This has undoubtedly been said many times (heh) but I don’t recall reading it before.
Customized one-hour productions like movies, novels, plays, symphonies and operas are totally unlike all other human activity.
All other activity consists of repeated reused segments, interspersed with possibly original commentary or filigrees.
The typical job repeats the same transaction or process hundreds or thousands of times in a day, with different personalities on the other side of the transaction or different options on each process. Cooking reuses premade objects like carrots and eggs and porkchops with original commentary by spices and sauces. A song repeats the same refrain with original verses between. Walking reuses premade sequences in the cerebellum with spice by different turns or halts to suit the route. Most walks or drives run a premade sequence of turns and stops in a habitual ‘beat’, which is more formal in jobwalks or jobdrives. Blogging typically starts with premade quotes from other written sources or from myself, spiced with commentary to fit today’s events or moods. Programming reuses premade modules and libraries with newly formed code to solve the problem at hand.
In entertainment, a DJ is spinning premade songs with original commentary. A pop concert is expected to run through the best-selling songs, often with repeated encores. A soap opera, whether it’s labeled as “news” or “drama”, runs a predictable sequence of plot events with some new dialog interspersed.
The best entertainment, like the best food, starts lower on the food chain.
This is the old cooking rule of Halal and Kosher. Sharia extends the principle to all of life, including commerce and science.
Good cooking starts with freshly cut broccoli or steaks instead of canned and preprocessed glop. Radio before 1940 was expected to use local talent for music instead of records. The best community theaters write their own plays instead of paying royalties to a NYC publisher.
The sharia rules against interest and gambling kept commerce lower on the food chain, closer to real investment in real value-creating business. FDR’s controls on the stock crime served the same purpose in a less absolute way.
Alidades kept astronomy lower on the food chain. Lenses rely on preprocessing.
Applying the same standard to entertainment, the most honest entertainment is entirely prepared HERE by one writer or by the writers and actors HERE in our studio. Lower quality entertainment for steady background noise, like the DJ playing records, has lower expectations. Using “records” formed by AI is permissible in background entertainment, but one-off custom entertainment is expected to start lower on the food chain.
Carver:
Start where you are.
Work with what you have.
Make something of it.
Never give up.
Polistra's Mill 