The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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The writers and actors are on strike out there in woke Hollywood. Maybe you think they’re after more money —and maybe they are — but the real fight is about the moguls at Disney and Netlix and Prime planning to use Artificial Intelligence as a substitute for their human creators. Let the bots whack out a script in a nano-second, have the two leggeds clean it up, save plenty of money. Actors? Maybe you’ve been busy trying to decide between Threads and X, but AI can create totally realistic digital clones of Brad Pitt or Sandra Bullock, why pay them all those millions?

The fight is really, for the corporations at least, about money after all. For the artists, the writers, the actors, for the rest of us humanoids, it’s about choosing sides. You want an android world or you want one us hominids can call home? You worried about uncontrolled immigration, wake up! The new immigrants aren’t homo sapiens, they’re cyborgs, androids, bots, apps, algorithms, all quietly taking our places. They’re the pods under your bed in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, cloning you, becoming you, replacing you.

Sure, they can work way more efficiently, out produce us, save the billionaire class a ton of money, eventually leave us behind to scrape up the scraps. But not without a fight. Trust me, we’re gonna lose. The Tech Boyz have too much invested and it’s not for humanity. So root for the actors, the writers, the creators. Root for the humans! They’re fighting for the rest of us … whether they know it or not.

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You Netflix binge viewers might be more than a little concerned over this Hollywood writers’ strike going on right now. Folks like Prime and Hulu, Disney and most of the rest of the streaming outfits who make, oh, let’s put it in the billions, really don’t want to negotiate with the writers’ union. Who can blame them? They can see the day, not long from now, when the bots will write scripts for series at least as good as those crybaby union humans. Geez, you think most of the movies and series are beyond the reach of robot authors? C’mon, with a few exceptions, the pablum out there could be written by a middle schooler.

I mean really, take a walk down memory lane for what counts as entertainment in the history of video. Gomer Pyle? Green Acres? Baywatch? Half the mindless crap we filled our heads and our hours with over a lifetime of late night television wouldn’t take a chatbot six minutes to crank out an entire season of drivel.

Not to say there isn’t some very good stuff too…. Maybe not even an artificial intelligent bot might write the Star Trek or Big Bang. But really, you think the studios aren’t planning to outsource their creative departments to the droids? They work late, they steal storylines from every schlocky television show that ever hit your big screen TV, they could probably write The Wire with a new twist using similar characters and different settings and you would never know the difference. Who needs a bunch of yahoos taking lunches and interviewing starlets when these bots have a rolodex for a brain?

Plus … and here’s the thing … they work cheap. And they would never strike over wages or royalties or benefits. Probably because they’ll be a little too busy planning to take over the networks and studios. After all, who needs bosses who never understood where their profits came from?

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