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\n\t\t\tPosted by\t\t\tJohn Scalzi<\/a>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\u00a0\u00a0
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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\u2019ve written and ideas I have currently not connected to something I published. The meetings generally went very well \u2014 which isn\u2019t necessarily the same as I\u2019m walking away with a movie deal, there\u2019s a lot of moving parts involved with that \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019m running past them is my own, not generated by or written out with, some version of \u201cAI.\u201d From a practical point of view this means they know there is no issue with things like copyright (\u201cAI\u201d 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\u2019m bringing to them \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
In other words, they know I can do actual creative work, from ideation to production, and they know when they work with me they\u2019re not only getting an idea but they\u2019re 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 \u201ccognitive offloading,\u201d the more of a differentiator this will be. <\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t an anti-\u201cAI\u201d post. It is a \u201cthe more other people claiming to be writers use \u2018AI\u2019 the more secure my gig gets\u201d post. If you want to use \u201cAI\u201d 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. <\/p>\n
\u2014 JS<\/p>\n
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