One story that drew a lot of interest in last week’s Wrestling Observer Newsletter was the one about WWE’s artificial intelligence initiative, and the hiring of someone dedicated to advancing it.
In addition
to being dismissed by the portion of the wrestling world that disbelieves anything that comes from the Observer and its writer Dave Meltzer, the story drew a refutation from WWE sources of Fightful’s Sean Ross Sapp (who has plenty of his own critics and haters, but I digress). That all brought an update from Meltzer in this week’s WON.
The Observer’s sources at WWE say that upper management at the company were upset that the AI story was out in the world, but internally they didn’t deny it either. These WWE “higher-ups” are said to have tried to focus on uses of AI other than for writing television shows, some of which Fightful’s report covered. Meltzer’s update addresses that directly:
Although that’s true, as last week’s example showed, the idea is also for scripting shows. Right now publicly the idea is that AI will be doing the job of a writer’s assistant. But that’s the present and not the plan for the future. AI is studying the creative process and Cyrus Kowsari [the former Buzzfeed exec hired to lead WWE’s AI push, and liaise with the Trump White House] is studying the creative process.
At the production meeting covered in the WON’s previous report, WWE Chief Content Officer Paul “Triple H” Levesque did tell his team that no one in the writer’s room would lose their job and that Kowarsi would be focused on integrating AI into “creative, video, graphics and storytelling”.
But that hasn’t stopped some writers from worrying about their job security. That has understandably been an issue since TKO took over, as internally many believe WWE’s parent company “has no loyalty at all to anyone”. But Triple H, Seth Rollins, and their inner circles working people backstage over the summer about Rollins’ leg injury has supposedly eroded trust even more before the creative rank-and-file and management.
So writers’ job concerns linger for those reasons, and because of AI. Because even if AI doesn’t force out any current writers, WWE’s usually learn the job as assistants. Since many of the tasks WWE is hoping AI will do are currently done by assistants, one of Meltzer’s contacts said the feeling is “even if it just eliminates some entry level positions, that would mean fewer new writers being trained.”
Whether they’re done with the intent of using them or just as an early step in the overall project, the WWE AI tool’s early attempts at creating storylines are still said to be laughably bad. The belief is that’s because they’ve only been trained on the company’s own creative, aka Vince McMahon-booking. WWE seems confident it will improve over time.
