Posted on April 24, 2026
Posted by John Scalzi
As most of you know I spent much of this last week in Los Angeles, taking meetings with film/TV folks and pitching things to them, both from books I’ve written and ideas I have currently not connected to something I published. The meetings generally went very well — which isn’t necessarily the same as I’m walking away with a movie deal, there’s a lot of moving parts involved with that — and I came away with a lot of interest in the things I pitched and movement as my manager sent along materials. I gave some thought on why these meeting generated as much interest as they did.
There are a number of factors for this, but the one I want to bring to the fore at the moment is this one: When I sit down with these film/TV people and run an idea or concept past them, they one hundred percent know that the idea I’m running past them is my own, not generated by or written out with, some version of “AI.” From a practical point of view this means they know there is no issue with things like copyright (“AI” generated work is not copyrightable, and rights issues are a big deal for film/TV). From a creative point of view this means they know I have actually thought about the concept I’m bringing to them — that I know it inside and out and can build it out, dig deeper into it, and can improvise with the concept rather than just go with whatever an LLM spits out from a prompt.
In other words, they know I can do actual creative work, from ideation to production, and they know when they work with me they’re not only getting an idea but they’re also getting the actual working brain behind it. That brain can efficiently work the problem, whatever the problem might be. In 2026, this is a real and actual differentiator: A functional brain, and a reliable creative partner. I rather strongly suspect the further along we go in this new era of “cognitive offloading,” the more of a differentiator this will be.
This isn’t an anti-“AI” post. It is a “the more other people claiming to be writers use ‘AI’ the more secure my gig gets” post. If you want to use “AI” to generate ideas or create your prose or whatever, by all means, be my guest. The next twenty years of my career thanks you in advance for your choices.
— JS
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