New York Times critic James Bailey takes offense on behalf of his pals in the Writer’s Guild, whose expensive strike is about to end, with a lament called “Emma Thompson Is Right: The Word ‘Content’ Is Rude.”He took off from a statement by Oscar-winning actress (and apparently now screenwriter—at least enough to put her in the union) Emma Thompson, who told the Royal Television Society conference in Britain last week,“To hear people talk about ‘content’ makes me feel like the stuffing inside a sofa cushion.” She continued, “It’s just a rude word for creative people.I know there are students in the audience: You don’t want to hear your stories described as ‘content’ or your acting or your producing described as ‘content.’ That’s just like coffee grounds in the sink or something.”
You see, the main impetus of the writer’s strike is the threat of artificial intelligence generating “content” and putting “creative people” out of work.
Writes Bailey (in part), applauding her indignation,
She’s right about the real-world impact of what is, make no mistake, a devaluing of the creative process. Those who defend its use will insist that we need some kind of catchall phrase for the things we watch, as previously crisp lines have blurred between movies and television, between home and theatrical exhibition and between legacy and social media.
But these paradigm shifts require more clarity in our language, not less. A phrase like “streaming movie” or “theatrical release” or “documentary podcast” communicates what, where and why with far more precision than gibberish like “content,” and if you want to put everything under one tent, “entertainment” is right there. But studio and streaming executives, who are perhaps the primary users and abusers of the term, love to talk about “content” because it’s so wildly diminutive. It’s a quick and easy way to minimize what writers, directors and actors do, to act as though entertainment (or, dare I say it, art) is simply churned out — and could be churned out by anyone, sentient or not. It’s just content, it’s just widgets, it’s all grist for the mill. Talking about “entertainment” is dangerous because it takes talent to entertain; no such demands are made of “content,” and the industry’s increasing interest in the possibilities of writing via artificial intelligence (one of the sticking points of the writers’ strike) makes that crystal clear.
Perhaps the finest example of this school of thought can be seen at Warner Bros. Discovery…The “content”-ization of that conglomerate’s holdings is the only reasonable explanation for the decision to rename HBO Max as simply Max — removing the prestigious legacy media brand that most clearheaded, marginally intelligent people would presume to be an asset. It lost 1.8 million subscribers in the process, but that’s merely the battle; it won the war, because when you visit Max now, the front-page carousel is a combination of scripted series, HBO documentaries, true crime and reality competition shows. It’s all on equal footing; it’s all content. But “Casablanca,” “Succession” and “Dr. Pimple Popper” are not the same thing — and the programmers of a service that pretends otherwise are abdicating their responsibility as curators...
The way we talk about things affects how we think and feel about them. So when journalists regurgitate purposefully reductive language, and when their viewers and readers consume and parrot it, they’re not adopting some zippy buzzword. They’re doing the bidding of people in power, and diminishing the work that they claim to love.
This is, to quote a word that arose from past Hollywood “content,” gaslighting. Reality show writers marched shoulder to shoulder with the “artists” Bailey is extolling, and what they were striking over is money, not art, as the unionized writers try to fend off the threat of robots who are either capable or soon will be of producing the kind of swill I see in 80% of the TV and Hollywood content I watch ….and I watch a lot.
When artists start accepting money to produce their “art” and do it to conform to the demands of the companies and organizations that foot the bills, they no longer can claim to be primarily “creative people.” They are paid—often highly paid—mercenaries to whom quality of output is secondary, if it’s important at all.
Hollywood writers have been complaining about this for nearly a century, but have still taken the checks. The much praised 1992 in-joke movie “The Player,” which had a massive number of star cameos endorsing the joke about an idealistic writer who allows his masterpiece to be reduced to a Bruce Willis action movie in order to cash in, was about how “art” becomes “content” in the entertainment sausage factory. (And not to be snarky, but if I relied on genuine “talent” to find what passes for entertainment now, I would soon move into a cave.)
If writers feel they need to unionize, like railroad workers, truckers and plumbers, I don’t want to hear their exalted claims that they are “artists.” It’s just a bargaining ploy. Most content-producers for the networks and streaming services today churn out derivative, unoriginal junk that an AI bot could duplicate easily. A disproportionate number of the non-game shows and reality shows on the networks today are produced by writer Dick Wolf, and his usual fare could be “written” by a half-decent bot with access to all the episodes of “Law and Order” and its offspring (along with some news “ripped from the headlines”).
If Hollywood regarded art as its objective, the Oscars wouldn’t dare impose DEI and affirmative action staffing and casting on Hollywood productions. And if Emma and her colleagues don’t want to be called “content providers,” then they need to be real artists and make better art. Right now, they are simply selling what’s “good enough” and demanding top dollar for it.
Ethics Alarms 
Well, this has absolutely no relevance to this post, but this is one place I can make a baseball related post where there are folks who are also fans.
As you all know, I’ve been a Texas Rangers fan for 30 or so years (about half as long as I’ve been a Houston Astros fan), and this year is the first time they’ve really been competitive since about 2016.
After leading the division most of the season, August was a truly dreadful month and I am sure that a lot of fans were wondering if this team was simply falling back to earth. It didn’t help that they did not field a lineup containing all six of their All Star game starters from mid July until mid September. When everyone was back and healthy — mirabile dictu their fortunes immediately started to improve.
There are 5 games left in the season for the Rangers and nothing is decided in the AL West or AL Wild Card. It’s still barely possible for there to be a three way tie for the division, and definitely possible for other ties.
I have spent more time this month trying to figure out tiebreakers than the rest of my life put together. If there were a three way tie for the division, and my math is correct, the Mariners would hold the tertiary tiebreaker. It is very unlikely to happen — but still possible. On the other hand, if the Rangers and Astros win tonight, I think the Mariners are eliminated for the division (but not the wild card).
Part of the genius of baseball is that, with everything on the line, these three teams mostly play each other the last 10 days of the season. The Astros play 3 of 9 games against the Mariners, the Rangers play 7 of 10 against the Mariners, and the Mariners play all of their last 10 games against the Rangers and Astros.
Win or lose, what a way to end the season!
p.s. the Rangers are up 1-0 going to the 2nd.
The Mariners lost, the Rangers won, so I’d say your team has made it into the play-offs, probably as the West champion. Good: they deserve it. They are the best team in the West. I’m sorry Eovaldi broke down for a while, but that’s him; the other ex-Sox pitcher, Perez, basically returned to his norm after a freak season last year (the Rangers should have traded him). As a DC area resident, I have affection for the old Senators, and it high time they won a World Series.
I’ve neglected by baseball posts of late, in part because the Red Sox collapse nauseated me. I’ll have some soon.
Yeah, they are ever so close to clinching a playoff spot. There is a nightmarish scenario — if the Rangers get swept and Houston wins 2 of 3, there is a 3 way tie for the division. In a 3 way tie the Mariners win the division and Houston is 2nd, the Rangers might well be out totally.
But……all they have to do is win a game to make the playoffs. If they can’t do that, well, it’ll be a sour end to the season.
But after tonight, I am very optimistic.
And on topic, if writers and actors can’t cope with being ‘content creators’, then how can they possibly hope to reach the young, up and coming audience that they will need to consume (another recent buzz word) their art?
Everyone else in the world has to deal with this sort of language shift, I don’t see why Hollywood should be different.
You probably guessed that I’d disagree on this one.
I come at this from two angles. First, I’m one of two admins for the Facebook page of the honor society of which I’m the national president. Our page settings are such that–much like Ethics Alarms–the first post by a user is screened by a moderator; after that, members can post without moderation. Obviously, as here, the moderator can take down a post and ban someone, but that’s a different issue.
Of late, we’ve been inundated with spam posts, mostly from outside the country. The vast majority of these posts are videos–all of them irrelevant to the organization, some of them pornographic or otherwise problematic to post anywhere, let alone on our page. And we’ll often see a half dozen posts with the same inane “reel” in a single day. Virtually every one of the people trying to clutter our page with this crap self-identifies as a “content creator.” So yes, in my world, that’s a term of derision.
Indeed, I do believe the term is employed, probably intentionally, by studio execs and their minions as a means of diminishing the work of the people who actually do the work–the writers, actors, directors, et al. Words matter, and the studios know it, even if they can’t bring themselves to acknowledge that fact publicly.
Second, I regard Emma Thompson as one of the top ten actors of her generation in the English-speaking world. So yes, she’s an artist, and a damned good one at that. That not everyone in SAG/AFTRA or the WGA is that good sort of goes without saying.
I won’t argue with the fact that a lot of what Hollywood churns out is dreck. ‘Twas ever thus. Sophocles’ Electra is laughably bad; so is Troilus and Cressida. But the world would be a lesser place without Antigone or Hamlet. The key here is that, assuming the bots could paint-by-numbers their way to writing 80% (your figure) of the material that gets presented, that leaves the 20% it can’t produce. That 20%, the stuff that requires actually creativity and talent, can’t be duplicated by AI. I’d argue that the 20% figure would probably be higher if the studios would actually take a chance on something non-formulaic, but that’s another issue.
I don’t want to live in a world that intentionally cuts itself off from even the possibility of new art. Is “content” “rude”? Not in isolation, no. But as a glimpse into the mindset of the people who control what “new” films or TV shows we’re allowed to see, it’s at best a portent of ills to come. At worst, we’ll have abandoned fictional censorial dystopias for the real thing.
My observation is that the writers, actors, and creators of today have not “created” much “new content.” They have essentially mimeographed that which was created in the past amending to it DEI nonsense.
Emma Thompson: the woman Hillary Clinton likes to think of herself as being. Hilarious. I’m not an Emma Thompson fan. I think she’s the most overrated actress of our time. If you want simpering, she’s your girl.
I’ll just say that I’m sympathetic to the “industry” using the term “content” rather than “entertainment” in a way that diminishes those who create it.
It’s common practice in my field (I.T. Contracting, particularly with the Federal Government) to use the term “resources” to describe the employees of a contracting company who are deployed on a contract–and I have long railed against this as dehumanizing and akin to treating people as disposable objects, all the while encouraging others to think similarly.
I once even spoke up at a meeting where we were drawing up a proposal where my resume was one of the ones submitted as a “key person” (meaning: this individual will definitely be assigned to the contract for its duration, not someone else with similar experience, THIS individual) and the description of my resume began with the phrase “Dwayne is a resource who had expertise in ….”. I told them “Change. This.” I don’t ever like people being called “resources” and I sure as Hell was not going to allow the words “Dwayne is a resource” to pass by me and just let it slide.
I suppose that companies adopting the attitude that its employees are things they own rather than people the depend on to function is probably universal.
–Dwayne