Popping Open A Live Crab

I’ll leave the arguments about Substack’s new AI detector to other, smarter voices - suffice to say, I think my three-and-a-half-thousand word essay about AI makes my feelings clear.

There is a lot of writing out there about AI, but most of it focuses on AI voice. You know what I’m talking about - that weird, flat affect, that clipped, faux-profound tone.

Lately, AI-generated screenplays have flooded the queue of scripts I read for the Black List.1 And it’s got me thinking - sure, we all know AI voice, sure they ‘sound like AI’. But what are the qualities of an AI-generated character? What personality traits does AI lean on, the way it leans on an em dash?

Before we dive in, some caveats to my study. My sample size is necessarily small - enough to spot a trend, but not enough to speak authoritatively. I read probably two or three scripts a week I strongly suspect are AI-generated, and have for a couple months. Maybe I’m reading more AI scripts than I realize - maybe I’m reading fewer.

I’m also responding to the qualities that seem, to me, like tells of AI fakery. Maybe others have different perspectives on what ‘sounds like AI’ or maybe I’m getting paranoid and reading too close. I mean, I write with a fair amount of em dashes. What if…?

So now that I’ve made it clear this is cherry-picked, unreliable science - sorry, Mom! - here’s what I’ve noticed:

The AI protagonist is uniformly cool and collected and driven. She’s - weirdly, given the LLMs are trained on so much Reddit, she’s usually a she - a bit of a black box. She has no outward expression, no doubt, no concern or consideration. She does hard things, but they never seem to feel hard for her. She exercises, but she never sweats. She is competent to a fault. She works as an investigator or computer scientist, a pattern detector by nature.2

There’s also something heavy and weighty and pretentious to so many of these characters, a sort of unerring confidence. They never laugh or crack a joke or fuck up or cry. They approach everything with steely resolve and move forward with a self-serious sense of mission. Maybe, at the end, it turns out the mission was more complex than they realized - if so, that twist tends to transform them into victims of the plot. They tend to be passive, the subject of extraordinary events rather than the actor behind them.

Anyways. I say all this because I think understanding what AI tends towards is probably vital to understanding what people do particularly well. Or to put it more simply:

Oh, that’s what the machine does? Yeah, fuck that, I’ll do the opposite.

I have a long-standing beef with the idea of ‘competence porn’.

People talk about characters being unrelatable, too ‘difficult’ or ‘rude’ for the audience. But I know and love plenty of difficult or rude people. What I don’t know and love are an army of perfectly abled, immediately gifted geniuses. And that’s why it drives me insane when people say that audiences just want to see characters be really, really good at things. To me, that’s what’s really unrelatable, because even the most brilliant people I know make mistakes. I’ve heard accomplished doctors admit that sometimes they sneak out of the exam room to google symptoms.

I’ve always thought that a good story should focus instead on incompetence porn. In college, a screenwriting teacher of mine explained CHINATOWN by saying ‘It’s always helpful when your character is kinda an idiot’.

How much more engaged is an audience when they know the right choice but find themselves yelling ‘no, don’t!’ at the screen? Think about the value of dramatic irony - us understanding something the protagonist doesn’t. Think about the basic fact that drama is about watching people do the wrong thing, not watching them excel.

When it comes to storytelling, idiots and regular, flawed folks are kinda where it’s at. I don’t want to watch competence porn. I want to watch people feel vulnerable. I want to watch them when they’re way outta their league.

I dunno about you, but on a given day, that’s a lot closer to how I feel.

These AI-generated scripts also tend to elide sex and violence - they cut to black right before a murder, pan away before a sex scene. I can’t figure out why that is - after all, they’re trained on the entire corpus of the internet, which has to be at least 75% pornography. How did Claude end up a prude?

And yet it feels appropriate, right? AI, by definition body-less, shies away from very human, embodied experiences. It can’t imagine3 injury and intercourse, the same way it shies away from doubt, despair and inner conflict. These, to me, seem like the things that make us…well, us.

When I was in sixth grade, I watched a fisherman use his thumb to open the carapace of a crab while it was still alive. A little pressure on the belly - hold it like a hamburger, he said - and pop. Suddenly, we could see into its guts.4 He giddily pointed out the crab’s ovaries, slimy and pulsing and visible.

This is kinda what we do at the movies. We don’t come to this place to admire someone’s steely exterior shell. We come to see them opened up so we can look deep into their hearts. We come to this place to see people break open.

Months ago, before the AI incursion, this essay was about the legion of Tarantino clones I’m constantly reading, scripts about tough guys who never seem to be desperate or hurt or sad. I don’t think people realize the best parts of Tarantino’s movies aren’t the violence, they’re the character flaws.

I remember seeing THE HATEFUL EIGHT when it came out. The audience was silent for most of the movie - and then, at the first sight of blood, they burst into applause. They thought that was the point.

I bring this up not because I want to compare Tarantino to AI. Whatever you think of the guy, he is the definition of an auteur - personal, distinctive, driven by his own compulsions and interests and thoughts. He’s a lot of things, but he’s not a robot.

I bring this up because the mindless regurgitation of Tarantino - to diminishing returns, like photocopying a photocopy - is a lot like the process behind LLMs. Tarantino isn’t like AI. The Tarantino clones are like AI.

What do we go to the movies for? We go to connect with people onscreen.

Watching an insurmountable badass is just as uninteresting as watching a stoic, doubt-less AI-generated heroine. You may think James Bond is super cool - but Daniel Craig is the best Bond because you can feel for that guy. He can show you the exterior, the untouchable super-spy - and also show you the interior person trying to put up the facade of an untouchable super spy. You can connect with him.

This is what we, human writers, can do that LLMS can’t. We can make people ache. We can make you feel for them. Is there anything more human than incompetence? Cool characters are inherently overrated - because if they never have a moment of crisis, never have a moment of doubt, never get in over their head…

Well, like I said. Our job is to pop open the crab so people can look inside. I don’t think AI knows how to do that.