No Drugs, no Drama, More Profit

Finally, a story I had been expecting for years popped up on the web. Models are now concerned that their trade will vanish suddenly. AI is creating virtual models.

Virtual models have a number of advantages. They don’t have to be paid. They don’t use coke or heroin. They don’t have attitudes. They don’t sue because agents or photographers rape or grope them. They never get old. They do exactly as they’re told. They never get fat. They don’t wrinkle or go grey. Nothing sags or droops. Nothing is too small or too big. They don’t abuse themselves with hard living and expect makeup artists to do magic when they show up for work.

One really nice thing about them is that they don’t become narcissistic objects of worship, so they don’t go on Twitter and say stupid things all day, stirring up legions of mindless fans. Of course, they could do that, depending on what their creators want them to do. Maybe it will happen later.

I expected this to happen with actors, but we haven’t seen that yet. We’ve seen CGI bodies with real voices. The fake voices will come soon.

This would be a big benefit to society. Show business, historically, has been the domain of degenerates. It still is. It attracts terrible people, they become obscenely rich and powerful, and then they use their power to corrupt the rest of us and destroy civilization. Think how different it would be if the biggest names in show business were AI actors.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the people who program them, also trashy show business people, would use them as avatars to promote their own degenerate values.

Somehow, I don’t think a bot could be as persuasive as a person when it comes to selling products. “Drink Pepsi! ChatGPT loves it!” I don’t think that will work. I could be wrong. But a bot could push the leftist agenda.

I hope we won’t have a bot Antichrist. I don’t think that can happen, since the Antichrist will be a man. But he could be a man wired up to AI. Elon Musk is at work on that. We may have a future with two classes: cyborg overlords, and lowly all-meat humans.

What if we had had bots 90 years ago, and the actors our great-grandparents knew had been bots? Humphrey Bogart would still be working. So would John Wayne. They would still be raking in money for the studios and their stockholders. They would work until we got sick of them.

A long time ago, I wanted to be a comic strip artist. I actually got to the development stage with the guy who discovered Garfield. Luckily for me, I failed. Newspaper cartoonists used to make a ton of money, and that might have destroyed me. Anyway, I learned something most people don’t know: it’s very had to break into the comic strip business, because newspapers are still full of strips drawn by dead people.

At least one major cartoonist has made fun of this in his work. Cartoonists call strips by dead artists “zombie strips.”

If you had been born the day Peanuts creator Charles Schulz died, you would now be 23. So United, his syndicate, ran his final strips and then withdrew his feature, right? No. He’s still plugging away, postmortem. Peanuts still runs all over America. Old strips appear daily as reruns. He was allowed to die, but he can’t retire.

Schulz isn’t the only comic strip zombie. If you check, you will find that other well-known strips are earning royalties for the dead.

It shows what can happen when media people prefer a sure thing to developing new talent, and if actors and actresses were immortal, like bots, it would be nearly impossible for young actors to find work in big roles. They would all have to keep their Olive Garden jobs until they died.

The better AI gets, the less it will matter to the public that celebrities aren’t real. The ones we have now are barely real anyway. Future bots will be sexier, funnier, better looking, more charismatic, and more talented than the flesh and bone celebrities we have now. We won’t care. I already don’t care.

We’ve already seen performances that were at least part CGI, which is AI’s lesser sibling. If you’ve seen a Marvel movie, you’ve seen a character switch from real to CGI and back. Tom Holland can’t really jump around like Spider-Man. Mark Ruffalo can’t balloon up to the size of an RV and turn green. Marvel actors have CGI body doubles. Marvel stunt budgets must be miniscule now.

What will come after actors? Acting requires a little more talent than modeling, so actors will follow models. Singing requires more talent than acting, so singers will follow actors. Writing original songs takes more talent than singing, so singer-songwriters will come later, probably at about the same time AI comedians start to appear.

It almost makes you wonder why a real audience is needed. We could be replaced, too, but then where would ticket money come from?

Pretty soon, a studio will, over the screams and threats of SAG narcissists, create a major actor, and whether we like the first one or not, they will eventually create some we like better than actual actors. Maybe we’ll see a gradual end to the spawning and maintenance of corrosive billionaire thespians.

I don’t think we should feel smug. AI will eventually be good enough to replace people with real jobs, not just performers. Even studio executives will be outdone by machinery. Machines get better and better, and there is no stopping it, no matter how much Elon Musk warns us. The human race keeps proving it can’t resist or control the drug of technology. We will always abuse it.

Will we get AI politicians? What if we get a really popular AI president? Will we repeal the 22nd Amendment, based on the assumption that we can’t do better?

In a situation like that, I believe an AI Obama or Sanders is more likely than a solid leader like an AI DeSantis. Our slide into leftism is not going to stop. America belongs to Satan, and he prefers leftism to conservatism.

Whatever happens, it will be nice to see certain classes of destructive people lose their access to excessive wealth and powerful platforms. No more Chrissie Teigens or Gwyneth Paltrows. That would be great.

It will happen. It has to happen. It’s as predictable as the death of a star.

I don’t know if we will ever be able to get rid of overpaid, bloviating leftist athletes. Maybe there is some way to make AI games competitive and unpredictable. Imagine Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb running the bases again.

Spectator sports don’t run on the love of athleticism. They run on the love of betting. Racehorse owners learned that over the last couple of decades. Tracks shut down because people were just as happy to gamble online as they were to go watch horses. If AI games could be fixed so they had random outcomes, and there was some way to have fair AI drafts, billionaire athletes could vanish from the earth.

A company called Cloudflare makes huge money introducing randomness into the world of computers. Maybe they could branch out into the creation of AI athletes and game variables.

We already have something like this. Fantasy football. You pick your fictional team of real athletes, and their unpredictable performance introduces randomness so the whole thing seems competitive. The real players do Cloudflare’s job.

If we can get excited about fantasy football, we can get just as excited about AI football. We will love football players with a limitless average career length instead of 3.3 years, which is the actual average career length.

AI can’t replace me. I don’t do anything.

Assuming the rapture doesn’t come first, a lot of crazy sci-fi things are going to happen soon, and they will happen before sci-fi writers anticipate them in works of fiction. That’s weird. Usually, fiction gets there first.

If you’re hoping to become a model, think it over. Olive Garden only needs so many waiters.