Kenneth Cukier and Eleanor Warnock recently launched a newsletter about AI’s affect on writing and writers, Chief Word Officer. Their recent issue is an interview with comedy writer Madeleine Brettingham is fascinating; read the whole thing.

In particular, there’s a few things I’ve been chewing on this interview nicely frames.

On Cultural Acceptance of AI

EW: How do you feel people in your industry are reacting to developments in AI?

MB: People are joking about it a lot, which is to be expected, because that’s how comedy writers process anxiety. I’ve heard everything from, ‘I think this is going to replace me in five years, and I need to retrain’ to ‘It’s not a threat. It can’t be funny.’

It’s at a stage, like when Ozempic hit the market, where there are probably quite a few people who are on Ozempic, but nobody’s admitting to it. It’s kind of like the Ozempic of the mind: who knows, really, who’s taking this stuff? Until the norms are clearer around when it’s acceptable to use it and how it’s acceptable to use it, we won’t know.

There are some fields that are more concentrated with hardline AI skeptics. But among some of the skeptics I know, these hardlines are softening. They’re beginning to embrace AI not out of enthusiasm for its capabilities, but out of a fear of being left behind.

And these people, when they talk to me and ask for tips or suggestions, do it quietly. They don’t want to be seen using AI. Even in computer science, this skepticism persists.

It will be interesting to observe how this negotiation takes place and how it shapes each respective field. There is a wide spectrum of light to heavy AI users. And how we all get distributed along that span will be fascinating to watch. I particularly like Madeleine’s comparison to Ozempic here.

On Competing With AI

EW: Because the AI is going to the mid, to the average. But what elevates great writing is something that makes a connection you would have never thought of.

MB: AI will draw our attention very rapidly to all the things that other people could have thought of, so it makes it clearer where the virgin territory is.

I think it’s similar to the dawn of the Internet. Social media roughly coincided with me starting out, so I’ve never worked in the pre-social media landscape. But when writing jokes for satirical shows, for example, you’ve got to be conscious to say something that hasn’t already been said by millions of people on X or Bluesky or Instagram. The bar for originality and authenticity has been raised for everything. So I think LLMs will lower the bar for entry and raise the bar for quality…

Jokes are a way of signaling social status. So I think an interesting thing to think about is how that’s going to affect the value of certain kinds of jokes. Because things that are abundant can become low value. So I think certain kinds of parody will probably become extremely tired because an AI can do it.

Over the last few months, discussions have touched on the changes professional photography and photographer aesthetics went through with the rise of cell phone cameras and image sharing networks. This democratization changed professional aesthetics from both ends. Advertising and marketing imagery embraced the democratic imperfect composition, imitating the photos of their audiences. While many professional artists flocked to higher resolution formats and techniques outside of the range of an iPhone’s capability.

The masses armed with ChatGPT is not unlike the masses armed with cell phone cameras. Madeleine’s conclusion feels spot on: The bar to entry gets lowered, but the bar for professionalism screams upward.

On AI-Powered Performance

MB: Similarly, with stand-up and other forms of comedy, the risk and the fact that someone is putting themselves on the line is part of what’s funny.

There are two slightly different things there. One is that things that the LLM can do easily all become tired and low-value. Even playing around with it had that effect on me. It’s a bit like a party trick: ‘Okay, I get it.’ The second point, a bit different from the effort and risk in comedy being part of the comedy itself, is: would a robot Charlie Chaplin be funny? Can you have a slapstick robot? Because the robot doesn’t care.

EW: It’s not going to get embarrassed. ChatGPT doing standup wouldn’t be funny because ChatGPT itself isn’t funny, even if it could write you a funny joke.

MB: People wouldn’t watch the robot Olympics, for example. People don’t watch the chess computer world championships. They watch the chess world championships because they’re interested in other people going through the journey of life and wrestling with the same things they’re wrestling with.

When I was at the University of California Santa Cruz, I once snuck into a colloquium on the idea of virtuoso performance in the field of electronic music. I had never really thought about what virtuosity meant as a concept, but the way it was discussed in this forum has since solidified the idea of it in my brain: virtuosity can only be achieved when the audience can perceive the risks being taken by the performer.

A DJ that walks on stage and hits play is not likely to be perceived as a virtuoso. While a pianist who is able to place their fingers perfectly among a minefield of clearly visible wrong keys is without question a virtuoso. I think this idea carries over to sports as well and can partially explain the decline of many previously popular sports and the rise of video game streaming. We watch the things that we have personally experienced as being difficult. That is essential context to appreciate a performance.

Initially, many AI applications were, surprisingly, embraced as incredible performances. The images generated by DALLe were usually not more impressive than those of professional illustrators. They were instead incredibly impressive because they had been achieved by a computer program. The same goes for video generating AI demos; none of their video clips are aesthetic or narrative achievements. They are impressive because they were generated by software. But even here, the AI is not the virtuoso. The virtuoso are the teams and companies building these models.

We’ve been able to watch this sheen come off very quickly. Generating an image from a chatbot is no longer very impressive to our friends. It is a novelty. And this half-life, the time it takes for a model’s output to become merely novel, is shortening with every release.

Again, read the whole thing.