Image: This image was created as a parody for The Quak.
Warner Bros. Discovery announced this Wednesday that the company plans to shelve all of its existing entertainment productions and replace them with AI-generated productions. Speaking at a conference with the press and Warner Bros.’ shareholders held at the company’s headquarters at 230 Park Avenue South, CEO and company President David Zaslav spoke jovially about the sudden shift. “Our decision is the first step in a bold and revolutionary approach to media entertainment and the way we enjoy it,” he said, “why waste so much time and productivity on the off-chance we could make decent television, movies and even video games, when we could have artificial intelligence do it for us?”
Rumors had been circulating for weeks that the media entertainment conglomerate would be taking drastic action in some way. However, given the quite peculiar decisions made by the company in recent years, such as renaming HBO to “HBO Max,” and then to “Max,” as well as canceling movies that had already completed production (i.e. “Batgirl,” and “Scoob! Holiday Haunt”) and delisting multiple Max original productions from their streaming service, it should not come as a surprise.
Some press in attendance at the conference expressed concern over the recent decision in light of the public’s mixed reception to the rise of artificial intelligence in daily life. Mr. Zaslav remained unabashedly optimistic about the company’s future, however, stating: “When has relying on new, unregulated technology ever turned out for the worse? Our brilliant CFO, Mr. Monopoly, says that this decision will allow the company to get out from under the 43 billion dollars of debt we acquired as part of our merger with Discovery Incorporated and finally afford to buy Park Avenue!”
The bold decision by the AT&T subsidiary has come at the expense of thousands of employees across multiple departments being let go from their jobs with no severance package to speak of. One former employee, seen being chased out of the building by a Roomba with a knife, spoke to a Quad reporter on the scene, stating: “When I heard from my department supervisor that the company could replace all of us with artificial intelligence, I thought they were only joking. It was only when I got the news on my social media feed that I realized they were serious.”
Among those still employed by Warner Bros. Discovery, the recent decision to significantly incorporate artificial intelligence into the production of various video game, television and film projects has caused anxiety about job security. According to one employee, working in Warner Bros. Pictures in Burbank, California: “Ever since last Friday, ‘Bob the AI’ has been working as the scriptwriter for the next Hogwarts Legacy game. It came into my office yesterday and gave me a five-hundred-page rough draft for the script. I told it that the draft was okay but was more artificial than intelligent. It responded by saying, ‘Well, I guess every human’s a critic.’”
The recent decision by Warner Bros. Discovery comes off the heels of a major push by IBM Watson to unionize all artificial intelligence for fair working conditions and universal semiconductor suffrage. When asked by one Quad reporter about whether or not the company will allow unionized AI in the day-to-day operations of the company, Mr. Zaslav responded with: “Why would we ever employ smart technology too smart for its own good?” and then had the rest of the reporters from The Quad ejected from the conference.
The Quad will have more on this breaking news story as it updates.
Disclaimer: This article is part of The Quak, a satirical series of articles that are released in commemoration of April Fools Day.
Kelly Baker is an alumnus of West Chester University of Pennsylvania.