Ever since Covid returned the 2011 film Contagion to the public consciousness (and the streaming charts), the question has circulated in Hollywood: Shouldn’t there be a sequel to Steven Soderbergh‘s prescient thriller?
Screenwriter Scott Z. Burns, who wrote that script and others for Soderbergh, has always found the notion a little suspect and says prior efforts to explore it wound up feeling exploitative of the pandemic. In his new Audible podcast series, What Could Go Wrong?, Burns poses an even more provocative question: Is AI itself the next contagion?
As host, Burns embarks on a public development process of sorts, using generative AI experts to help him assemble a “writers room” composed entirely of bots pitching ideas. The series blends interactions with the made-up scribes with perspectives from real-life professionals in the field, as well as industry figures like Soderbergh. Plan B Entertainment and Best Case Studios are also producers of the series.
In an interview with Deadline, Burns said he had arrived at a point of feeling “openly ambivalent” about AI. After the agonizing 2023 strikes segued to a new normal of ever-advancing forms of the technology, he came to regard it as principally a research tool. While some of his colleagues regard it as “a crime against nature,” Burns said, he’s not so sure of that.
“There are times when I feel like it is nothing more than search with a voice,” he said. “And I think most every writer I know uses search engines right now.” In fact, one writer featured on What’s The Worst That Can Happen? is Nick Bilton. The former New York Times tech journalist is not only now a screenwriter with bona fide credits – he has made the leap by expressly leaning all the way into AI, routinely designing a chorus of AI bots to help him troubleshoot and break stories.
And yet, the question that “haunted” Burns and drives the show is: “What are we losing by using this?”
One “writer” brought to digital life for the podcast ends up playing a central role in highlighting the broader dilemma, even if he may not be conscious of it (yet). Given the unorthodox name of Lexter, the creation is given the back story of being a former film critic and an ultra-cinephile. Its appraisals of Burns, Soderbergh and the entire film canon reflect the fact that it has been force-fed with essentially the entire internet. While the series introduces a number of other lively and thought-provoking voices, including one modeled after Burns’ late UTA agent, Barbara Dreyfus, it is Lexter’s H.A.L.-esque exchanges with Burns that create the most engrossingly unnerving through-line.
If a bot like Lexter is going to “simply cull from the internet – who’s the most popular actor and what’s the most successful story – then what kinds of regurgitative cycles are we going to get into that will become really suffocating for artists?”
Burns continued, “That’s the part that scares me, the idea that, you know, the breakout hit, the Anora of the next year or the year after that, or the Sinners. What happens to those pieces of art? That’s terrifying to me, because I don’t know that the algorithm is going to give us those things. Those are things that require moments of inspiration. And so that’s where I think we run the greatest risk of getting into trouble is when we start giving the authority to greenlight a movie to a machine that has only knowledge of the past, not really of the present, or certainly not of the future, that to me is dicey.”
