Novel vs. Clever: Is AI Coming for Hollywood?

TL;DR: If your job is to be novel, your goose is cooked. If your job is to be clever, you're safe. But you'll also need a lot of aspirin and a therapist. And probably the location of your nearest AA meeting.

I had an interesting conversation with a friend who writes for television. I was explaining my hypothesis of what AI is good at (so far) and what it sucks at (so far). 

It boils down to Novel vs. Clever.

A.I. is great at novel. Bad at clever.

Novel is the ability to create something new. Probably by mashing a couple of ideas together creating a third thing. Novel.

“Clever is a very specific kind of randomization. It's a search for unlike things that have a hidden theme latent in them. A theme that has emotional resonance.”

But novel isn't necessarily interesting. Novel is essentially randomization. Something computers and AI do a billion times faster than humans. Mostly because they've managed to swallow the internet whole.

But clever… That's a whole other can of turkey.

Clever is novel but with something more. Clever is a very specific kind of randomization. It's a search for unlike things that have a hidden theme latent in them. A theme that has emotional resonance.

A quick art history lesson to show you what I mean.

Since pretty much the Renaissance, the peak of being a highly skilled artist was the ability to reproduce objects and scenes from real life with uncanny precision. In fact, when someone casually asks, "Can you draw?", what most of us take that to mean is, "Can you reproduce something from the real (or imagined) world with accuracy." In other words, "Does it look like me?"

Then the camera happened. (Actually the camera obscura happened. But we'll ignore Vermeer for now.)
The camera (technology) pretty much rendered the need to reproduce something with accuracy moot. The camera represents things exactly as they are.

The war to reproduce a three-dimensional reality in two-dimensional space (a canvas) had been won. By technology.

What's an artist to do?
See better. See more better.

“… art history lays bare these giant shifts in thinking and seeing when new technologies instantly retire old jobs. And not just old jobs, but conventional thinking itself.”

The artist will need to see in a way a simple reproduction machine cannot. 

So a handful of industrious artists in Europe decided to paint the impression of things rather than the thing as an accurate representation. We call them… well, we call them the Impressionists.

Why am I telling you this?

Because art history lays bare these giant shifts in thinking and seeing when new technologies instantly retire old jobs. And not just old jobs, but conventional thinking itself.

These shifts in art styles aren't just novel… they're clever.

Clever is the adaptation of novel thinking in the pursuit of solving an emotional problem.

“… the characters weren't just featured in the horror movie. They were self-aware of their place in it.”

When the camera stole representation away from painters, painters fought back by painting an emotional response to light. Rather than a physically accurate one. Or, later, they chose to deconstruct the whole damned thing and reassemble it from multiple viewpoints in a single plane in the form of Cubism.

One more example. This one is more current.
In 1996, screenwriter Kevin Williamson wrote a movie called "Scream". For a decade before that, Hollywood had been dishing out slasher horror movies that usually featured teenagers as the sacrificial lambs for some psychopathic killer.

"Scream" did something unique. It was a slasher movie at its core but with a twist… all of the characters in the movie have been living in a world filled with slasher movies. All of the characters knew the slasher movie tropes. In other words, the characters weren't just featured in the horror movie. They were self-aware of their place in it.

That's certainly novel. But more than that… It's clever.

Williamson was solving an emotional problem. Maybe not a cathartic "crying-in-your-therapist's-office" problem but a cultural one. Slasher movies were getting a little long in the tooth. The story tropes were predictable and the form was getting boring.

“A.I. will never be able to read the room. It will only be able to measure it.”

"Scream" is both novel and clever because it found novelty in a meta social commentary. But still wrapped it up in a product the marketers and bean counters could greenlight.

That is a kind of thinking and creation I don't see A.I. being able to tackle anytime soon. A.I. is not "tired" of anything. It has no emotional memory. The only way it can possibly know if it's bored is by counting. But machine counting and emotional counting are very different.

A.I. doesn't get bored.

A.I. will never be able to read the room. It will only be able to measure it. Those are very different skills.

Back to the friend who writes for television.

The question was… should she be nervous? Yes and no. Yes, because a lot of television is novel but not clever. But that doesn't mean there's not an audience for novel without clever. The fact that soap operas run for 60 years tells us a lot about our tolerance for cleverless entertainment.

Some entertainment is comfort food. We want it to be novel just enough to keep us from getting bored. But it doesn't have to be all that clever. In fact, sometimes we'd prefer it not be all that clever.

Unfortunately… A.I. will probably be able to write that kind of entertainment. It's largely tropes without innovation. If it sounds and smells like a conveyor belt, A.I. is probably coming for you.

On the other hand, if you're writing clever stories, you're probably safe. At least from A.I.

The only problem is, writing clever stories… is incredibly hard. It's cognitively taxing and it requires a kind of cultural peripheral vision that takes awhile to gel into something cohesive.

All of this to say… when it comes to clever… put your money on people. But when it comes to generating creative products that are just servicing a fan-base… I wouldn't buy that big house in Malibu just yet.