It doesn’t have to be as good as a human doing the task, it just has to be good enough that it’s no longer worth paying the premium to have the human doing that work.

...I'm sorry, do you think that anyone is being paid for those drafts? That they have some sort of cost? Naaah. They're free. Cheaper than AI, they cost nothing. Wanna option one? that's a dollar. And that shit still doesn't get made. What "premium" are we talking about exactly?

Okay, fine. We're gonna pay the screenwriter scale, which I think is $180k or so. That's $180k more expensive than ChatGPT. We're going to pay Will Smith $8m though so the screenwriter doesn't fucking matter. Oh, I'm sorry, did you think we were gonna make a movie with AI Will Smith? Yeah, Actor's Guild won that one, sorry. Frankly, it's worth paying the screenwriter $180k just so we can blame someone if it tanks. Where are our cost savings?

That's what you're missing: the top of the top of the top of the cream of the crop are the guys who get published. Are the guys who get optioned. I was optioned, I was not published. I know one guy - ONE GUY - who had his first script made into a movie. Meanwhile, the whole of your argument - the whole of your thinking - is the infinite monkey theorem without recognizing that we don't want Shakespeare, we want a new twist on Shakespeare and ten thousand humans typing in their basements on evenings and weekends can't do what one Richard Linklater can do. We want the spark and the spark has been sucked right out of AI.

Lemme introduce you to Georges Polti, who argued that there are only 36 different stories in 1895. "Save the Cat" is basically "the Hero with a Thousand Faces for dummies" which basically pointed out that from the Aborigines to the Zoroastrians, everyone has certain paradigms and motifs in drama. Reductionist thinking goes back to Beowulf; that doesn't mean fiction can be simplified to the point of mechanization.

You pull this fantasy world of "luxury books" completely out of your ass as if there were any basis for any of it. There isn't. I have read more terrible writing in any given year than you have in your entire life and I'm here to say - terrible human writing often has glimmers of originality. It's what makes us keep reading. LLMs are the stochastic middle of whatever they're trained on and it is PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE for them to be original.

So tell me. What non "luxury book" would you read?

Make 100,000 and I’d say there’s probably at least one that’s better than Star Trek V.

Your mission: read 100,000 scripts to find at least one that's better than Star Trek V. They take about 45 minutes each. At 40 hours a week of reading, you're looking at 37 years to find "Star Trek 5 plus."

It doesn't have to be vaguely better sometimes. It has to be markedly better, every time. And there is absolutely zero evidence or even reason to suggest that anything about it will ever be more than the mushy middle of mediocrity, by design.

And the fact that you think an LLM will write better than a human some day says a lot about you.