Ask A Genius 921: The Everyday Future
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/04/20
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: In our previous session, we were talking about how to present the everyday future, and there’s a very effective way to address issues like that in TV writers’ rooms, which is called breaking a story, or you get your writing team, ideally, a bunch of people who have a bunch of life experience and also writing expertise. You must get from point A to point B or determine what points to reach in a particular episode and break the story. Everybody throws out possible beats, and until everybody agrees upon each beat or has enough beats, you write stuff down on index cards. They still use index cards because everybody can see them, and you don’t have to have the writer’s assistant punch everything onto like a screen. Still, you have a team of people, and you throw out ideas until you have ideas that everybody agrees on, which is a promising way to go.
So, we could be a two-person team beating out the future. Some of the best shows on TV hire people with appropriate backgrounds. For example, a cop show will hire ex-detectives turned aspiring writers. What’s a way for a cop to confront a drug dealer? People have seen that happen dozens of times. If you have a former Vice Cop in your writer’s room, they can maybe instead of relying on everybody’s imagination, which is limited because they’ve never been cops. So they’re going to be building from a foundation of cliches; the cop can describe some stuff that maybe actually happened, which people who are good at imagining things could use. The story isn’t excellent or unexpected, but you can work from relevant experience.
Phil Rosenthal, the producer of Everybody Loves Raymond, tried to wrap every day by 6:00 p.m. He said to go home to your families a) because it’s nice to be with them and b) so you can have family experiences you can tell us about tomorrow, and we can weave them into the show. So, it’s an excellent way to work. There’s a similar thing with the Judd Apatow method in writing movies where you write your film, and it’s a comedy because Judd Apatow does comedies. Then you invite all your funny friends to a series of readthroughs, and as you go through the script, everybody throws out additional jokes for every plot beat or line in the movie. They were able to release two versions of Anchor Man 2 with the same plot beat for beat, line for line, except they had so many jokes that they could do a second movie where the same stuff happens, but there’s a different joke for every line, which is excellent.
We can look forward to when AI gets for good and for ill when AI gets smarter because AI is nothing but, at this point, a probabilistic fill-in-the-blank engine. People who know AI like to say it’s just a powerful auto-complete that you give it a prompt, and it uses all its Bayesian probability engines to figure out the most likely fill-ins for the prompt. You can ask the AI to give you 15 different ideas; say you’re writing a screenplay; what are 15 other ways a 32-year-old African American male who works as a CPA could meet a 31-year-old recently divorced woman who hates her job in brand management? You can say you have 15 ideas, and it will give you 15 ideas, and most of them will be cliché, maybe all of them, because the AI can only work off the fill-in-the-blanks based on what information you give.
I should type that in, and in the next session, I can tell you what the AI gives me. We’ll see how cliché it is, which will be plenty. I would bet you money that at least one of the 15 ways is somebody stumbling over something or people running into something, but you can work from that. Getting a list of clichés also helps you ensure you didn’t meet any possible ways to go that you could build using your imagination. In the future, more powerful AI may be able to come up with creative ways, which are both great for writers and terrible because when your AI is toting the barges, what need is there for you?
[Recording End]
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