Bryan Cranston Tells Bob Iger ‘Our Jobs Will Not Be Taken Away’ by AI in Rousing Speech: You Will Not ‘Take Away Our Dignity’

By Joe Otterson

Bryan Cranston delivered a fiery speech at a SAG-AFTRA strike rally in Times Square on Tuesday, which included a message directed at Disney head Bob Iger. “We’ve got a message for Mr. Iger,” Cranston said from the stage of the “Rock the City for a Fair Contract” rally. “I know, sir, that you look [at] things through a different lens. We don’t expect you to understand who we are. But we ask you to hear us, and beyond that to listen to us when we tell you we will not be having our jobs taken away and given to robots. We will not have you take away our right to work and earn a decent living. And lastly, and most importantly, we will not allow you to take away our dignity! We are union through and through, all the way to the end!”

Watch an excerpt from the speech below Cranston began his remarks by saying that there is one thing that all the guilds and the AMPTP fundamentally agree on: “Our industry has changed exponentially.” “We are not in the same business model we were even 10 years ago,” he said. “And yet, even though they admit that is the truth in today’s economy, they are fighting us tooth and nail to stick to the same economic system that is outmoded, outdated! They want us to step back in time. We cannot and we will not do that.” Cranston was one of a number of stars who took the stage to address a crowd of hundreds of SAG-AFTRA members and union supporters at the rally, with others including Steve Buscemi, Wendell Pierce, Christian Slater, Christine Baranski, Stephen Lang, and Titus Burgess. They were joined onstage by fellow actors Michael Shannon, BD Wong, Brendan Fraser, Jessica Chastain, Matt Bomer, Chloë Grace Moretz, and Corey Stoll, and more. Burgess decided to forego a speech, instead singing a section of the song “Take Me to the World” from “Sondheim On Sondheim.” Baranski told the crowd “We will not live under corporate feudalism” while also praising the background actors on shows like “The Good Wife” and “The Good Fight,” saying that she attended the rally to speak for them and demand they get fair treatment under any new contract. Slater then spoke about how his father, a fellow SAG member, received support from the union after mental illness and later cancer left him unable to work. Later on in the rally, “The Bear” star Liza Colón-Zayas told the audience that she has been a union member since 1994 and “struggled for 30 years to finally get here, only to find that my residuals have dwindled exponentially.” She then paraphrased Snoop Dogg by saying “We the artists, our gripe is that we deliver in high numbers, in major numbers. And yet, where the f— is my money?”

  • ram@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    arrow-down
    9
    ·
    1 year ago

    Regarding the AI dilemma I have two questions. How is it different from any other time in history when a worker was replaced by a machine, and given the lessons learned, isn’t it futile to resist?

    • SpamCamel@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      It’s actually very different. An AI is not something that you just go build and then it’s immediately useful. One an AI is built it needs to be trained in a process where it is exposed to examples of real works (text, image, video, etc) and “learns” how to reproduce similar works. This learning process involves using the real works to fine tune parameters of a large mathematical model. These tuned parameters are what make the AI an AI and not just a useless pile of random numbers. So arguably, the owner of every work used to train the model is as much a contributor to the AI as the AI company itself.

      These media companies not only want to use artists’ works to train a model that they will not be given any ownership of, they want to also own the rights to an artist’s image and likeness to be able to reproduce that image and likeness in a potentially infinite number of derived works without needing to compensate the artist.

    • wanderingmagus@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      You forget that we now have the tools to simply erase the biosphere and humanity now. I, for one, am not convinced that we won’t attempt to do so before the end of this century. If/when that happens, regardless of whether it’s successful in wiping out humanity, it will certainly wipe out AI, along with any technology more advanced than a hammer.