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.
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.
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.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/sam-tung