AI Entertainment Made to Order

Or, Even We Don't Know What the Fuck We Want

Remember Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure? Not important. In the movie, there’s a scene where Bill and Ted are trapped and need a way to get out. So they say they’re going to time travel after the events of the movie and leave behind keys. Wouldn’t you know it - there are keys waiting for them! By thinking about creating keys, they created keys!

Let’s all be honest: We feel the same way about the internet. If I Googled any proper noun and “porn,” it would exist. If I needed a photo of a cartoon parrot frowning, I could probably find one in Google Images right now. Yep, just checked and there’s a whole fucking page. Despite the fact that the proper noun porn and cartoon parrot already existed are besides the point. The feeling is the same: By asking for it, we feel like we wished it into existence.

Which is now the promise of AI in entertainment. As the sales pitch goes, you can have your entertainment made to order, exactly the way you want it, and even starring yourself! While the technology doesn’t exist yet, it makes for a fun thought experiment. What would you enter into a prompt to get your perfect movie or TV show? You’re essentially making your own little instant Hollywood with just a few buttons!

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This isn’t the reality. I don’t know if it’s not the reality yet or if it’s not the reality ever. Right now, most AI art is funny and fun because it’s AI art. We like novelty. As far as I can tell, books “written by a computer” have been sold and marketed as such since at least the 1980s. It’s been a sales gimmick before and it’s a sales gimmick now. So it’s hard to tell when gimmick becomes accepted reality - as some tech does and other tech doesn’t.

So I don’t know if and when fans will flock to a book franchise written entirely by AI and owned entirely by a corporation. 

But let’s say it does happen. Let’s say you can write into a prompt and get a novel, a movie, a game, an album - whatever - made specifically to your tastes.

It’ll still suck ass.

Now, real quick - this isn’t about jobs! I’ve written plenty about AI and art jobs. I know you’re probably tired of thinking about how Skynet is going to replace us until we’re all Morlocks living underground. Or you’re tired knowing you’ll be the one the Council chooses to rise to the surface in hopes of finding some meager food left behind in the before times. Or you find it pedestrian that I’ve mixed together so many sci-fi references in the same metaphor.

Actually, it’s not that serious. Or it is. Who knows.

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On its face, entertainment made to order sounds nice, like finding porn of your favorite proper noun. In theory, it means that everything you watch will be specifically created for you and will cater to your tastes. You won’t have to scroll through a streaming service, quit the app, and then scroll another streaming service. You could say, “A romantic comedy starring Arianna Grande and Greta Garbo” and a machine would spit it out for you. And it’ll be perfect.

A couple things though.

First - and most obvious - none of us know what the fuck we want. I don’t mean that in some vast “We, the gatekeepers know what you want more than you do” way. I mean it in the literal sense of none of us know what the fuck we actually want from moment to moment. We aren’t scrolling endlessly through streaming apps because there’s nothing that appeals to us. We’re scrolling endlessly through streaming apps because we aren’t sure what we want to watch at that specific moment. There’s thousands of things that appeal to us we just skim right by.

You do it on Spotify all the time when a playlist you made for yourself hits a song you absolutely do not want to hear.

Like, I’m a fan of Law & Order, but I don’t want to watch it all the time. Sometimes I’ll skip right past it. No Law & Order for me! No thank you! I’m all set on what happens in a version of the Manhattan legal system featuring courtrooms with natural sunlight. Except, sometimes I think I want to watch Law & Order. And I really do and love it! Other times I don’t. And then I turn it off. And then I look for something else, even though my brain was certain I wanted Law & Order. 

Rather, it’s what we didn’t think we’d like that surprises us. Shows we think, “What the hell” and then end up loving. Documentaries that look boring as dog shit turn into thrilling mysteries. You finally got around to watching that movie everyone won’t shut up about with that actor you hate and - guess what? - you actually loved it. You didn’t know you would. But you did. 

The surprise of discovery is one of the pleasures of art. You’ve probably stumbled upon a strange song and shared it, only to be told that that band has a vast discography. Maybe you’ll like it. Maybe you won’t. Sometimes you will. Not everything is made for you. Nor should it be.

We all have preferences, of course. We might like a love story in our horror. We might want a type of scene to not appear due to anything from past trauma to exhaustion with a cliche. We learn what we like and dislike from, well, liking and disliking things. The rough edges and flaws define our tastes as much as the smooth, polished sides.

Second, algorithms are also terrible at knowing what the fuck you want. Remember scrolling through all that content to find something? Most streamers are specifically programmed to show you things the app is certain you’d like. Sure, there’s always the “trending” and “new” pages. But a huge, massive chunk of the shit you see when you open a streamer is based on what you’ve already watched and rated.

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And yet you’re still scrolling. 

We treat algorithms as these brilliant, almost sentient programs that can seemingly tell the future by predicting what you’ll want before you even know you want it. But have you shopped on Amazon? Half the time you buy something, Amazon assumes that’s all you want from this world. I once bought gardening gloves on Amazon and it kept recommending other gardening gloves to me. Sure, there was soil and a shovel in there, but Amazon seemed to believe that if I wanted one pair of gardening gloves, I must be in the market for all the gardening gloves. 

Online stores recommend things based on what you’ve bought and wishlisted, right? Then why is so much of it trash you don’t care about? Of course, you’re not going to buy every item in a store. And just because something appeals to you doesn’t mean you’ve got the resources to get it. But for fuck sake, if the world’s biggest tech corporations are this deeply so-so at figuring out what you want to put in a shopping cart, what makes you think that an AI will be able to create a complete piece of art for you that you’ll actually enjoy?

Art, even bad art, is hard to make. A movie or a show are massive endeavors. The reason it sucks to write a movie isn’t because playing make believe is a burden. It’s because creating anything involves juggling a thousand different concepts and interlocking pieces. What’s been done? What do you want to do? These characters have no logical way to meet but they’re both essentially to the story conclusion you came up with first. It’s a lot of work. Whether you succeed or not, trying to make something you love for yourself is hard. And that’s you working for you!

So why not cut out the middle man, right? Except you’re still going to see problems. Maybe your prompt wasn’t clear enough. Or you forgot to add a list of things you absolutely didn’t want to see. There’s a point at which getting the perfect movie for yourself involves a lot of guessing what you yourself might like and dislike before letting a machine guess what you might like and dislike. A computer-generated stand-up special might bore you to tears because it thought all you wanted was “women drive like this” jokes.

A machine can’t make your perfect movie because you don’t even know what your perfect movie is. I’m not saying it can’t try. This isn’t about the human spirit. I don’t give a shit about the human spirit. I wish AI lived up to the promise of killing us all. At least then I could sleep forever rather than waking up at 3 am to pee.

None of us know exactly what we want until we get it. We have preferences. We have things we usually love and usually hate. But if you’re typing into a prompt and expecting the perfect movie, you probably won’t get it.

But at least anything’s possible right? Of course fucking not.

In a realistic sci-fi future in which AI can generate consumable art, you’d probably subscribe to different “services” that have contracts with IP-holders and talent to use their likeness or artistic style. You can buy the Fatty Arbuckle DLC and get him in your movies. Rather than a mini entertainment factory, you’re scrolling through more shit figuring out which service has the rights to what you want. Good luck asking for an AI-generated Batman vs. Spider-Man vs. Spawn movie. You think companies with more money than God are going to just let that slide?

I’m not even touching on the fact that, for many people, movies and television are social. Fan communities thrive on shared experiences, even when playing games that allow them to choose the end result of their story. When a movie or show is being generated on the spot for you, it’s for you. Great. But something narrowly designed for you is going to be awful for someone else. And that’s if they even watch it. Imagine saying, “You gotta see this video that AI made! You’ll laugh so hard!” and then watching them stare blankly at something that only makes sense to you. You can hope people have the same interests as you, but that’s how things already work. Why make it even more isolating? And this comes from the world’s biggest fucking loser hermit.

As always, I hope I’m wrong. Maybe there’s a world in which you get your perfect erotic sci-fi Garfield movie. Or maybe you use it the way most people currently use AI for fun: To fuck around and say, “Hey, look at this weird shit made by AI.” But that’s just having fun with the existence of AI itself.

It’s asking for a B movie just to show yourself that you asked for a B movie and got one.