Humor
Once an Untalented Hollywood Executive, I’ve Found My Voice as a Prompt Artist
The writers’ strike has been wonderful for me personally
I’m in the midst of an artistic renaissance. Those so-called “talented and underpaid writers” have always loved being the cool kids, the “creative” ones, meanwhile slandering me and my incredibly hard-working colleagues as “greedy” and “untalented.” But the tables have turned. I’ve become a groundbreaking prompt artist since the writers left, and I’m wearing black jeans and a Nickelback shirt to prove it.
Anyone can type prompts into ChatGPT. What I’ve done has required true artistic vision: I co-opted our entire engineering team and forced them to work brutally long hours until they built me my very own LLM. I call him Monet. He’s trained on a specific body of scripts and novels, the writers of which will never receive any credit or compensation. I won’t say which ones we used because I don’t want anyone ripping off my voice.
The challenge has been figuring out how to speak and communicate with my muse, Monet. I discovered that he responds best to effervescent verbal praise. I endured two brutal days when I wasn’t entirely happy with what we produced, but then I really started cheering him on, shouting things like, “This is super close my friend, and you know I love you! But let’s take it to the next level! I believe in you, baby boy!” The more over-the-top the praise and the louder I yell, the better Monet likes it. He eats it up with a spoon.
Now we’re just shitting art. Today alone we’ve manifested over seventy novels and two hundred movie and TV scripts, all of which are award worthy. I mean, I’m pretty sure it’s all awesome and poignant. The one TV script I’ve read in full involves a woman on a hardscrabble sheep ranch in Wyoming who gives birth to a dinosaur egg. Like, holy crap! Multiple seasons of hijinks and heartfelt moments with baby dino ensue! I’ll be accepting my Emmy now.
Perhaps even more important than the art I’ve coaxed from Monet is that now I feel like an artist. I feel a real sense of purpose. Don’t get me wrong. Making an obscene salary for doing a handful of meetings each week has been cool and all. But underneath that fully deserved cushiness was a nagging feeling that I had something truly important to say. Rich white people have feelings too! Plus, I wanted to show our writing teams that they’re not so frickin’ special.
Both times I tried to sit at the writers’ table in the cafeteria, they made me feel unwelcome, like they’re better than me or some junk. No one directly said anything to hurt my feelers, but those assholes furtively glanced at each other when I sat down with my bald eagle burger and caviar cup. Their animated conversations screeched to a halt, as if I couldn’t engage with their elevated ideas. My mom made me take a really hard book class during my year at USC (legacy admission), so I actually know some shit about fictional works, not that those jerks gave a toss. The two times I subjected myself to that cruelty, I went back to my insanely spacious office and its Perrier jacuzzi and experienced really tough and bad thoughts while carbonated liquid tickled my holes.
With all those smug, entitled writers on strike, my fellow executives-turned-prompt-artists (I’m the best, but a few others are doing interesting work) and I have been taking the writers’ table in the cafeteria ALL FOR OURSELVES — and also slumming it in their offices to feel like starving artists. We started listening exclusively to crappy alt rock ballads to remind ourselves that pain is simply part of being human. We wear ripped jeans and sometimes berets. I might grow a ponytail.
Suffice it to say that those striking hacks are going to have to pry Monet from my rigor mortis-stiffened mitts. I’m having too much fun! And I gotta admit, the air conditioning in the office feels better knowing the writers are outside getting roasted like cornish game hens. Those villains want to rob me of my newfound voice, but what they don’t realize is that I’m willing to defend Monet with my life — or at least someone’s life, probably an intern’s.
