The ‘inevitability of AI’ is ‘bullsh-t… it’s not inevitable’

We haven’t talked about Tatiana Maslany in a minute, but she’s still around and she’s still booking work. Which is good news, because she’s one of the most talented and hard-working actresses around. Tatiana has seven projects coming up (according to her IMDB), and she recently chatted with the Hollywood Reporter to promote one of those projects, a crime thriller called Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed. Because of her background working for Marvel/Disney, THR asked her about the 2023 strikes and the “rise of AI,” especially on many of the bigger studio productions. She had some great stuff to say – as it turns out, she wasn’t part of that dumb “ladies need to get involved with AI” meeting.

She didn’t have a real audition for Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed: “It’s wackadoo that we’re not doing real auditions anymore. I think self-tapes make people so self-conscious. They need to be able to be fearless and unencumbered and not worried about what their face looks like — that’s the whole f–king job.”

Advocating for herself & the crew: After She-Hulk came the writers and actors strikes, which she credits for waking her up to the power of collective labor. Now, she’s better at advocating for herself on set and also makes a concerted effort to understand the experiences of every single worker in a production. “You get paid good money on big studio productions, but actors’ contracts are a totally different thing than everybody else’s and I have trouble talking about that because I feel like the double standard is so intense,” she says. “A lot of Marvel stuff is non-union for the crew, so any luxuries go only to the actors.”

On AI: She has conversations about this with many of her fellow actors, about how to work in this field that’s getting swallowed up by conglomerates without feeling like you’re part of a larger system that you can’t abide by. “So much is changing so quickly, and that’s why things like ‘the inevitability of AI’ — I’m putting that in quotes — are bullsh-t,” she says. “It’s not inevitable. It’s a thing we’re being as sold as, it’s inevitable and it’s coming for our jobs, and it doesn’t have to. We don’t have to succumb to that. We can advocate for real people, for labor law, for the rights of all workers.” Now, Maslany gives extra attention to the way that any production operates, like whether they offer points on the backend to the entire crew.

[From THR]

It sounds like the bare minimum, but it’s NOT. Tatiana is one of the very few above-the-line Hollywood types saying AI is bullsh-t, they’re feeding you a line about AI’s “inevitability,” people need to fight for human workers and workers’ rights. Call ‘em out, Tatiana!! She’s absolutely right. I have a conspiracy that for a lot of actors above a certain age, they feel like AI is not their battle to fight – like, they came up pre-AI and reaped the rewards, and now it’s up to younger actors and younger filmmakers to fight AI (or not, in many cases).

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.