Thoughts on My Life's Work, AI Chatbots and the Writers Strike

I wear, around my neck, every day, a leather necklace upon which hangs a USB drive, known as a thumb drive, that contains every article I have written since January 1991. You wouldn’t know it’s there if I didn’t tell you, because the leather and the thumb drive are under the shirt I choose to put on for the day.

There are a number of reasons I wear this. One of them is because back in the early 1990s, computers — pretty new on the market — sometimes just crashed, and words I typed would simply vanish if I hadn’t saved them promptly on something else beforehand. Another is that after a while, it became apparent to me I could search for and find things in past stories on the thumb drive that could serve as research for newer stories.

And as it went on and on, year after year, I realized I had something pretty remarkable and quite humbling. My life’s work, thousands of stories, all on a piece of metal smaller than a dime. How absurd!

I mention this because, although I am probably the only person on the planet who does this dumb thing, last month, members of the Writers Guild of America went on strike. This is something else.

Producers and directors in the film, TV and new media business have become quite upset about this. Those on strike — I am certainly not one of them (obviously, since here I type on) — say it will probably last well into September before anything is agreed upon between the two sides and, in the meantime, there will be ramifications.

A paucity of content. Many scripts postponed, even canceled, or never started. I’m like, “What the hell?”

This past week, I spoke to one of these movie and TV types. He’s also my stepson. And he lives in LA. What was it all about?

“Just money?”

“No.”

“Poor working conditions? Dirty writing rooms, dim lighting? Producers demanding a rewrite of a script before morning, so the writers, exhausted, have to write 24 hours straight to redo a scene about who kills who without a break?”

“No.”

“And aren’t there second-rate writers, eager and willing, who could push through the demonstrators and, as scabs, get to the writing rooms before the goons with the baseball bats get them and do the writing needed even if it is not quite up to snuff?”

“Really, it’s about AI.”

“Huh?”

“Every day, more and more, producers of movies and shows are relying on artificial intelligence to do the writing. Writers who used to do all this see their careers melting away. The AI chatbots can, on demand, write a script in any style needed, for example, in the style of the late Nora Ephron. With this happening, writers fear there may soon be no further writing careers at all for anybody.”

“AI can do that?”

“The producers just pour her material in. Out comes Nora Ephron. And it doesn’t cost them a dime.”

“So, what do the writers want?”

“They want guarantees that at least a certain percentage of what gets written comes from humans.”

“Have there been any offers from the producers?”

“Closest they have come is to say we’ll review this annually. See how it goes.”

“That’s not an acceptable answer,” I said. “And it seems like the writers are in a no-win situation. There’s nothing to prevent the use of AI.”

“That’s why they are on strike now. At this time, they still have some power.”

So that was that. Hmmph.

And then I thought, maybe there’s an opportunity for me here. But probably not. Nobody’s ever asked me to write a screenplay. I’d probably be lousy at writing a screenplay. A third-rater. I guess I should just stick to writing these stories.

There’s really quite a lot of stuff on my thumb drive. The drive has 33 individual folders, one for each year. For years I wrote 300 stories a year, although lately I’ve cut back to about half that. There are, as a matter of fact, 9,266 stories, nearly all having found a place in Dan’s Papers. Or in books I’ve written. I’m a Random House author.

As a matter of fact, in 2008, Stony Brook University began saving my books, diaries, manuscripts and some physical Dan’s Papers in a climate-controlled part of their Whitman Library. It’s called the Dan Rattiner Collection. And this spring, they did something even more remarkable. It’s related to the fact that when I began Dan’s Papers in 1960, I’d every week bring home a copy of that week’s paper hot off the press. I still do this.

It’s become an enormous collection, consisting of 63 years of not only my writing, but also of all the other authors who have written for the paper. More than 160 bound volumes. It’s to be digitized and made searchable. It’s to be the centerpiece of the collection, and later this summer, it’s to be brought to the Southampton Stony Brook campus library where, occupying more than 60 feet of shelf space, it will be available on display in its own room just behind the chief librarian’s desk, kept available for scholars and researchers all day but under lock and key at night.

You will be able to visit it and read it. You will be able to learn about the transition years of the Hamptons and the North Fork, when it changed from a community of farmers, clammers, fishermen, tourists and members of the New York social set into the world-class resort it has become today, along the way bringing with it the Rolling Stones, Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Sheldon Harnick, Paul Simon, Martha Stewart, Alec Baldwin, Billy Joel, Marilyn Monroe, Richard Avedon, Jerry Seinfeld, the Clintons, George Plimpton, James Jones and Eli Wallach. And thousands more.

And you know what? How about I get together with an AI chatbot, enter into it all the stories I’ve written since 1991 on my thumb drive? It takes up only six megabytes and could probably be downloaded into the bot’s brain in six seconds.

Then, after I’m gone, you could just ask it to write stories on any future topic, ready for a new movie, book or column, just the way I would have written it.

You know? I’d like that.