The New Creative ARISTOCRACY

Artificial intelligence is calling into question the legitimacy, and economics, of human ingenuity. The talent in these pages is keeping it regally, outrageously alive.

- CARL SWANSON

How do you succeed as a young creative person today? How do you make it? What does it even mean to make it now? The old models, pathways, and rules-some not even that old have been scrambled and upended in the past few years, as the traditional gatekeepers and arbiters are replaced by the herky-jerky algorithmic democracy of social media. In place of the lowbrow-highbrow divide, we spend much of our lives immersed in one of several competing popular cultures-Oppenheimer vs. Barbie?-that demand that you pick sides to participate. The question is no longer so much whether you should sell out, but how to sell at all, and to whom.

For much of 2023 Hollywood has been on strike because of the fear that the suits, who always found the creatives the least reliable part of their business, would replace them with artificial intelligence, which presumably operates autonomously, like those creepily polite Waymo cabs scurrying about San Francisco. The studios especially those owned by tech companies, which understandably have an ingrained sympathy for robots-would love it if ChatGPT could just rustle up a new script in the style of something that succeeded in the past at little or no cost. Maybe starring the digital avatars of actors who have been uploaded to the cloud without asking about their character's motivation. M3GAN, but starring an all-CGI cast.