Ever since Covid returned the 2011 movie Contagion to the general public consciousness (and the streaming charts), the query has circulated in Hollywood: Shouldn’t there be a sequel to Steven Soderbergh‘s prescient thriller?
Screenwriter Scott Z. Burns, who wrote that script and others for Soderbergh, has all the time discovered the notion slightly suspect and says prior efforts to discover it wound up feeling exploitative of the pandemic. In his new Audible podcast sequence, What Might Go Fallacious?, Burns poses an much more provocative query: Is AI itself the following contagion?
As host, Burns embarks on a public improvement strategy of types, utilizing generative AI specialists to assist him assemble a “writers room” composed completely of bots pitching concepts. The sequence blends interactions with the made-up scribes with views from real-life professionals within the discipline, in addition to trade figures like Soderbergh. Plan B Leisure and Greatest Case Studios are additionally producers of the sequence.
In an interview with Deadline, Burns stated he had arrived at some extent of feeling “brazenly ambivalent” about AI. After the agonizing 2023 strikes segued to a brand new regular of ever-advancing types of the expertise, he got here to treat it as principally a analysis software. Whereas a few of his colleagues regard it as “a criminal offense towards nature,” Burns stated, he’s not so certain of that.
“There are occasions once I really feel like it’s nothing greater than search with a voice,” he stated. “And I believe most each author I do know makes use of search engines like google proper now.” In actual fact, one author featured in What Might Go Fallacious? is Nick Bilton. The previous New York Instances tech journalist will not be solely now a screenwriter with bona fide credit – he has made the leap by expressly leaning all the way in which into AI, routinely designing a refrain of AI bots to assist him troubleshoot and break tales.
And but, the query that “haunted” Burns and drives the present is: “What are we shedding through the use of this?”
One “author” delivered to digital life for the podcast finally ends up enjoying a central function in highlighting the broader dilemma, even when he will not be acutely aware of it (but). Given the unorthodox identify of Lexter, the creation is given the again story of being a former movie critic and an ultra-cinephile. Its value determinations of Burns, Soderbergh and your entire movie canon mirror the truth that it has been force-fed with primarily your entire web. Whereas the sequence introduces numerous different full of life and thought-provoking voices, together with one modeled after Burns’ late UTA agent, Barbara Dreyfus, it’s Lexter’s H.A.L.-esque exchanges with Burns that create probably the most engrossingly unnerving through-line.
If a bot like Lexter goes to “merely cull from the web – who’s the most well-liked actor and what’s probably the most profitable story – then what sorts of regurgitative cycles are we going to get into that may develop into actually suffocating for artists?”
Burns continued, “That’s the half that scares me, the concept, you recognize, the breakout hit, the Anora of the following yr or the yr after that, or the Sinners. What occurs to these items of artwork? That’s terrifying to me, as a result of I don’t know that the algorithm goes to offer us these issues. These are issues that require moments of inspiration. And in order that’s the place I believe we run the best threat of entering into bother is once we begin giving the authority to greenlight a film to a machine that has solely information of the previous, probably not of the current, or definitely not of the longer term, that to me is dicey.”
