While it may not look like it ,I really am trying to reduce the amount of time I waste thinking about You Know Who and his cult of white nationalist paranoiacs. It’s summer in America and there are so many other villains worthy of my interest.

Take for example the on-going-and-now-getting-truly-serious strike(s) in Hollywood. Yesterday the TV industry announced the four million awards it will give out at the Emmys, a show which might not even happen because of the current writers strike. Then, last night, the Screen Actors Guild announced it too is prepared to strike, as early as today, which means that everything in movies will shut down. The two Guilds have never before gone on strike simultaneously, so it is, as Ron Burgundy likes to say, kind of a big deal.

There are all sorts of issues that are arcane and eye-glazing, many dealing with giving writers — aka the people who thought up and produced the idea for the show/movie — a fair cut of the dough that the movie makes as the years roll on. But, as everyone following the conflict knows quite well, the single issue that is most motivating writers, and now actors, is the looming threat of Artificial Intelligence. No bullshit /journalist podcaster Kara Swisher has plenty to say about the movie industry predicament re: AI, and of course Ezra Klein at The New York Times has been on a tear about AI in general for months.

Never mind that AI is very real, very much here already and increasing in sophistication practically by the hour. With Donald Trump and his MAGA morons sponging up 90% of the country’s attention, few are giving it the focus it needs.

But … Hollywood is. TV and movie writers, some of whom are successful and rich and many who are not, recognize the ease with which they can be replaced by computer programs, as long as the mission of the big company in charge of production, be it Disney or Amazon or Apple, is satisfied with what I’ll politely call “familiar” or “traditional” storytelling. AI, as it exists today, quite masterfully collects and collates themes, types of characters and styles of dialogue into scripts unrecognizable from what humans produce. So, “Why bother with all these pissy, whiney, expensive writers?” you might say if you’re the CEO of Amazon or Disney.

The hard irony here is that there is a logic to the boss’s argument, as long as all you want to fill your program schedule is the 2000th variation on “Two Broke Girls”, another re-re-boot of “Lord of the Rings”, the next “Star Wars” step child or any rom-com you can think of. All the elements for that, um, “familiar” type of programming is in the computer hard drive and ready for instant replication — with strategic variations — by, you know, Amazon or Netflix’ on board HAL 9000 computer.

Things are much different, and tough for AI if you tell it to produce a story with dialogue and ideas no one has ever heard before. (I wonder if AI could ever produce something like Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Mirror.) But, folks, it’s show biz. Giving the people what they want is just another way of saying, “Give them what they’ve already seen and liked before.”

So yeah, the writers are in a tough place.

But actors too are quickly realizing that they are replaceable as well. Imagine, for example, ChatGPT 9 in 2031, or whatever, commanded to collect, scour and digest every film and every interview Marilyn Monroe gave in her career and reproduce her in near perfect detail in an entirely new production, maybe opposite, say, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, with Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin in the supporting cast? Are you prepared to say something like that could never happen?

In my more macabre imaginings I think of Oliver Stone, or one of his acolytes, re-staging Dallas 11/22/63 with perfect AI-created doubles of JFK, Jackie, LBJ and the whole cast of historical characters, to the point the camera/audience is in the limo rolling through Dealey Plaza. Point being, AI will be able to create almost anything that can be imagined … and without a human actor or screenwriter to be paid $20 million per film plus residuals.

I have no idea how the Hollywood strikes will end. (Swisher’s Pivot podcast partner Scott Galloway believes the unions have been badly misled and lack and serious leverage.)

But as with several other vital cultural issues over the past century — anti-semitism, racism, gay rights, etc. — El Lay is at the tip of the spear fighting something that’s coming, one way or another, for all of us.