Tag: Broadway

A.I. May Soon Make The Hollywood Writers’ Strike Moot

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The thing about A.I. that a lot of my fellow writers — many of the far better writers than I will ever be — miss is that most people watch and enjoy dreck. As such, whatever A.I. produces just have to be good enough to be on in the background of daily life for most people to accept it without even thinking about it.

As such, I think there is a real possibility that if the Hollywood writers’ strike lingers long enough that A.I. will not just break the strike, but render it moot. Barring something I can’t predict — I am wrong all the time, afterall — it definitely seems as though Hollywood is on the cusp of being radically transformed — “Moneyballed,” if you will — to the point that the only people making any money will be studio execs and actors who live passively off of full body scans.

And that’s if the actors are lucky!

It could be that ultimately even actors will be rendered moot as a cost-cutting measure on the part of Hollywood studios. All those 90s dystopian movies about faux movie stars generated by AI will become a reality and people will grow to have parasocial relationships with stars that don’t even exist in reality at all.

Stranger things, and all that.

If you throw in the growing likelihood of a severe economic downturn happening very, very soon because the US defaults, well, there you go. Before you know it, people will turn to Broadway and their local live theatre if they want to have any sort of human-generated entertainment.

Will A.I. Bring A Broadway Renaissance As Hollywood Fades?

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

As is suggested in the movie “La La Land,” there is still a lot of truth to the myth that young people with a few bucks in their pockets make their way to Los Angeles in hopes of making it big in Hollywood. The rise of A.I. generated entertainment might change all of that, however.

Instead of going to Hollywood, young people in the near future might flock to New York City in hopes of making it big on Broadway and leveraging that fame to get a full body scan that will allow them to live passively off the scans use for years to come.

I say this because I wonder if the potential death of mass media because of A.I. generated entertainment might might lead to people turning to live theatre in a way not seen since before the advent of Hollywood in the first place.

I’m not saying I think this will happen for sure, but it’s definitely a possibility. It’s very easy to imagine a future where AI has grown so powerful that we have a “Her” movie situation. Instead of paying $15 a month for Netflix, we will pay a similar amount for access to the “scans” of actors over the years that we can use to populate our very, very specific movies.

Now here’s another interesting idea — will there be any market for mass media entertainment at all outside of the theatre or will everyone just use A.I. to generate very personalized entertainment? There won’t even be a need for a prompt — your digital personal assistant will just know you so well that you sit down and watch entertainment it generates on the fly based on what it knows about your personality from use.

But I still think it’s possible that live theatre — and Broadway specifically — could balloon in cultural significance as we transition away from Hollywood having any humans involved.