You know what would have improved "Deliverance"? If instead of "squeal like a pig" the guy said "I'm going to rape you up the asshole with my penis". Without that specificity, you just can't be really sure what happened. Same with your posts. Your sneaky ambiguity really throws us dummies for a loop. You're so smart.
Sneaky ambiguity. You people really think you are worth that effort. Back in reality, I said nothing whatsoever about intellectual property rights by mocking the shitty products of a big studio.
It seems like you have a fairly limited imagination for a sci-fi fan if you cannot conceive of a point where AI will be sophisticated enough or fed enough grist that it cannot do a reasonable approximation of work done by even talented humans. I would say we are far closer to that point IRL than we are to, say, replicators, transporters, or phasers. I don't have much of a clue as to the numbers to back up popularity, but I'd guess ST09 was about as popular as any of the movies, and probably more popular than Picard, SNW or LD. This is hampered by those three being stuck on a niche streaming service. I would be careful claiming to know what it means to give "most fans what they wanted." I think like FF and others, absent actual numbers, it's just projection as to what most fans might want. I don't see any reason why Star Trek can't be its Star Wars or MCU or Batman in terms of either numbers or action driven episodes or any other criteria. There are a lot of ways that a good writing staff could combine the pew-pew-pew to make things more interesting to a wider audience while retaining the philosophical and character components that make IMO Star Trek Star Trek.
I am continually jealous that they have the means to actually win those auctions. They've also got the mask of the El-Adrel creature from "Darmok", and the navigation console from the Defiant. I would've crawled naked over broken glass for the shooting model of DS9 that was up a year or so ago, but I did not have the necessary tens of thousands of dollars of expendable income, sadly.
A reasonable facsimile does not make it superior to human creation. I admit, we will probably hit a point where those things are nearly indistinguishable. But they will have no soul. No art. You can't read an AI piece and wonder about author intent, historical influence, etc, etc. It will always just be a pasted-together hodgepodge of previously-published materials. Getting hard numbers is pretty much impossible, unfortunately. There are, as far as I can tell, NO streaming records for Lower Decks for instance. I can find information for Picard, Discovery, and SNW though. Picard was by far the most successful from a viewership standpoint. Discovery is right behind it. SNW is up there, but still behind those two. Critically speaking, Lower Decks and SNW do far, far better than DSC and PIC in terms of positive reviews and general audience reception. Prodigy is up there too, but is barely in the conversation (unfortunately). And I agree 100% that it's hampered by being stuck on a niche streaming service. Like I was saying in that post, Star Trek needs to be easily available to build a new audience. I'm doing my best here to base it off of actual critical and commercial engagement. I would never, for instance, just flippantly call DSC a "failure". I don't really care what YouTube pundits like Critical Drinker or Red letter Media have to say. Although, to RLM's credit they at least don't really comment on the stuff they haven't watched. My evaluation comes from what I've been able to glean from official sources on their streaming numbers, as well as critical reception from mainstream sources (Variety, EW, etc), more niche sites like Den of Geek, and also longtime critics of the franchise like Keith DeCandido and Jammer. In that sense, my evaluation is that Star Trek hits that zenith of popularity and commercial success when they get the right mix of characterization, drama, sci-fi elements, and a connection to a familiar shared universe. That is, I think, one of the main reasons why the 31st-century Trek is struggling. Essentially, we are overlooking 800 years of history by continuously linking to things from the TOS-Berman era. For instance, it took them a thousand years to truly follow up on the events of "The Chase"? How does that make sense? A thousand years, and everything technologically is still similar enough that Jet Reno can become and Academy instructor? Scotty, the "miracle worker", was obsolete in less than a century! It made audiences feel two things: 1) This century isn't honestly much different than where we were, and 2) It's so separated from where we were that it barely feels like the same universe. SFA fixed some of that, but it was fixing a self-inflicted wound. While I agree with the latter, I can't really agree with the former. I can't imagine any Star Trek film getting the box office Brand New Day did, for instance. It's had very successful films, yes, but it just functions differently in pop culture. It is, at its core, supposed to be a cerebral story. And you can do cerebral with action (Wrath of Khan, The Undiscovered Country, First Contact), but for the most part the Kelvin films didn't really accomplish that. Star Trek 09 was a good film, I enjoyed it, but it was like a cake that was 70% frosting. The whole "red matter destroying a planet" thing was just incredibly stupid, as was the "supernova that would destroy the galaxy!" I was so glad Picard retconned that nonsense. There are ways to combine the pew-pew for people like FF or UA with the cerebral storytelling that other fans enjoy. But I think the current producers are not interested in finding that sweet spot. Ellison wants a big bang, and he wants it now. I don't really blame Kurtzman. I think he often has the right idea, to be honest. I blame the people above him, who see the franchises like Star Wars, Batman, or the MCU and want that for themselves. I think it might be possible to get in that ballpark, but it's going to take a LOT more nuance than I think someone like Ellison is capable of.
As to AI: If AI is capable of doing a reasonable facsimile of creation by a human, one could look at it and use all the same analytical tools one uses with a human-driven creation. It might reveal issues with the analytical tools used on human works, but that's a separate issue. I think the notion of work with "soul" is probably a mix of ego and self-deception. What will differentiate a work with soul versus one without? If it could be proven that [insert movie here] was largely created with AI with humans taking credit for the work of AI and doing a little punch-up after the fact, or even entirely with AI, would that devalue the work in your eyes? If -- or I should say when -- we get to the point where AI can make the equivalent of a Michael Bay Transformers movie or a James Bond or a noir murder mystery a la one that could have come out in the 1940s, will it matter that it is "soulless"? Isn't there a reasonable argument that much of what comes out of Hollywood is soulless anyway? Isn't Spider-Man Brand New Day largely a mashed-up hodge podge of materials that have come before? Why is it "better" by definition because some 5ish humans were responsible for writing the hodge-podge based on their reading/watching maybe half of the Spider-Man comics and movies that exist and other things than an AI that actually was fed that material and then some. Surely, there will be a point where AIs will be able to recombine things in a more satisfying way to viewers than some group of still very talented humans. As to Star Trek becoming cool and popular and profitable: The MCU managed to catch lightning in a bottle not once but for basically most of its movies from 2008-2019, and even quite a few after that. If in 1990-2000, anybody had suggested that there would be two movies about Black Panther and one about Carol Danvers Captain Marvel that each pulled in about a billion dollars, while movies about far better known characters like Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman generally failed to reach that level, anybody would say you were on crack. As popular as TOS and other version of Star Trek have been over the years, there has indeed always been the vibe that made it not as cool in pop culture as Star Wars or comics or a lot of things. I don't think that there's anything inherent to make that remain the case. I think if the creatives behind it were lucky/smart/dedicated enough to get themselves the right set of people, they could probably take the franchise to new levels of commercial and creative success. I do think if they were willing to do give an Andy Weir rein to make a Trek movie in his image -- say, a post-First Contact movie about Zeframe Cochrane -- that would do well both commercially and critically in a way that Trek has never done before. I think SNW is having fun with crossing Trek with other genres like horror and comedy that could also yield results if it were done on a bigger stage.
It's interesting, you're the Second person I've seen today that's suggested Andy Weir should write for Star Trek (the other being RLM). I think he'd be a really good choice. I'm not sure what it would take to make Star Trek "cool" and popular. I think Star Trek 09 was the closest we've gotten to it. But it fell off quickly, and honestly I'd rather they not try to go in that direction anyway. As far as AI goes, all I can say to your thoughts are: As good as AI gets, it will always simply be duplicating, never innovating. In wrestling parlance, AI can conceivably give us the next Shawn Michaels, but it will never give us the first Chris Jericho. Not unless it achieves sentience, and then we're taking about a while other can of worms.
The AI we have now isn't actual AI, the term is used for marketing LLMs to the public, and they are not in any way, shape, or form, intelligent - if autocomplete was the first bacteria, then our LLMs are ferns. We have no real idea of when we'll ever create an actual artificial intelligence, someone could crack it next week, more realistically, the timescale to create one exceeds the timescale of our survival. That's not to say there are not reams of papers and claims, most of which are more to do with attracting funding than anything concrete. Now, if we were to create a genuine AI, it's entirely possible it could produce superior art to humans - although perhaps as a different lifeform, its art would be as inscrutable to us, as ours may be to it. With a much wider sensorium, its canvas would be orders of magnitude more vast than we could perceive. Just as our machines can only reduce our art to bytes, so we would only be able to do that to its.
The good thing with the genre crossing is that I'm hoping Trek starts being open to actively filching from other creations at scale. Babylon 5 pretty much remixed Tolkein, mostly Lord of the Rings, and set it in space. They even actively lifted parts of it - Gandalf's fall battling the Balrog being transferred to Sheridan leaping down a pit, being one of the most obvious examples - and was all the better for it. JMS took an already successful body of work, and made another successful body of work from it, without it minimising the source material, and having the new material true to itself . Trek could learn from that. Hell, after years - natch, decades - of half completed work, I've opted to stop trying to cloak influences so much, to the point I might actually complete two works before years end and I can die content having been published in something more than a periodical.
To be clear, I don't know if I personally would want an Andy Weir-based Star Trek. But I think, credit where credit is due, Andy Weir has shown that he can sell sci-fi to the general populace in a way that Star Trek has never really succeeded at. Noting that I haven't seen the Martian yet, but I've done the audio book and the movie of Project Hail Mary. I think that the general notion of single-character triumphs over space difficulties seems to be a wheelhouse he's comfortable with. And whatever he comes up with would probably be immunized against the anti-DEI whinging that Trek typically gets these days, even if the central character was a disabled trans Latina.
