MACHINE DREAMS

The creator of the beloved cult hit Dickinson on how she learned to stop worrying and love AI

- ALENA SMITH

BEFORE YOU KNOW IT, they say, robots will be making our TV shows. At this very moment, the machines are learning: to generate full-length screenplays; to spin up dazzling sets and locations; to deep-fake 3D rotatable stand-ins for your favorite actors; to bust out all-new needle drops of algorithmically regurgitated data sets that more or less amount to Taylor Swift. And all without paying a single fee or residual. So if you thought we were already drowning in “content,” girl, strap in! Soon every teen with a computer can be a showrunner—it’s just a matter of entering the right prompts. They’ve already got infinite Seinfeld running on Twitch.

Given that—as an AI chatbot adequately trained in English idioms might put it—the horse has left the barn, it seems there’s nothing any of us can do to prevent this oncoming flood of digital spew. So perhaps the move for us bedraggled mortals, stuck in our sloppy, stubbornly circadian carcasses, is to humbly step aside. We had a good run with our myriad millennia of arts and culture, but I’m calling it now: That’s a wrap. It’ll be easier for all of us, going forward, if we just take everything human out of the equation. Let the robots make the shows, let the robots pick the shows, let the robots distribute the shows— hell, let the robots