It was a day like any other in Hollywood. Directors yelled “cut,” stars pranced around in costume, and writers? Well, they found themselves out of a job. Not because of a lack of creativity, mind you, but because of a certain unsolicited guest: Artificial Intelligence.
Mike Fleiss, Hollywood’s own writer and producer, decided to have a tête-à-tête about this very guest. Having traversed from newspaper alleys to the silver screens of Hollywood, Fleiss is no stranger to the transformative power of innovation. But AI, he muses, is a different beast altogether.
Remember HAL from that old Kubrick film? Well, it’s 2023 and HAL’s distant cousins are everywhere — from medical labs, sleazy marketing cubicles, to — dare I say — potential intimate companions. Good for us? Well, not if you’re a purveyor of creativity in Hollywood, according to Mr. Fleiss. Learn more
The stage is set. Members of the Writer’s Guild of America have drawn their lines in the Californian sand, wielding placards instead of pens. The antagonist? The pervasive spread of AI.
Dive into the annals of Fleiss’s memory and you’ll find a young man at UC Berkeley, looking up to the likes of Mencken, Didion, and Smith. These weren’t just writers; they were artists who painted vivid tapestries with their words.
Yet, today, Fleiss grimly predicts a future where machines might churn out tales as bland as the back of a cereal box. Stories stripped of human emotion, genius, and that inexplicable touch of magic.
And if you think that’s the worst of it, Fleiss has more foreboding news. He paints a picture where AI becomes the norm, a world where genuine brilliance and creativity are pushed to the backburner. Mediocrity? That’s the soup du jour.
Could you feed AI a diet of old scripts and ask for a fresh one? Certainly. But as Fleiss quips, there’s no replacing the genuine human spark. In a world driven by algorithms and code, the cost, he argues, might be our very essence.
As the sun sets over Hollywood, one can’t help but wonder: in this age of machines, is genuine artistry fading to black?