Why you should be concerned about an AI writing a mock ‘Scrubs’ script
The singularity takes one more gracious, eternally loving step into our lives.
A form of AI program, known as a “predictive keyboard”, has crafted some of the most beautiful and titillating writing known to man. It was fed a series of scripts from the medical comedy series “Scrubs” which aired on what was once Comedy Central (now just Central, since nothing on Comedy Central is funny anymore and has not been for a while).
This shit caught fire like you wouldn’t believe, turning viral on multiple social media outlets. Such content was life-changing. So arbitrary and metasociological was this one post that it even managed to reach the eyes of Zach Braff, who proceeded to lose his mind and arrange a cast reunion.
Now, I can’t help but worry that this nihilist irony culture is going to reach a point where we don’t really care if something is written by a robot because it appeases our desire for absurdity. By the time we’re concerned about it, we won’t be able to tell algorithm-developed news articles from human crafted wares. Worse yet, we might not be able to tell robot-written creative literature from the brain stuff.
Automation is coming for us. It will take what few entry level jobs exist, slowly remove the desire for teaching trade skills and leave many traditions in the dust. Surely, though, it could not come for the artists! That’s impossible. Art is such a human thing… Until human things can be automated.
As our sense of what is/isn’t funny, beautiful, witty or deep becomes more uniform and undiscerning, so will the art that surrounds our lives. It’s only a matter of time before algorithms and AI meet us halfway and begin to pick up the slack. I am pretty sure that movies like “Sing” and “The Emoji Movie” were written with almost nothing but focus surveys on what average people find to be relate-able and entertaining.
I very, very personally believe the next stop on this gravy train is tasking a series of predictive keyboards to write move-scripts people are guaranteed to like, much like a room full of culturally informed monkeys banging on keyboards except you don’t have to feed them! They’re fucking robots.
The lesson here: Don’t think something is funny because it’s illogically absurd, because there is rarely anything to absurdity. That’s the point. So you’re basically laughing at nothing and being taken advantage of. It’s ok the be a little more discerning about what you do and like (even if it happens to be absurd humor), or an AI will come for it.
