Hiya Genius. It's Your Memorial Day Weekend Wag!

Dear Wags,

This Memorial Day weekend, our thoughts turn to an old war we mostly ignore. We speak of the eternal spat over human creativity—an unreliable quality that defies attempts by McKinsey consultants to cram it onto a spreadsheet.

Until lately, even base entertainment required a dash of flesh-based genius. Now, there’s nothing new about dehumanizing art in the service of greed, but we’re at a crossroads: Technologists seem close to ejecting artists from the game entirely.

The battle is hottest in Hollywood, a shaky human enterprise that’s increasingly a province of Big Tech. Show business is obviously shuddering through seismic disruption. Everyone associated with it—stars, writers, directors, cinematographers, production people, publicists, agents, the mass audience—may go poof. Legacy entertainment is expensive, impractical, and antique. And there is no shortage of Silicon Valley illusionists pitching quick fixes.

It’s not hard to imagine an optimized entertainment industry, in which computer-driven intelligence tailors diversions for hermetic silos. Maybe it will spawn a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure future, with a billion mini Spielbergs orchestrating bespoke fantasies on individual holodecks. Or maybe it will be wall-to-wall porn. What could we lose in the bargain? Only shared culture, which turns out to be a necessary adhesive. We’re already living in the rough cut of this dystopia, and it’s a horror movie.

Big picture, we’re learned that in a world pandered to by algorithms, technologically advanced democracies are vulnerable. We are becoming unglued from common nationhood, values, and even language. More primal and disruptive identities assert themselves in this stew. In the U.S., the temptation to juice chaos for shareholder value appears irresistible. We can barely contemplate putting the breaks on.

The going wisdom—do let it be wrong—is that ascendant artificial intelligence will make a parlous situation worse. If human beings hanker for authenticity in an increasingly synthetic ecosystem, what could be more real than ripping someone else’s throat out? Let’s have bots flood the zone with more agitating content and see.

Now back to the small a apocalypse looming over culture industries: There will always be powerful incentives to reduce risk and safeguard the bottom line. A programmatic solution for the dilemmas of human creativity would thrill executives and shareholders. But by deleting creative risk, we may lose the opportunity to be surprised and transformed by art that is both authentic and broadly popular. Such marvels are generated by a glitchy server called the human brain.

There’s always the chance AI will free us up in miraculous ways. Still, a question lingers: What happens when we sideline our species from much of the old-fashioned business of being human? We have always gone to work. A lucky few of us have been paid to imagine things. Listen to the visionaries leading this revolution and it becomes clear they haven’t spent much time thinking about its consequences.

Still, artists may have a Boadicea to lead them in the coming human-robot wars. On May 20, Scarlett Johansson accused OpenAI CEO Sam Altman of a kind of theft. She alleged Altman offered her a deal to be the voice of ChatGPT 4.0, which she turned down. Nine months later, OpenAI launched a bot named Sky, whose seductive tones sounded eerily like the Black Widow star.

Well, obviously that was just a coincidence! Except that Altman left fingerprints at the scene. During Sky’s launch, he tweeted one word: her. In case you missed it, that’s the name of a 2013 Spike Jonze movie about a man who falls in love with his A.I. concierge—voiced by Johansson.

The actress says Altman called her agent right before Sky debuted, asking her to reconsider. She refused again. Altman denies skulduggery. “The voice of Sky is not Scarlett Johansson's, and it was never intended to resemble hers,” he said in a statement. “We cast the voice actor behind Sky's voice before any outreach.”

Still, Altman said that “out of respect for Ms. Johansson, we have paused using Sky's voice in our products.” As if he were doing her a favor.

It’s not the first time Johansson has fought to protect her persona, and it may be the template the rest of humanity follows. “In a time when we are all grappling with deepfakes and the protection of our own likeness, our own work, our own identities,” she tweeted, “I believe these are questions that deserve absolute clarity.”

Johansson is one of the last movie stars, whose distinctive human qualities are recognized by millions. Perhaps that’s why she’s at the forefront of Hollywood’s rocky transformation. In 2021, she settled a breach of contract lawsuit with Disney over her Black Widow payday, which claimed the studio trimmed potential earnings by simultaneously releasing the picture in theaters and on its streamer, Disney +.

The studio said the move was necessitated by the pandemic, but Johansson argued it ate into her percentage at the box office—a key deal point. In effect, the new media ecosystem upended a long established human arrangement to the detriment of talent. Hollywood’s subsequent wave of strikes litigated the same questions. In this contentious moment, humans —even those as lavishly compensated as Scarlett Johansson—are touchy about being sacrificed for innovation.

OpenAI says its “mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.” But the devil is in the details, and techies are never good at providing them. OpenAI’s board already fired Altman once for not being “candid.” He was hired back, but this episode reinforces the image of tech moguls as shady and—to borrow from Johansson’s cinematic universe—Thanos-like in their arrogance.

That’s not helpful as Altman’s company confronts questions from regulators about the ways its technology might not be so beneficial — especially to the owners of copyrighted material. When asked by the Wall Street Journal about how OpenAI developed its Sora video tool, CTO Mira Murati said the business used publicly available data and licensed data. As Axios reported, that covers almost anything.

If AI developers were more transparent, they could expose themselves to an avalanche of lawsuits, since they’ve already uploaded the world’s knowledge to inform their products. That explains why OpenAI was quick to pull Sky from the marketplace. The rest of her species has Johansson to thank for raising an important issue.

Must we accept that what makes us human—our words, voices, faces, and art—no longer belongs to us? That everything we are is just data, for others to mine and monetize? If so, then creativity as we’ve known it may well be at an end. In the meantime, we’re with her.

Yours Ever,

Stephen? It’s Demi. Get me ready for awards season!

Letter from Juan-les-Pins

Oh dear. There were strained smiles over the rosé this year, as big Hollywood movies failed to spark frisson at Cannes. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga was supposed to roar out of the festival. Instead it hobbled into Memorial Day weekend, scraping together around $31 million, the lowest holiday opening in 29 years. Please don’t blame Anya Taylor-Joy! Meanwhile, Yorgos Lanthimos swatted away meh reviews for Kinds of Kindness, which some critics found long and self-indulgent. Even so, Jesse Plemons took home the fete’s best actor honors. Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis got one of those long standing ovations, but executives aren’t convinced his $120 million opus can find a distributor, let alone an audience. “Of course they gave an ovation to Coppola,” says Our Favorite Producer. “I just don’t know how a passion project this grandiose fits into the current entertainment landscape.” Another big ovation-getter, Kevin Costner’s Horizon, got a lukewarm reception.