“Why are you trying to optimize the creative process?” snaps Deborah Vance on the sixth episode of Hacks’ latest season. “That’s one of the things we’ve actually figured out—we’re good there.”
Deborah, played by Jean Smart on the hit HBO comedy, is talking to a tech bro who is trying to convince her to get on board with the AI revolution and use her voice and writing to create an AI program. While she’s open to the idea at first, she realizes the program would erase all the parts of the creative process that, in the end, lead to real, human comedy. She turns him down—hard.
Hacks is just one of several HBO shows this season to make AI a main character—and a controversial one at that. On the third season of The Comeback, Valerie (Lisa Kudrow) gets a job leading a new sitcom that is secretly being written by AI. On The Pitt, a new doctor is pushing for an AI program that she claims will help the doctors with efficiency and diagnosis. Even the new series Rooster, starring Steve Carell as a novelist turned writer-in-residence at a college, sees a student using AI to write his paper.
TV has always held a mirror up to what’s going on in the world. So it’s not surprising that the biggest question plaguing Hollywood and much of society right now—where does AI belong?—would make its way into storylines. Several of these show creators say they rushed to get this timely issue into their series, where they felt they could best explore it, perhaps helping others see its potential implications.
“Putting it into narrative helps people understand it in a way that reading an article about it might not—especially if that article is generated by a media conglomerate that is funded by or has a large interest in AI,” says Hacks cocreator Paul W. Downs. “When you’re doing it with humor, people can laugh and relate to things—it can be a very effective way to shift understanding.”
When Michael Patrick King and Kudrow were in the writers room working on the AI storyline for the third season of The Comeback, one of the writers stopped the discussion to ask: “What’s the moral of the story?”
“I felt like I was hit by a train,” King tells Vanity Fair. For three days after that, he debated in his head what the third season was trying to say about AI. In the end, he and Kudrow decided that their job was to tell the story—not to create the happy ending that would soothe audiences (and writers). “This is a fictional world of what happens when there’s a seismic shift in the way television is made,” he says. “There’s enough hope and anger in the show that I hope we respect the reality of what everyone who works in this business is feeling.”
