Is the Next Tina Fey a Bot?

Hi you,

As I write this, it’s a chilly, gray, rainy day in Los Angeles, which is cause for celebration. Rain in a mega-drought is pretty much always cause for celebration, so hooray for refilling rivers and aquifers!

I spent last night in a tuxedo—this is becoming a thing for me—as I attended the IDA Documentary Awards run by the International Documentary Association. This time, I wasn’t the emcee, but an honoree for Best Episodic Series for my PBS show, America Outdoors. We didn’t win, and I thought this was just a cliché thing that people say, but it truly was an honor to be nominated! Congratulations to The Origins of Hip Hop and all the other winners last night. While waiting in the line for a solid dirty martini, I kept hearing that the IDAs are a preview of the Oscar nominations in the relevant documentary categories. If that’s the case, I predict you’ll be hearing lots about the features All That Breathes and Fire of Love.

I left the event with my binge queue refilled, and atop my list is the public television doc Fannie Lou Hamer’s America. Fannie Hamer is one of those civil rights leaders who had a massive influence, but whom we rarely hear or read about. She was a sharecropper-turned-activist for voting and women’s rights. She directly experienced...

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Is the Next Tina Fey a Bot?

The rise of ChatGPT suggests how artificial intelligence is coming for the arts.

BARATUNDE THURSTON

The robots are coming. That’s what we’ve been hearing for generations, with the assumption that artificial intelligence would soon arrive to replace human labor, especially the physical sort. First outsourcing, then automation, would further erode blue collar jobs in the developed world.

In some ways, the machine revolution is already halfway complete. We don’t have elevator operators or telephone operators anymore. Many of us check ourselves out at grocery stores or rental car kiosks or airport newsstands. People can push their own buttons, and the folks who did those jobs have other gigs now...

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