SPECTATORS - Part 77

Plus, where were you on 9/11?

Sep 11, 2023

∙ Paid

Wait, were you born after September 11, 2001?

Brian here, and I was just listening to a story on the radio about how 9/11 is ancient history for most current U.S. military recruits, as I realize it probably is for a healthy number of you readers. Those memories are still very fresh to this old-timer, but more on that enduringly depressing subject in a bit.

First, an important heads-up for those of you haven’t yet left the office this evening. After a few weeks of relatively wholesome chit-chat between our spectral protagonists Val and Sam, today’s installment of Spectators is once again decidedly NOT SAFE FOR WORK, so before reading, please be old enough to have a job and possess enough wisdom to consume explicit content in a responsible venue, thanks.

Co-creator Niko Henrichon absolutely blew my mind with this action-packed double-page spread (a deliberately speechless one, but Fonografiks and his fantastic letters will return with more new dialogue next week), and I hope you enjoy inspecting every salacious detail when you’re back home in front of your largest screen…

Spectators 190 191

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Quick, which fornicators are your favorite?

I’ll definitely be gunning for this gorgeous original artwork if/when Niko ever chooses to put it on sale. For now, there are still a few early hand-painted Spectators pages available over at Essential Sequential. And pretty soon, we’ll be giving away another valuable page to a lucky paid subscriber in The Tower, where members also get a special discount on all of Niko’s extraordinary artwork, so thanks for considering joining your fellow giraffes.

In last week’s fun-filled dispatch, I panicked about the rapidly approaching threat to working writers posed by artificial intelligence.

Here’s the short version: while some writers like Stephen King don’t believe that A.I. is yet capable of “a genuine creative moment,” others who have had the opportunity to test more powerful programs than ChatGPT think that A.I. “will be able to beat any writer in a blind creative taste test” in less than five years. But because things like creativity and quality have never been of paramount importance in show business, I worry that some screenwriters’ replacements might already exist.

Imagine a studio’s proprietary artificial intelligence trained not just on thousands of hours of its scripts, shows and movies, but also on data compiled from decades of audience dial-testing and focus-grouping. (While working on a television pilot years ago, I learned that most middle-aged male viewers love watching paper maps be unfolded!)

Couldn’t such well-trained A.I. spit out an entire season worth of solid first drafts for a new show, before those scripts are then turned over to a single flesh-and-blood showrunner charged with doing a quick “human polish” on all this engineered-to-crowd-please content? And if that (doubtlessly underpaid) lone showrunner ever dared to push back on any studio notes, would the more compliant A.I. get to do the final pass?

I realize this sounds like a far-flung dystopian worst-case scenario, but it’s also exactly the kind of not-so-distant future the AMPTP seems to be prepping for in its counteroffer to the WGA. Needless to say, I’m concerned, both as a writer and as a spectator.

Thankfully, a few of you lovely readers wrote in to remind me that—while a coming A.I. revolution might be unavoidable—it won’t necessarily be entirely lousy for everyone. As Seb G. noted:

I work in radiology and AI is already being used in this profession (although not everywhere) to search for cancer diagnosis. Using Deep Mind/Hive Mind AI tech, it can be used to search breast mammograms for cancer, thousands of breast mammograms searched super fast and then the findings passed onto real-life-human-radiologist-doctors to confirm the findings. All images are still screened and checked by humans, but at its early stages. Another method AI is used for is improving the quality of MRI images - These can take 3-5 minutes to produce per sequence of images of a knee for example. With AI the image data is processed through what-it-could/should-look-like existing images of 10,000s of images and and the quality of the image is improved, whilst the scan time is shorter. Anyway, it’s good news for patients, bad news if it takes humans out of the job, right? It’s early days so we’ll see how this gets adopted by the profession. Sorry if I’ve bored you with this work-speak! More info at this link : https://www.v7labs.com/blog/ai-in-radiology

But some commenters, like Tim, took us down even darker (but equally fascinating) potential paths:

For a very good (and very harrowing) listen on the topic of AI, check out this interview of Yuval Noah Harari (of Sapiens fame).
tl;dl: We’re at the end of human culture. All future cultural production will be undertaken by computers.

Astounding listen, thanks, Tim.

But our intern Genesis the Exploded Giraffe only had one copy of I Am Code (a breathtakingly original “autobiographical” book of poems written entirely by A.I.) to give away, and Genesis randomly selected Bryan L., who shared:

I’m a high school English teacher so ChatGPT and I got off on the wrong foot last year as I was preparing my students for the AP exam. Their AI outsourcing didn’t do them any favors on the exam, but that’s just adolescent brain development, confined to the present and its immediate needs. This year I’m framing ChatGPT to my students as an existential threat to human creativity. I’m not sure if I completely believe that or not, but I think resistance to AI’s cheap ease might just be a little bit heroic. I hope at least that I can get my students to see it that way.

Thanks for writing, Bryan. Not to assign you a book report you weren’t looking for, but I’d be curious to hear what you (and your students?) make of I Am Code.

I promise we’ll return to less anxiety-exacerbating matters next Monday, as Spectators continues to heat up, and we give you your first look at some of the crazier entries to the Saga Costume Contest, whose winners will finally be revealed in next week’s new issue (at your local comic shop Wednesday, September 20th, thanks for your patience).

But for the moment, if you’ll permit me to once again pry into your private past: What, if anything, do you remember most about September 11, 2001?

Exploding Giraffe

SPECTATORS - Part 77

Plus, where were you on 9/11?

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