AI yi yi yi yi.

Movie plots are strange, sad beasts. 

When films were more formulaic, they were sad because they were predictable. Like: Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back. Murder is discovered and clues are unearthed to solve the mystery. Bad boy meets good girl and reforms. Party sets out and overcomes deadly obstacles to achieve goal. 

Then the plots got tortured to upend the expectations of the viewers. The cop is bad! The father is bad! The mother is bad! The bum is good! And eventually you'd know that the cop was the bad guy and the useless bum the good guy within five minutes, because the upended expectation was the new norm.

Then they got mangled because filmmakers were so in love with visuals that they threw the plot into the toilet and flushed and plunged until it went away. "We need a volcano to erupt here!" "Everyone should fall out the twelfth-story window and punch on the way down and survive!" "Wouldn't it be awesome if the moon exploded?" 

If that isn't enough, test audiences were brought in to torture the plot some more. Don't let the couple break up! Don't kill the boy! Don't kill the dog! Don't let the bad guy get away! Don't let baby Ashton strangle himself to death in the womb! (Hey, I didn't say the test audiences were all wrong.)

But why screw these things up on our own, when we can get technology to do it for us? 

If you look at startups these days, it's all AI, all the time. But I was still surprised when a friend pointed out a company called StoryFit, a Texas-based (do I have to say Austin?) company that aims to take your script and use artificial intelligence to make it awesome. 

"StoryFit's AI technology platform helps you understand the true value of your story and how to best reach your audience."

"StoryFit brings together insightful perspectives, industry expertise, and content analytics from our team of thought leaders to help you stay ahead of the curve in the ever-evolving world of storytelling."

"Learn how StoryFit champions creatives by helping them uncover white spaces for creative development, understand story elements that make their content special, and position their stories in the best places to succeed. By measuring thousands of story elements across thousands of stories, StoryFit expands creativity into new dimensions."

“We created 100s of proprietary models to measure 100,000+ story components matched against millions of audience data points to create the best possible opportunity for success.”

So, this is kind of depressing. 

First off, stories are human things if they're any good. Who needs artificial intelligence monkeying around with human storytelling? If we can't think up decent stories on our own (and, Hollywood aside, I think we still can), then can we even enjoy good stories anymore? Are we eager to kick experience and inspiration to the curb in exchange for machine learning?

In some golden age science fiction worlds, people were freed from drudgery by Science! and allowed to devote themselves to arts and other creative endeavors. So now the computers have to take that away too? Aren't professional writers already panicking enough about losing their jobs to AI? Yes, the stuff produced by computers is lousy so far, but thanks to companies like StoryFit it's going to get better. Will it matter that the Writers' Guild settled its strike if the writers will be erased anyway?

It’s depressing, therefore, because it reminds us how much our popular culture sucks, how much intellectual space we're giving over to computers, and how quickly we're racing to make our species obsolete. 

The people at StoryFit seem nice enough, but I really can't wish them well. If we can't tell good stories without computer aid, we ought to stop entirely. If we're that creatively bankrupt, we're done.