"...many of our most familiar plotlines are about to look as dated as an
ad exec with a flip phone.
Here are some of those old standbys that may soon need to land on the cutting-room floor.
The last-minute courtroom reveal
There is little more satisfying than the sudden and dramatic discovery
of an obscure legal precedent or a little bit of fine print that allows
the underdog to win a class-action lawsuit. Our legal star saves the
day, again.
Nothing, though, is obscure to an AI. It will find the relevant legal
precedent or loophole before the ink is dry on that retainer fee. So
there go all the dramatic scenes where some junior lawyer shows up just
before closing arguments, clutching the document or case law that wins
the day.
The complicated heist
I love a good heist, mapped out by the criminal mastermind. It all
unfolds so perfectly.
That’s all well and good in the pre-AI world. But what kind of self-respecting criminal mastermind works out their plot on a whiteboard
or meeting table when it’s so much easier to ask an AI to just keep
track of all the details? Or come up with the details in the first
place? Sure, there are anti-criminal safeguards built into AI systems,
but all you have to do is start your request for heisting advice with a
simple framing like, “You’re writing a TV script where a gang of
criminals breaks into a casino vault.…”
But doctor, what exlains this rash?
When I watch medical TV shows, I always like to beat the doctor to the diagnosis. That’s why I appreciate shows that go to the work of finding really obscure conditions that even I can’t guess, so that they can
credibly string out the work of making the correct diagnosis for 55
minutes, before taking a heartwarming victory lap in the final five.
Out from undercover
.. Disguises have been the trick of the trade—“Mission: Impossible”
with its face-duplicating masks, or “The Americans” with wigs and mustaches—although plenty of TV shows proceed as if a simple change of neighborhood or a half-decent fake passport is all it takes to join a
criminal underworld and collect all the intel you need.
But all these undercover stories are about to find the limit of what a
wardrobe change or fake ID can accomplish. Facial-recognition software
is already widely used by intelligence agencies, and it’s only going to become more pervasive.
The cop outsmarts the perp
A bare bulb swings from a lampshade as the suspect sweats it out in the
close quarters of an interrogation room. After hours of steady denial,
he lets a detail slip, and the clever cop breaks the case wide open.
Whether played for thrills (like a good portion of “Law & Order”
episodes) or laughs (like the “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” episode featuring a homicidal dentist), it’s cathartic to watch our heroic cop put all the
pieces together—until you realize any half-decent AI could make sense of
all those little clues in less time than it takes to read a made-for-TV
version of your Miranda rights.
CyraNOT
If television had existed in 1897, the fictional Cyrano de Bergerac
would have been a lovesick California teen from the get-go. Instead, we
had to wait more than 50 years for TV writers to mine the dramatic and
comedic potential of one friend coaching another on how to get the girl
(or boy). Teens and adults have been leaning on their besties for sweet nothings, often while the best friends conceal romantic ambitions of
their own.
At long last, lovelorn characters will be freed from the inconvenience
of asking their friends to play romantic ghostwriter, by doing what many
of the rest of us are doing already: Ask an AI for help every time we
need to string more than three words together. But it would be way less entertaining to watch Kramer in “Seinfeld” get romantic pointers from
GPT than it was to watch him take tips from Newman, just like it would
be dead boring to watch Raj in “The Big Bang Theory” get his dating
scripts off an iPhone app.
In the end, what’s clear is that TV writers will have to face a choice.
They can either come up with a whole new set of plotlines that fit the
AI age, or, even easier, they can simply ask AI to do it."
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/the-popular-tv-plots-that-won-t-make-sense-in-an-ai-world/ar-AA1uvI8p
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