With Sam Altman's OpenAI Closing Sora, Will AI Still Change Hollywood?

The AI Uncertainty

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[Some spoilers follow for the current seasons of The Comeback and Paradise]

The new season of The Comeback, in addition to heralding the return of one of the great annoying-watchable characters in premium cable television, also introduces an element we’ve yet to see dramatized in comedies: AI as plot device.

Kudrow’s Valerie Cherish returns after many years away to find that television, or at least a certain kind of commoditized fast-streaming television, can now be written largely by machine. The show’s cringe-comedy dystopia dances on satire’s edge; are we to laugh at the replacement of human slop or fear what else could be taken over? Either way, Kudrow and her fellow executive producer Michael Patrick King leave one truth unchallenged: computers can already do plenty of creative jobs.

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As the season progresses this sends human writers into a tailspin (“I am just trying to get me and my kids out of this town before it explodes,” Abbi Jacobson’s showrunner character says in an epic rant) and a whole industry into a precarious state. Of course whether said industry actually faces mass machine disruption or just Chicken Little doomerism, the (human) writers also leave deliciously vague.

The ambiguity provides a good metaphor for the entertainment business as it stands, or perhaps wobbles, right now. An industry feels on the verge of great change. But whether toward implosion or a needed rebirth remains anyone’s guess, and its many players’ holy crusade.

All with access to a laptop or first-look deal are warrioring, from Gullermo del Toro’s lusty award-season anti pronouncements to Darren Aronofsky’s earnest tinkering curiosities, from Pamela Anderson’s AI-model ban to the rise of virtual influencers — and, further downstream, on every WhatsApp thread and lunchtime yap session — onward endlessly and without resolution. In the finale of this season of Hulu’s Paradise Dan Fogelman instead throws up his hands on the question entirely, if craftily: he makes the whole episode turn on whether AI will be our doom or our savior. The characters don’t know, and the real-life writing staff, Fogelman seems to suggest, won’t insult our intelligence by pretending to.

A battle is unfolding across much of creative culture — unseen to the naked eye, yet everywhere once you start discerning its patterns. It’s the fight over whether to welcome this new digital door-knocker or keep the analogue safe and secure, and it plays all the way up to c-suite decisions and all the way down to cultural moments. Volkswagen attempted an anti-tech pro-human message during the Super Bowl with an ad that showed earthy pleasures like dancing in the rain and chasing an ice-cream truck. Not long after OpenAI offered its own automotive retort: it has been airing a spot during March Madness in which young-adult brothers fix and take ownership of an old family truck only with the help of ChatGPT.

This spectrum provides a lens through which to view so many moves — it explains what the Guilds do when they fight AI changes in contract negotiations and filmmakers do when they use the tech in their work; what awards bodies seek with guidelines for AI and what entrepreneurs attempt when they deploy it on masterpieces. And it casts a light into the existentially jangly mind of so many creatives. As the comic performer Jenny Slate recently told THR‘s Chris Gardner, “I just want to be an actor. Please let me keep being an actor, please. Computers, don’t take my job.”

All of this even while the real-world creative impact of AI lags. For the many VC dollars spent on it, machine intelligence has not yet taken charge of writers rooms or recording studios; it has thus far refrained from storming the castles of news-production meetings and film-production crews. This, of course, only causes more heel-digging — nothing spurs divisiveness like a lack of clarity. Will AI take over development and production or just cheerfully help like a P.A. R2-D2? No one knows. Will studios abandon new work for memeslop or nobly resist a descent into IP-management nothingness? Ditto. Everyone sure has an opinion, though.

The shocking retreat of Sam Altman and OpenAI from Hollywood last week, with the axing of Sora and its we-hardly-knew-ye Disney deal, underlines the nobody-knows-anything point. Writers exulted at the walkback of shame from a memeslop king who so badly wanted to rule Hollywood, but it probably just means another company will take its place, and don’t those writers all use ChatGPT anyway?

The moment is an odd one. The very holiness that the creative class — a group led by the firecracker-hurling del Toro but c