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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