The Picket Line and the Prompt

My union, SAG, went on strike for about a year. The Writers Guild was already out. I was on the line.

I was also, at home, using ChatGPT every day.

That is the actual story. Not “I had a contrarian take.” Not “I saw the future.” I was a working actor who walked the line in the morning and went home and tried to get a model to draft a cold email in the afternoon. The strike was about a long list of things, and one of those things was AI protections for actors and writers. I supported the protections. I walked the line. I also did not pretend I wasn’t using the tool the protections were about.

The community first

Before this is a piece about AI it is a piece about a year my friends were out of work.

The line was a community. It was the people I had worked with for fifteen years. It was the people who had given me my first jobs, the people who had given me callbacks I didn’t earn, the people I had eaten craft service with at four in the morning. They were tired. They were scared. The strike took a year. A year is a real thing. Marriages strain at a year. Mortgages strain at a year. Kids notice at a year.

What people who were not on the line don’t get is that the strike was not an abstract battle about technology. It was actors and writers showing up at gates day after day with no income because the studios had decided to make them wait. The AI question was real, but the immediate question was rent.

I want to say that out loud because this part of my story keeps getting compressed into “Hunter was the AI guy on the picket line,” and the compression turns a community into a backdrop. The community was the foreground. AI was inside it.

The conversation I kept having

I had the conversation maybe forty times that summer. A friend would say, “I can’t believe they want to do this to us.” I would agree they wanted to do it to us. I would say the protections we were striking for were the right protections. And then I would say something like: I am also using this thing at home. It is real. The protections matter exactly because the tool is real. Pretending it isn’t real does not protect anybody.

Some friends took that fine. Some did not. A few stopped wanting to talk to me about it. I learned, the hard way, that being right about a tool was not the same as being a good friend during a hard year. I started being more careful about where I had this conversation, and with whom. Calibrating, I would say later. Reading the room.

That is not retreat. That is craft. The same craft that makes you a working actor makes you a person who can be in a tough room without making it tougher.

Where I landed

The line ended. The contract got the protections. Everybody got back to work. About a year after that, the people in my industry who had not wanted to hear about the tool were posting that they had finally tried it.

I am not going to say I told you so.

But I told you so.

Here is what I actually think, almost three years on. The protections we walked the line for are good. They should be the floor everywhere. The tool is not the enemy. The studios that wanted to use the tool to push the floor down further were the enemy. The fight was always about who controls the floor. The people who confused the tool with the people who wanted to use it against us, lost a year of their own learning curve. They are catching up now. I do not think any worse of them. The line was hard. They had the right to be tired.

What I do think is that the people who walk picket lines are also the people who should learn how the new tools work. They are the ones with the moral standing to use them well. If working artists hand the new tools to the only people who already had power, the floor will go down whether or not we struck.

The conversation about actors using AI usually gets framed as a binary. Either you are afraid of it and you should be, or you are using it and you have sold out. That framing is a luxury people who were not on the line afford themselves. The actors and writers I know are doing both at the same time. Afraid where afraid is correct. Using where using gets the rent paid. Calibrating, every week.

I run a company now that builds AI for marketing teams. The reason I can run it is that I am still a working artist. I still go to the line. I am still in my union. The tools and the line are not opposites. The line is what made me trust the tools enough to teach the tools how to talk like a person.

Some of what I learned about voice from those eight hundred recorded interviews came directly from the year on the line. The line teaches you to listen to people who are tired and afraid and still showing up.

Cheers.