Yahoo News Showrunner Frank Spotnitz on AI Threat to Writers: ‘I Want to See Aaron Sorkin Write Something, Not the Aaron Sorkin AI’
The challenges, opportunities, and above all anxieties wrought by the ongoing AI revolution were on just about everyone’s mind at a business panel held at the Monte-Carlo Television Festival this week, and which kicked off with a tone-setting disclaimer.
“We do not have the answers,” said moderator Mathilde Fiquet, who is secretary general of the European Audiovisual Production Association (CEPI). “So I think we’re all going to leave with more questions than answers, but we really need to have these discussions.”
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“I haven’t spoken to a writer or director who isn’t absolutely terrified right now,” added Frank Spotnitz, the one-time “The X-Files” writer and “The Man in the High Castle” showrunner. “But being against AI [right now] would have been like being against automobiles or airplanes or the internet. It’s pointless; AI is coming.”
With that stipulation in mind, Spotnitz – whose more recent credits include “Leonardo” and “Medici” – admitted his own pessimism, at least in the near-term, given AI’s ability to replace human costs with algorithmic outputs.
Arguing in favor of regulations that would neither limit AI capacities nor cleave human creativity from economic potential, Spotnitz linked AI concerns to those of the ongoing writers strike. In both cases, creators needed greater legal protections, if not full-on authorial copyrights, as is the case in France.
“We need to think about our moral and ethical values, and how to translate them into law,” said Spotnitz, who recognized that an AI produced “X-Files” would be totally legal so long as it was sanctioned by the copyright holder. “That why one of the demands in the Writers Guild negotiation is to please not use our work [in such a way]. And I think they’re going to push back very hard on that.”
If AI generated content could conceivably threaten mass-entertainment, Spotnitz saw less cause for concern for higher-brow fare.
“People will always want the human [touch],” he said. “It’ll be like the Fine Arts – a bit more expensive, and not for everybody, but I want to see Aaron Sorkin write something, not the Aaron Sorkin AI. I want to see a Martin Scorsese film that I know was made by hand, not by the Martin Scorsese AI.”
“I am still awed when I look at ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ and see those scenes of the desert with no CG, in a way that I am not by any Marvel movie,” Spotnitz continued. “Because my brain knows the Marvel movie is not real and the other thing is. So there’s that element as well. But there’s going to be a lot of trial and error – a lot of mistakes are about to be made.”
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