Urbanworld, a film festival that showcases black and other minority filmmakers, just lost its financial support from the Writers Guild of America East (WGAE) over AI.
Per the far-left New York Times, Stacy Spikes, the festival’s founder, alerted staff and supporters in a letter this week that revealed the WGAE had “withdrawn its sponsorship and participation in this year’s festival” over his decision to add films made with A.I. tools.
Spikes added, “We are deeply disappointed. For the past decade, the WGAE has been one of Urbanworld’s most valued partners.”
This year’s Urbanworld film festival is scheduled for October and enjoys some form of sponsorship from HBO, Warner Bros. Discovery, Netflix, and the Directors Guild of America.
Apparently, the fallout is over the 27-year-old festival announcing last month that it is launching a new programming category called UrbanworldAI. The idea is to showcase short and feature-length movies that incorporate AI.
Far-left Variety reported that Spikes’ goal with UrbanworldAI is to “meet the industry’s resistance [to AI] with curiosity, one that he said bore similarities to other industry transformations, such as those spurred by digital filmmaking or the transition from VHS to DVDs to, eventually, streaming.”
“We’ve always felt it was our responsibility for our filmmaker communities to be a place where we could bring the technology and the people using it and creating it and put them together to make sure that you’re as up to speed as anyone else,” Spikes explained. “So there’s a responsibility here, because as AI is bringing costs down, it’s going to open up more people who can make things at a level they couldn’t make, because making films is a very expensive hobby.”
Six weeks later, the WGAE scooped up its marbles and ran home crying like a nine-year-old girl.
Sounds to me like the Urbanworld film festival is in good hands, is run by a mature adult who understands the lay of the AI land, which is: Embrace it or be left behind.
The WGAE, on the other hand, is acting precisely as you would expect a bunch of crybaby commies to behave: like petulant children and dumbass Luddites who seriously believe they are Sarah Connor and can stop the future.
And it’s not just any future they want to stop, but one where the ridiculous cost of moviemaking can be made much cheaper without sacrificing quality. Sorry, no one will ever convince me that AI is not already as good as CGI when it comes to adding backgrounds and special effects.
From where I sit, what the greedy commies at the WGA East and West really want is something they haven’t earned, which is a piece of the AI pie. The Writers Guild knows there is no stopping AI, so it is using what leverage it has to shake down anyone they can: Hey, that’s a nice film festival you got there, be a shame if anything happened to it.
Do I wish the world had come to a stop in 1984? Sure — I’m human, and outside of food and shelter, humans most crave stability. Besides, The A-Team ruled. Change is disruptive, and it makes us feel old. Nevertheless, the quickest route to misery is agonizing and stressing over what you have no control over … like the passage of time.
You gotta roll with it. Eventually, if we live long enough, the future becomes a place where we no longer belong.
Still you gotta adapt. If Breitbart News announced today that I’m out of a job because an AI writer can do what I do with fewer grammatical errors, I’d roll with it. And I have a Plan B. Granted, I don’t really want to live in Minnesota, but I’m ready to open a Learing Center.