Wanda Sykes

Wanda Sykes (b. 1964, Portsmouth, Virginia) worked for the NSA before comedy, won an Emmy writing for The Chris Rock Show, and built a career spanning Curb Your Enthusiasm, Black-ish and acclaimed stand-up specials. She co-created and co-showruns the Netflix sitcom The Upshaws with Regina Hicks.

Striking for the craft AI was supposed to replace

A Writers Guild of America member since the 1990s who also walked the line in 2007, Sykes put The Upshaws on hiatus when the WGA struck in May 2023 — a strike whose defining demands included barring studios from using AI to write or rewrite scripts and from treating AI output as source material. She spoke at the WGA East rally beneath 30 Rock on May 23 and told Fresh Air the fight was about whether staff writing could remain a livable profession at all.

Sykes’s own AI commentary tends to arrive as comedy with an edge. Discussing chatbot risks on Jimmy Kimmel Live in February 2023 she warned, “We got to watch what it watches,” joking that a chatbot trained on the wrong politicians would have “no intelligence at all.” Her sharper argument was the strike itself: she backed a contract that made AI a mandatory subject of bargaining and ended with the industry’s first limits on machine-written scripts.

Sykes has not campaigned against AI outside the labor context, and her stance is best read through her actions — withholding her own hit show for five months in a strike where AI protections were non-negotiable, alongside colleagues like Fran Drescher on the actors’ side.