Sam Tung

Storyboard Artist & Director

Storyboard artist and director who serves on the Animation Guild’s AI task force and negotiating committee, and who has become a plainspoken explainer of how image generators are powered by artists’ scraped portfolios.

Animator Artist Entertainment Activism Filmmaker

BRIC Foundation profile

Why this score

How the formula works →

+6.4antiCampaigns against AI
+0.9anti1 anti-AI statement (forceful)

Weights, statement counts, the ×1.25 multiplier for having a stake in an AI-impacted field, and the formula’s smoothing are already baked in — the points add up to the score: Strongly Anti-AI · 7.3/10

In his words

These things are only working because they went on the internet and they scraped all of our portfolios — every movie, every comic book, whatever.

— LAist, 2025

Biography

Sam Tung is an American storyboard artist and director working in film and television animation, with a long career boarding sequences that translate scripts into visual blueprints. Beyond the drawing table, he has taken on a labor role: serving on the AI task force and negotiating committee of The Animation Guild, IATSE Local 839, which represents animation workers in contract talks with the studios.

Explaining the machine

In a 2025 LAist report on AI’s spread through Hollywood animation, Tung offered one of the clearest lay explanations of why artists feel wronged: image generators, he noted, only function because their makers scraped the internet — every movie, every comic book, every image any of them had ever created — to power the tools now being pitched as replacements. His framing cuts through the abstraction, tying the technology’s capabilities directly to uncompensated use of artists’ own catalogs.

As a committee member, Tung’s opposition is not just rhetorical but institutional: he helps shape how The Animation Guild approaches AI at the bargaining table, pushing for consent, credit, and protections against displacement. That combination — a working boarder who can explain the tech and a unionist who can negotiate over it — makes him a representative figure in the animation labor movement’s response to generative AI.