In Hollywood Strike, AI Is Nemesis

The subject has been missing from almost every news account, but not from the minds of show-biz execs attending this week’s Milken conference in Los Angeles, who were positively chortling about the opportunity. The BBC figured it out, commissioning ChatGPT to compose plausible opening monologues for the “Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon ” and other late-night programs put on pause by the strike.

Understandable is the indignation of journeyman writers. Employment is up, earnings are up in the streaming era, but so is gig-like uncertainty, forcing many to hold down day jobs as other aspiring artists do. But wanting a full-time job plus benefits is not the same as someone having an obligation to confer them on you.

Surprising, in the press coverage, is how many cite their skin color, gender and sexual orientation as if these are bargaining chips. Audiences don’t care. They may be excited by an interesting show about a gender-fluid person of color but they aren’t excited by a boring show written by one.

This attitude does not bode well. I recently asked ChatGPT-3 an esoteric question about which news accounts have published thousands of words: What is the connection between the 1987 murder of private eye Dan Morgan and Britain’s 2011 phone-hacking scandal? OpenAI’s Large Language Model got every particular wrong, starting with a faulty premise. But its answer was also plausible and inventive, which suggests ChatGPT will be suitable for creating TV plots long before it’s suitable for big-league news reporting and analysis.

Transformed might even be the inept recommendation engines used by Netflix and others. If AI can’t find us a show we’ll like, maybe it can create one, and instantly to our specifications once CGI is good enough to provide a fake Tom Hanks along with fake scenery.

Save for another day the question of whether artificial intelligence must be added to the list of technologies that might save us if they don’t kill us.

ChatGPT comes without Freudian derangements. When it “hallucinates,” it does so to manufacture “coherence” from the word evidence it feeds on, its designers tell us. Humans are doing something else when they hallucinate. So a broadcast statement in which Donald Trump

Dubbed the “fine people hoax” by some, it’s closer to the opposite of a hoax—a Freudian admission by the press that it has a new mission and can’t be trusted on the old terms.

Throw in the probability that libel law will remain more generous to flesh-and-blood press misleaders than to robotic ones. AI is likely to find a home first in the fictional realm, where such pitfalls don’t apply. Meanwhile, the most unsettling revelation of the AI era continues to percolate: We’re the real algorithms. Our tastes, preferences, thoughts and feelings are all too algorithmic most of the time. Collaterally, the most problematic algorithm may be the one in our heads, the one that can’t see ChatGPT outputs for what they are, machine-like arrangements of words, simulating human expression. See the now-iconic furor kicked up by reporter Kevin Roose in the New York Times over Bing chat mode’s proposal that he leave his wife.

My own guess is that this problem will be transitional. One day we’re told every will child will have an AI friend and confidante, but I suspect tomorrow’s kids, from an early age, will also effortlessly interpolate (as we can’t) that AI is a soulless word machine and manage the relationship accordingly.

All this lies in the future. In one consistent pattern of the digital age, a thin layer of Hollywood superstar writers, as creators and owners of the important shows, the ones that impress with their nuance, originality and intelligence, will capture most of the rewards. The eight-figure paychecks will continue to flow. Today’s frisson of solidarity with journeyman colleagues is likely to wear off after a few weeks. After all, they have interesting work to get back to, cultivating their valuable, emotionally resonant and highly investable franchises. And a big job is beckoning: how to adapt artificial intelligence to improve the quality and productivity of their inspirations.