Infinite Options and Zero Choices

Last week, SAG-AFTRA went on strike and joined the WGA members who have been striking for a little over two months. Among the shared grievances actors and writers have with the studios is the looming specter of A.I., which threatens to further devalue artistic work. For writers, the concern comes from having A.I. spit out scripts and then writers accepting a pittance to polish up these scripts. For actors, A.I. presents a likeness threat with deepfake algorithms taking an actor’s voice and appearance and plastering it on an unknown performer. In both cases, you have studios banking on unproven technology at the expense of artists who create the value those studios depend on, and hence we’ve arrived at our current moment where labor is tired of being taken for granted and expected to roll over as the chasm of income inequality grows ever wider.

In a previous Substack, Writing Is Not a Widget, I touched on how A.I. in journalism was a poor practice that devalues the skill and process required. I want to expand upon that now that screenwriters and actors are in the fray, and how their strike is part of a larger piece. On the one hand, we have an executive class that has to show profits no matter what, and furthermore, the line must always go up. A.I. seems like a solution to that problem. You can dramatically cut labor costs if you think that writing and acting can be automated.

Executives backing this practice see no problem as they look over a digital landscape and see gaping maw that can never be filled. As viewers cut the cord and look to streaming for entertainment, they meet a platform with no boundaries. In the network and cable days, shows had to find an audience to warrant their time slot. There were only so many available time slots, and thus a limit on what could be produced. Since streaming is theoretically infinite, A.I. seems like a solution to that problem: a machine that never gets tired or asks for more money to crank out endless content for streaming services.

Of course, even before A.I. starts trying to make new shows (or new seasons of existing shows), we can see that streaming is beset with its own issues. Almost ten years ago, The Onion ran an article, “Netflix Introduces New ‘Browse Endlessly’ Plan.” Now there are multiple Netflixes, all asking you to browse endlessly, and all we’ve gotten for it are the smallest subsets of viewership where we gather with our friends, ask, “Have you seen [this show I watched?]” and inevitably they reply, “No, I haven’t, but I’ll add it to my list.” We have come to see that an onslaught of options is almost the same as having no options at all. Competition for our attention is more intense than ever, and if you lose that competition, your work may get deleted entirely. While this loss isn’t necessarily new (shows on cable and network that failed to find an audience were also sent into a void), it does smash up against the notion of infinite availability. In this way, we get the worst of both worlds—platforms that hold too much to amass any kind of following, and then shows punished for failing to find an audience because the only post-release plan is “Viral hit or nothing.”

Streamers have tried so hard to meet every entertainment need as if the solution to the cable era was a cable channel that aired everything all at once and then asked you, the viewer, to sort it out. Sorting through this heap of content becomes even more difficult with poorly designed platforms and limited ways for shows or movies to break through. If you think of entertainment as nothing more than product, then streaming is just the shelf where you put all those products. But, as they exist now, shows and movies differ in quality and shape, and therefore can’t be treated like other consumer products. A package of wheat bread is always going to be a package of wheat bread. An acclaimed creator can make a hit show one year and then can have a flop as a follow-up. There are no guarantees, and the men who run these media companies hate that.

A.I. seems like a solution to that problem: why roll the dice on a person when you can just shove responsibility onto an algorithm? Why deal with actors when you just need their likenesses? You’ve now not only cut out labor, you’ve also embraced an illusion of certainty where even if the A.I. fails, technology is always improving. Keep investing, don’t sell your shares, and CEOs promise that the next show the computer cranks out will be a hit and the audience won’t even know the difference.

What’s funny here is that even in this best-case scenario for the studios—that A.I. gets so good that it can write and act in such a way as to be indistinguishable from human effort—it still fails. Art is all about choices and process, and A.I. doesn’t choose and doesn’t have a process. All A.I. can do is scrape together the art of others, but even here, it doesn’t make decisions like a human being. The creative act is about harnessing meaning from chaos (for more on this, see Asteroid City). A.I. doesn’t understand that and it never will. Asking a machine to make art misunderstands art beyond an outcome. You can’t program a Spike Lee or code a Michelle Yeoh. What makes them great artists are the lifetimes of their experiences and the choices they make in their artwork.

Not everything they do is going to be successful, and like any worthwhile endeavor, there’s risk involved. But no matter how bad the art may get, there was a human being behind it. And humanity is what we connect to, not some cold-blooded, risk-averse, algorithmically generated slop that we’ve been told is made to order but lacks all the depth and nuance that come from a fallible human being.

I assume there will be op-eds trying to paint writers and actors as “out of touch,” and these will come as an attempt to sway public opinion against “coastal elites” who would dare ask to be fairly compensated by the petulant oligarchs who have made it their mission to ruin everything you like in favor of goosing profits for shareholders at the expense of everyone else. Creative labor is labor. It is valuable work, and the way I know it’s valuable work is that people have been paying money for it for centuries. This isn’t a problem we need a machine to solve, because a machine scraping together other people’s artwork can’t make art any more than I can make a Picasso by using a photocopier.

A tone-deaf Bob Iger (the head of Disney), speaking at a retreat for billionaires, told CNBC’s Squawk Box that “We managed, as an industry, to negotiate a very good deal with the Directors Guild that reflects the value that the directors contribute to this great business. We wanted to do the same thing with the writers, and we’d like to do the same thing with the actors. There’s a level of expectation that they have that is just not realistic. And they are adding to the set of the challenges that this business is already facing that is, quite frankly, very disruptive.” When asked how the striking workers are being unrealistic, Iger replied. “I can’t answer that question.”

If anyone is being unrealistic here, it’s the guy who literally oversees theme parks with a place called Fantasyland. If we want to be realistic, then let’s stop pretending that the studio heads are the reasonable party here. Let’s not pretend that putting entire professions out of work so that the wealthiest among us can be even wealthier is “reasonable.” Let’s not pretend that because streamers demand endless content that the people who make shows and movies should be compensated less. Let’s not pretend that the art that made us feel alive—whether it was the biggest blockbuster or the most unknown indie—is now worth less because a computer program can respond to a prompt. Let’s stop pretending better things aren’t possible.

We don’t know how long the work stoppage will last, so please consider donating to the Entertainment Community Fund.