“A tree is best measured when it is down,” the poet Carl Sandburg once observed, “and so it is with people.” The recent death of Harry Belafonte at the age of 96 has prompted many assessments of what this pioneering singer-actor-activist accomplished in a long and fruitful life.
Belafonte’s career as a ground-breaking entertainer brought him substantial wealth and fame; according to Playbill magazine, “By 1959, he was the highest paid Black entertainer in the industry, appearing in raucously successful engagements in Las Vegas, New York, and Los Angeles.” He scored on Broadway, winning a 1954 Tony for Best Featured Actor in a Musical – John Murray Anderson's Almanac. Belafonte was the first Black person to win the prestigious award. A 1960 television special, “Tonight with Belafonte,” brought him an Emmy for Outstanding Performance in a Variety or Musical Program or Series, making him the first Black person to win that award. He found equal success in the recording studio, bringing Calypso music to the masses via such hits as “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” and “Jamaica Farewell.”
Harry Belafonte - Day-O (The Banana Boat Song) (Live)www.youtube.com
Belafonte’s blockbuster stardom is all the more remarkable for happening in a world plagued by virulent systemic racism. Though he never stopped performing, by the early 1960s he’d shifted his energies to the nascent Civil Right movement. He was a friend and adviser to the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. and, as the New York Times stated, Belafonte “put up much of the seed money to help start the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was one of the principal fund-raisers for that organization and Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center notes that “he helped launch one of Mississippi’s first voter registration drives and provided funding for the Freedom Riders. His activism extended beyond the U.S. as he fought against apartheid alongside Nelson Mandela and Miriam Makeba, campaigned for Mandela’s release from prison, and advocated for famine relief in Africa.” And in 1987, he received an appointment to UNICEF as a goodwill ambassador.
Over a career spanning more than seventy years, Belafonte brought joy to millions of people. He also did something that is, perhaps, even greater: he fostered the hope that a better world for all could be created. And, by his example, demonstrated how we might go about bringing that world into existence.
8K Writers Can’t Be Wronged - AI Platforms “Scraping” & Stealing Bestselling Books
Close to 8 thousand writers recently signed a letter from The Authors Guild protesting the unauthorized use of their stories.
Technology is inescapably linked to the art and craft of writing. Humanity’s desire to share and preserve its thoughts, its pleasures, its discoveries, its knowledge, and its very survival led to hieroglyphics, the development of paper and ink, to the printing press, the typewriter, and the computer. Technology’s traditional aim was to make it faster and easier to create and disseminate the written word. Now it seems technology’s out to eliminate writers altogether.
Or, at the very least, the writers’ livelihoods.
NPR’s Chloe Veltman tells us that The Authors Guild – an organization founded in 1912 to “support working writers and their ability to earn a living from authorship” – is taking on “artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI and Meta” which use writers’ work “without permission or compensation.” As Veltman describes it, “text-based generative AI applications like GPT-4 and Bard...scrape the Web for authors' content without permission or compensation and then use it to produce fresh content in response to users' prompts”.
Approximately eight thousand writers, Veltman reports, have signed a Guild letter protesting such unauthorized use of their material. Some of the better-known scribes include Nora Roberts, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Michael Chabon, and Margaret Atwood.
The Authors Guild’s petition is not the only action being taken in the wake of AI. Other writers have filed class-action suits against AI companies, claiming their work is being pirated. AI is one of the main reasons for the Writers Guild of America’s strike (starting May 2nd), bringing American film and television production to a complete standstill. The New York Times summarizes the WGA’s position: “Writers are asking the studios for guardrails against being replaced by AI, having their work used to train AI or being hired to punch up AI-generated scripts at a fraction of their former pay rates.”
Award-winning writer/director Doug Burch describes the WGA strike as “vital to the future of those wanting basic living wages...It’s truly despicable when CEOs make $400 million a year and say that writers and actors are being unrealistic wanting to at least make a living wage.”
And just what is this average yearly salary? A forthcoming report from The Authors Guild asserts that the median income for a full-time writer was $23,000 in 2022. This after, a precipitous 42% decline in writers' incomes between 2009 and 2019.
History proves time and again that the haves never give anything to the have-nots without being forced to “share the wealth.” Whether it's coal mining, auto manufacturing, or movie-making, it’s taken the commitment of generations of die-hard activists to help address an economic imbalance.
The writers have one huge strength, something no boss or executive can do without – their talent, their craft, originality, passion, and their grit. As I understand it, AI can synthesize, imitate, mimic a writer’s work. The one thing it can’t do is create original thought and original material. Writers – with their unique perspectives and experiences, their individual and idiosyncratic use of language, and their ability to capture human behavior in all its grunge and glory – cannot be replaced.
Books, films, non-fiction, graphic novels, and poems are not merely material to be scraped, stolen, and exploited. They’re not “a data set to be ingested by an AI program”, they hold our past, our future, our quotidian lives, they teach us what it is to be human. This is a writer’s work.
The message is clear – Support the writers.
