Comedian Tim Dillon says the actors’ strike backfired, arguing it pushed studios to pour money into artificial intelligence instead of paying human performers and writers.
On his podcast The Tim Dillon Show, Dillon revisited the 2023 Hollywood labor disputes while reacting to a recent appearance by “The View” co-host Sunny Hostin, who defended licensing her likeness and written work to an AI company.
Dillon traced the current AI push in entertainment back to the writers’ and actors’ strikes, saying the effort to gain leverage over studios instead left the industry worse off for the people it was meant to protect.
“They hammered out this very tenuous agreement and then they just went, we’re not even going to make anything anymore. We’re gonna make a few things and we’re gonna deal with a small group of people,” Dillon said, describing the aftermath of the negotiations.
Dillon, who noted he is a member of the Screen Actors Guild and was “technically on strike” during the walkouts, said studios had already invested heavily in AI programs during the pandemic, and the strikes did little to change that trajectory.
“They had invested heavily, during the pandemic, all of these studios and whatnot had invested heavily in AI programs. And one of the big things with the writer strike was, we will not be replaced by AI. And the studios were like, oh yeah, we weren’t even planning on replacing you. But of course they were. But the writers just didn’t have the leverage they thought they had,” Dillon said.
He argued that the fallout has left much of the industry worse off than before the strikes began, claiming most people in Hollywood share that view privately even if they will not say so publicly.
“Most people privately will tell you the strike was a mistake. Most writers in the town and actors and people that make a living will tell you privately will go this was a mistake. Doesn’t mean that the studios are good people… It means that you didn’t have the leverage you thought you did. And in fact, the situation for them at this point is worse now than it was,” he said.
Dillon connected his argument to Hostin’s comments defending her AI film partnership with a company called Fountain Zero, which she said would help tell stories from black and creative communities that Hollywood has been reluctant to produce. He was skeptical of that reasoning, suggesting the push benefits Hostin financially more than it serves the communities she described.
