Episode #9×26: Actors on Strike, What Strikes Have Accomplished, Replacing Writers With AI Yields Terrible Results

  • Welcome to #Millennial, the home of pretend adulting and real STRIKE talk!
  • We ain’t crossing the picket line: why we support the WGA and SAG strikes.
  • Writers, actors, directors, and other creators are receiving PENNIES on their streaming residuals, meanwhile corporate execs are yachting and complaining about not having money.
  • Studios are hoping background actors will agree to one day of shooting and granting the studio perpetual ownership of their likeness with no further compensation.
  • Other industries, like airlines and parcel shipment services, are also staring down the barrel of looming strikes. Are we at a cultural turning point in the push for workers’ rights?
  • Shoutout to unions, who got us weekends, paid sick leave, higher wages, and safer working conditions to name a few of their accomplishments.
  • We explore some examples of historical strikes, and examine what caused them to be successful vs what caused them to fail: Flint United Auto Workers Sit-in, Memphis Sanitation Workers’ strike, Postal Workers’ Strike, Air traffic controllers walk-out, Hornel Minnesota Meatpackers, UPS Workers’ Strike (1997), and General Motors Workers’ strike (2019).
  • AI is a hot topic across the board, but it is no stranger to controversy in the writing world: G/O Media, who owns sites like Gizmodo, A/V Club, Jezebel, io9, and Kotaku, announced that they would start testing AI-written content, a controversial announcement made days after laying off several writers. 
  • The AI articles were simply published with by an author named “Gizmodo Bot,” and one of the first ones published at the entertainment site io9 went really badly.
  • Where is the line with using AI to streamline work? How are we continuing to use Chat GPT? 
  • This week’s recommendations will literally make you cool for the summer: Glossier’s  Universal Pro-Retinol (Laura), after sun gel with aloe and lidocaine (Pam), and Spotify’s AI DJ (Andrew).

And in this week’s installment of After Dark, available on Patreon and Apple Podcasts: 

  • We can’t talk about AI without talking about the AI face filters that are triggering us on Tiktok. 
  • Tiktok’s ‘Aged’ filter is either making you look like a hot granny or a melting crypt keeper. 
  • The slippery slope of using face filters on social media and on Zoom: you forget that having smooth, textureless skin isn’t reality.  

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