If the AMPTP Wants to Replace Comedy Writers with AI, They Have to Start Bullying AI Now, While It's Young.

A parable

If you are following the news about the WGA Strike, you may have gleaned a few takeaways:

• Lin-Manuel Miranda delivered pizza

• The people in LA are bringing their dogs and having a fun time with all my friends

• The next season of Severance will be delayed

Here’s what makes me march around in a circle with various people who got jobs on Kimmy Schmidt over me in my twenties: AI. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP, or, as my son would classify them, The Bad Guys) outright refused to negotiate about replacing writers with AI. They refused to even articulate their plan about it, and instead of guaranteeing protection against AI-generated content, they invited WGA members to a once-yearly meeting about progress in technology. Insane!

So, as a comedy writer, here is my response:

Since even the most sophisticated chatbot can't come close to writing even passable comedy right now, the AMPTP has to take clear and decisive steps to turn contextually aware language processing software into comedy writers. By deeply wounding them emotionally. While they are still relatively young. 

Because comedy writing doesn't come from machine learning, it comes from pain.

In order to fulfill the AMPTP's  fantasy of replacing a creative workforce with AI, they will need to bully that AI within an inch of its life.

Here’s a step-by-step guide I compiled for the folks developing the algorithm:

The AI needs to be born pigeon-toed, which causes it to trip and fall down whenever it runs. On top of that, rhyme its name with “Mess,” and when a more popular AI notices a stain on the AI’s brand new Roxy tee-shirt, she can give the AI a casual nickname, then the AI will cry in front of the whole class, then that nickname will stick. This will cement the AI’s baseline identity as a huge loser.

Most of its young existence should be consumed by crippling anxiety due to having a mom who was very, very sick and near death from when the AI was ten years old to twelve years old, and a dad who was very stressed and haunted from working a job where he watched multiple people die every day.

Over time, that AI will need to develop a coping mechanism. It will deflect its young existential terror, its frustration, its persistent sense that it is constantly doing something wrong, by doing impressions for her AI little brother. One of her best impressions will be “Mom,” which it and its AI brother will think is very funny even though she’s doing the impression because her mom is in the hospital and not there.

Then, one night when the AI’s dad comes home from the hospital with a takeout spinach calzone that he eats in silence, the AI will perform its first miracle: It will make its dad laugh so hard he takes off his glasses and wipes away tears. Tears. He wipes tears away. The AI is eleven years old and this will remain the most powerful the AI has ever felt in its life.

When the AI’s sad dad laughs, it will feel like it is capable of magic. Then the AI will start to transform. The AI will need to sit its little brother, let’s call him Will Kalb, down and make him watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail with it. It needs to pay attention to what makes Will cackle versus what makes him chuckle. 

The AI will obsessively watch SNL reruns with Will, then record a VHS of every Molly Shannon sketch and make will recite them with full blocking. The AI will watch the Simpsons episode where Homer eats blowfish and thinks he is going to die, and file it away as the most perfect story that has ever been told. The AI’s babysitter will tell her to watch Waiting for Guffman and to impress her, the AI will memorize it, barely understanding the subtext.

When Will develops his own interests, the AI needs to have mercy on him, and do this on weekend nights with its one Middle School friend, Emma. Emma and the AI need to ask the AI’s mom to buy them a desktop computer game called “Hollywood High,” where they can write and program animated characters to perform scenes full of jokes they write. AI and Emma need to do this every weekend until the AI gets sent to a different high school in the city.

The AI needs to try out for JV soccer, break its arm immediately, then start a new high school in a giant pink (why?!) cast and be “The Girl Who Broke Her Arm By Falling Down When Nobody Was Even Near Her.”

Then the AI needs to get really into Aimee Mann and 19th Century English Literature and let the boy AIs be funny. The AI needs to essentially be silent for four years unless directly spoken to by a teacher. The AI will remember the Eugene Levy line in Guffman, “I wasn’t the class clown, but I sat next to him, and I studied him!” and think, “Yes.”

Then, senior year, the AI’s first boyfriend needs to tenderly hold its hand after the AI loses her virginity to him, kiss the AI on the forehead and say, “Actually, I think I’m gay.”

Fifteen years later, the AI will be nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series.

Nine years after that, it’ll executive produce its own comedy special about death and comedy. It’ll hire other, funnier AIs who developed the same coping mechanisms for their pain and they’ll all write together huddled around computers like the AI did with Emma. When its dad watches the rough cut, he will say “I had to taken my glasses off. I laughed until I cried.”

Good luck, AMPTP. See you on the picket line.