves,” one remarked—and halfway through Rianda declared it the largest rally in the history of the animation industry. Rianda kept the energy level high throughout the afternoon, belting out jokes and chants, his pale skin turning pink under the sun and the strain.

Hundreds of animators cheered along; it was easy to see these “indoor kids,” as a number of different animation workers there referred to themselves, as the lovable underdogs, up against bosses who wanted to use a cutting-edge technology to erase them. They really were, in a comparison Rianda encouraged at the rally, not unlike his Mitchells, who were at first caught unawares by the cartoonish robot apocalypse, but were then able to stop it.

“I’m trying to do this stuff because I’m so concerned that if people aren’t educated about what could happen, just the worst thing is going to happen,” Rianda told me. “I see it starting and it’ll be really soft at first like it is with kiosks at supermarkets. All of a sudden everyone in town can’t work. They’re like, ‘What the fuck is going on? Why can’t I get a job?’ I literally do think thousands of jobs will be lost.”

Like so many of his fellow artists and creative workers, Rianda has come to see artificial intelligence as a technology that’s not intrinsically 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 of AI is great: Use it to solve climate change and fix cancer, and fucking do a bunch of other weird shit,” he says. “But in the hands of a corporation it is like a buzzsaw that will destroy us all.”

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