If it feels like more of the content on our screens is just soulless, factory made, well, Content, you’re not wrong. Back in the early days of Hollywood, when people could only watch in a theater, the studios had time to find the best writers, directors, actors, and stories and meld disparate parts into enduring art. Now everyone (even some guy with a smartphone and a TikTok account) is competing for our attention.

There’s no room for error, and functioning that way is itself an error.

It’s human nature to look for foolproof formulas. Those who have the money and need a return on their investments turn to the engineers to find ways of eliminating risk, while also demanding quick turnarounds. The result for the audience is that we’re getting assembly line TV dinners, rather than wholesome meals made from scratch. If it feels like more and more of what’s hitting our screens isn’t any more satisfying than a microwaved salisbury steak that came wrapped in plastic, we’re not wrong.

Content is getting dumbed down.

A recent article in PC Mag explains it well. Netflix is clearly asking writers to craft their dialog so that characters explain what’s happening for the convenience of people who aren’t looking at the screen. Well, they’re looking at a screen all right. It’s just not the TV screen as often as it’s their phone. Those tweets aren’t gonna read themselves. Fortunately, we’ve got characters saying, “We spent a day together. I admit it was a beautiful day filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain…”

Which anyone who was paying attention would already know.

One of the things I learned from Burn Notice is that if you really want someone to believe you (especially if you’re lying), you make them work for the information. Until there’s an investment, until some effort has been put in, anything we’re given lacks value. The less attention our movies demand of us, the less value they have. Thus, it’s Content for the background and not worth returning to for a second for third look.

Easy in, easy out.

There’s another way the studios are looking play it safe and secure our attention. I first became aware of this from Blaine at Criticless Cast, with a video on how movies get cast based on actors’ social media footprint. In an interview actress Maya Hawke said that she’d like to delete her Instagram and just focus on acting, and was warned that movies will have more trouble getting made if the cast doesn’t have a total number of followers.

Anyone else see a problem with this?

On paper, it might make sense. More fans for the people involved means more tickets sold. Right? But if the available actors with the right quota of followers don’t fit the parts, the movie will suffer. Audiences will be merciless toward a miscast star, because at the end of the day story is king. And that’s assuming that this metric is even useful. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is hugely popular on Instagram, but did anyone watch Black Adam?

These are the last ditch attempts to save a failing industry.

The era of the moviestar is over, and influencers don’t sway people the way they think they do. Otherwise, the election would have gone very differently and we’d watching Jungle Cruise 3 this summer. There is no formula for success, just one rule: Whoever has the best story wins. Hollywood knows they don’t have the best stories anymore, and the audience is waking up to who does. 

Welcome to Indiewood. 

In case you haven’t been paying attention, right now Hollywood loves robots. We’ve got a steady stream of robot horror, robot romance, and robot movies for kids. Maybe it’s tied to growing interest in AI, as the robot is a physical manifestation of such an ephemeral thing. I suspect this will be a point of discussion for years to come. But for whatever reason, we’ve got robots.

So many robots.

Transformers One, based on the toy commercials disguised as 80s TV shows, didn’t get much love at the box office. Yet I haven’t heard a bad thing from anyone who’s seen it. While I’ve never gotten into the franchise, the trailers gave me some hope that it wouldn’t just be content. And it's not! Honestly, I was impressed. It’s an origin story for Optimus Prime and Megatron, so there are no humans this time around. 

Just a planet full of robots.

Yet because the story is so unapologetically mythic, I found it inspiring. It’s Cain and Abel, Zeus and Chronos, and Braveheart for kids. The character development is so subtle I hardly noticed it, and the tone of the film changes so gradually from small stakes fun to deadly serious that frankly I'm in awe of the deft storytelling. By the end, I felt like I’d gone on a long journey with these characters.

Not like I’d sat through a long ad for Happy Meal toys.

Then there’s The Wild Robot, a commercial and critical darling that’s winning all sorts of awards recognition. It’s… fine. Visually, it’s gorgeous. The voice acting is perfect and the music is great. But the story, about a robot who crash lands in the wilderness and must raise an orphaned gosling, left me cold. If Transformers One wants us up on our feet cheering, The Wild Robot wants us feeling warm fuzzies.

Not there’s anything wrong with that.

However, with Transformers it was organic to the story. Everything about those characters, in that world, had to be epic. And the effect of the epic is awe and inspiration. The Wild Robot feels contrived to manipulate those heartstrings. Nothing about the story has to do that. It wants to. But the bigger problem for me is that it leans into a new mythology, whereas Transformers retells something ancient.

The Wild Robot is about found family and overcoming your programing.

Transformers One is about following a code and fulfilling your potential.

More than than that, The Wild Robot presents the audience, children, with a childish world. At first it hints at life’s harsh realities. The pain of death. The kill or be killed laws of nature. The pain of saying goodbye. But by the end, Roz the robot has taught everyone to be nice and get along, so that a bear can be buddies with his prey. We won’t see the lion laying down with the lamb in this world, I’m sorry. (Also, Tolkien would’ve hated technology improving on nature). Transformers One, however, leaves us with the knowledge that there is evil in the world, predators who will always feed off of their own ambition, and that we must fight against them.

The old myth will always trump the new, because one has been confirmed by time.

When it comes to human technological advancement, artificial intelligence (AI) will probably be looked on as significant as the printing press. Whether you love it, hate it, are anxious, or ambivalent about it, nothing short of a Tower of Babel act of God is going to make AI disappear. It will likely change in some way everything we do, and, at the rate things are going, very soon if it hasn’t already.

But if we’re good at one thing, it’s adapting.

For the sake of brevity, I’m not going to spend any time trying to define what AI is. Rather, I want to discuss what it can do. More importantly, I want to talk about what it can’t do, and I have a perspective that I have yet to hear anyone mention. Full disclosure, I like AI and use it several times a day for getting information. Gone are the days of keyword searches and sifting through results.

Now I can just ask a question like I’m talking to a person and get an answer.

It’s great!

However, in the very near future AI will be able to do more. Much, much more. We’ll be able to ask an AI to make a movie with certain plot elements and actors, done in a particular style, and have it. We’ll be able to ask for a new novel from our favorite author and have a custom made original work. It’s not there yet (I think several movie scripts have been written by AI with little oversight and the results have been dismal), but we’ll get there.

So as a creative, I have to ask if I’ll still be relevant. 

Well, in short, yes. Because the people who anticipate or fear AI taking over creative spaces are overlooking the fact that us humans, created in the image of God, are more than just physical parts and chemical reactions. Every so often you hear about someone receiving a donated organ and developing a character trait of the donor. There are many questions about surrogate pregnancies, where the DNA comes from the parents, but how the baby, who has grown in the womb of another woman and grown accustomed to her voice, will do when suddenly separated from her.

When we create, do we put something spiritual, something of ourselves, into the work?

I think so.

One of the nice things about being in the indie author space is getting to read books written by my friends. Not friends in the parasocial, “I feel like I know him through his work,” sense, but people I’ve actually met in person or through long interactions online. And when I read their work, even if it’s fiction, I get the feeling that I’m spending time with them. While it’s not the same experience as receiving a personal letter, as these stories are written for everyone, I still know deep down that I’m looking into the depths of their hearts.

AI can’t replicate that.

There’s more to writing than word choice and the length of a sentence. Sure, AI will be able to spit out a novel without any adverbs and lots of short, punchy dialog and call it Hemingway. And, because we never met the guy, we may find a surface level satisfaction from reading it. But it will never be Hemingway. We need to remember that. More importantly, as AI becomes ubiquitous and customized novels become easily accessible, we need to know our authors.

Storytelling is communal, not commercial.

Get online and find a self-published novel you like. Then reach out to the author on social media. I promise you, with rare exceptions, they’re there. If you know writers, read their work and share it with your friends. AI is an incredible tool that will facilitate the telling of many great stories in new mediums. But if we allow it replace human interaction, we’re doomed.