Spanish model agency owner Rubén Cruz was having a tough time recruiting models so he created one.

They created Aitana, an exuberant 25-year-old pink-haired woman from Barcelona whose physical appearance is close to perfection. The virtual model can earn up to € 10,000 a month, according to her creator, but the average is around € 3,000.

“We did it so that we could make a better living and not be dependent on other people who have egos, who have manias, or who just want to make a lot of money by posing,” said Cruz.

Laura Llach, “Meet the first Spanish AI model earning up to €10,000 per month,” EuroNews, December 2, 2023

Aitana doesn’t look quite real, of course, but chances are the viewer is only looking at her for amusement anyway. She was real enough to get from 124,000 Instagram followers to over 211,000 in two weeks — with careful management:

“A lot of thought has gone into Aitana. We created her based on what society likes most. We thought about the tastes, hobbies and niches that have been trending in recent years,” explained Cruz.

Llach, earning up to €10,000 per month

Cruz can do well financially with Aitana because she doesn’t really exist. She has no needs and no potentially embarrassing off-runway life. She can be whatever a large number of viewers needs at any given time, whenever they need it.

And thus she embodies the fear of obsolescence that underlay the Hollywood writers’ strike, which drew in actors as well.

Could AI write films as well as act and model?

Media business writer Reed Alexander understands the mood. As a child sitcom actor, he had been warned around the turn of the millennium of the massive changes the internet brought to the industry:

People I worked with pointed to the advent of platforms like YouTube, which handed keys directly to original content creators to access huge numbers of followers without the burdensome rites of auditioning and relying on networks or studios to turn them into stars…

Fast forward 15 years or so, and we can now clearly see the results of this technological tsunami. For years, Netflix and other streamers have been upending the traditional models for creating, distributing, and consuming content — and in the process, writers have seen their compensation whittled and residual pay vaporized.

Reed Alexander, “Actors are joining writers on strike against the Hollywood companies…” Business Insider, July 13, 2023

The strike began with an overwhelming vote March 7 at the 11,500-member Writers’ Guild of America, targeting the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.

At Variety, screenwriter Chap Taylor spelled out the concern about AI replacing writers: “The corporations will push us all into extinction if they can … That’s the one that turns us into the makers of buggy whips.”

Strike settled … for now

The writers’ strike ended September 24, with an agreement that “AI can’t be used to write or rewrite any scripts or treatments” but “script scribes can use AI for themselves.” (Wired UK)

It is hard to see how this resolution will survive. It is like saying that the federal government is allowed to use electricity but no one else is. Or that upper classes are allowed to learn to read but peasants are not. Technology’s leveling power will erode any such agreement relentlessly. As comic Tim Dillon put the matter realistically, “They’re trying to it accelerate A.I. so much they never have to see another actor or writer again. I’m sure they’d love that.”

But wait …

All this follows only if we accept the underlying premise of the strike — that AI can show enough creativity to write credible screenplays all by itself. As Robert J. Marks has pointed out in Non-Computable You (Discovery Institute Press, 2022) , there is no evidence for that. And most of what people think is evidence isn’t.

Take Chat-GPT and other large language programs. They depend entirely on what humans have already produced in order to generate plausible copy.

Eric Holloway has pointed out here that chatbots like Bard and ChatGPT have been trained, using vast amounts of data, to respond automatically to sequences of words (predictive text). The resulting networks are an enormous collection of statistical correlations: “Word X appears in context of words Y and Z 90% of the time, so when I see Y and Z I will predict X.” Low-paid “grunts” worldwide spend countless hours writing predictions for the chatbots.

And, when the bots don’t have access to fresh stuff from humans, they start “eating their own tails” like the mystical snake of alchemy (model collapse). That is, they start regurgitating reams of nonsense that they don’t recognize as nonsense — because they don’t think and can’t create anything on their own.

There is no known technology that can just come along and make this reality vanish; it stems from the fact that computation and creativity are two different processes.

So an honest answer to the question of whether AI can replace screenwriters might look somewhat like this: Yes, if you are content to see the same-old same-old every day forever. No, if you want genuinely new material that makes sense and makes a difference. That will be true no matter who owns the technology or who is allowed to use it.

Can AI can replace actors? That includes some different issues, which we will look at shortly.

You may also wish to read: Model collapse: AI chatbots are eating their own tails. The problem is fundamental to how they operate. Without new human input, their output starts to decay. Meanwhile, organizations that laid off writers and editors to save money are finding that they can’t just program creativity or common sense into machines.