Long-running wrestling outfit the WWE has revealed its intention to enter a new era of “AI-based storytelling.” Per a report in the Wrestling Observer, the entertainment company recently hired former Buzzfeed guy Cyrus Kowsari to serve as its new senior director of creative strategy, i.e., the guy whose job it will be to cram artificial intelligence into every inch and crevice of WWE’s creative singlet.
Kowsari—who also spent several years at MMA company ONE—was introduced to WWE staffers back in September by chief creative officer Paul “Triple H” Levesque, who called him someone who would lead the company into an “inevitable” “transition into AI-based storytelling,” as well as fronting a push to “integrate AI into creative services like video and graphics.” The latter of which, we can kind of get: If you’re not that worried about things like quality, respecting copyright, or the environment, AI can crap out a lot of graphics really quickly. But the idea of letting AI write storylines for what is still one of the planet’s biggest wrestling promotions feels aggressively silly, especially when we’re talking about a form of entertainment that has had to fight off years of allegations that its storytelling was slapdash and inconsistent.
Among other things, the Wrestling Observer piece cites reporting from the site’s own Dave Meltzer, who wrote in his regular wrestling newsletter that recent attempts by WWE to use writing AI to generate storyline ideas produced unusable nonsense, with the models having little ability to keep track of, say, which wrestlers actually worked for the company. Again, you probably could filter through the massive amounts of garbage you’d get with this approach to find a usable idea created by jamming together five old ones. Which feels ridiculously harder than just stocking a writers room with a small collection of people who actually know the company’s output. But, hey, what do we know? We’ve never even suplexed one person through a folding table. Maybe this really is the future of wrestling.
