Studio executives are salivating over how much money they’re going to save once they cut people out of the equation. Imagine you’re the higher-ups at WB, this AI stuff, it’s not going to make anything new, but new stuff isn’t the game anymore, it hasn’t been for a long time.

How many years away are we from being able to type “Batman fights Poison Ivy” into a script generator, and then animating the scenes with an AI that has been fed all the other Batman shows and movies, and then voicing it with an AI that’s been fed all of Kevin Conroy’s dialogue, and then you get a couple humans to clean it up a bit, bam! Presto! New Batman the Animated Series episodes for audiences who don’t care whether real people make their stuff anymore, they just want content. I’m sure a lot of people will be fine with it. I’m not, but it’s not hard to see where the business incentives are going to push them. I hope I’m wrong, I hope audiences will reject this stuff. But uh, it’s hard to be optimistic.