● Wired 📅 12/05/2026 à 14:30

Data Science 👤 Katie Drummond

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Save this storySave this storyIf you’re a WIRED reader who uses AI in any creative context, I’d suggest staying far, far away from anyone involved in the TV show Hacks. In an interview earlier this year, actor Hannah Einbinder (who plays young comedy writer Ava Daniels on the show) described AI creators as “losers,” “not artists,” and “not special.”The show’s cocreators couldn’t agree more. In a wide-ranging conversation for The Big Interview ahead of the Hacks series finale on HBO Max, Paul W. Downs and Lucia Aniello were resolute about the value of human creativity—and what can be lost when AI enters the picture.If their work on Hacks is any indication, Downs and Aniello (along with their third cocreator, Jen Statsky) would be wise to stick with the tough, tiring, absolutely-no-shortcuts approach they take to making entertainment. Across five excellent seasons—if you haven’t seen the show, I really do recommend it—Hacks has been praised for its sharp writing and wit, and its thoughtful portrayal of Deborah Vance and Ava’s complex, constantly evolving relationship. The show has also acted as something of a mirror for the real-world entertainment industry, weaving in plotlines that tackle everything from media consolidation to corporate censorship to, yes, artificial intelligence.The show’s cast and creators have been on a media whirlwind as it all comes to an end. (If you keep seeing Hacks fodder on your Instagram feed, trust me, you are not alone.) When they came knocking on WIRED’s door, we jumped at the chance to chat, and I was lucky enough to spend an hour with Downs and Aniello—both WIRED subscribers, much to my delight—earlier this month. Here’s our conversation.This interview has been edited for length and clarity.KATIE DRUMMOND: Lucia Aniello and Paul Downs, who I just learned are married, congratulations and welcome to The Big Interview.LUCIA ANIELLO: Thank you so much.PAUL W. DOWNS: You should have been there. You should have been there.Aniello: Ugh, why didn't we bring you? That's crazy. Next time. We are going to renew for our 10-year at the same place though.Where was the wedding?Aniello: It was in Italy. It was in Tuscany. That's all I'll say.Downs: Lucia was born in Italy, so it was closer to a lot of family.And you were married in what year?Aniello: 2021.So I have some time, like another five years …Downs: You have time to find your look. Don’t stress.A major priority for me in my life is perfecting my look. It's very important to us at WIRED, having our look down.Aniello: Fashion first, that's WIRED. That's you guys, right?We do work at Condé Nast, and my boss is Anna Wintour. So “fashion first” has become more of a priority for me than it used to be. It's like “fashion third,” you know?Downs: Fashion third. I like that.My husband and I blew through a bunch of season 5 of Hacks this weekend. I'm excited to talk to you about the show, and I want to start by talking about women, a subject close to my heart, as I am one. But I also run a magazine that was run by men for years.I'm surrounded by men. They're everywhere in my life. They're everywhere in our coverage. And this show I love, in particular, because it centers around this relationship between these two women, who are very powerful in different ways in their own right, and they have this very complicated relationship and this big generational gap.Lucia, you have another cocreator, Jen, who's not here. But how did the three of you think about writing those characters? What was important to you in centering the show around the relationship between these two women?Aniello: One of the things that was appealing to us was the idea that, yes, they are two women of different generations, who are both comedians, and they have a lot in common and a lot not in common. But we were really interested in the collaboration between two female artists. Because that is what they are.They are comedians who love creating work, and that is in the end of the pilot. Spoiler if you haven't seen it, but you should go see it. They don't get along in their initial meeting at all, and they just argue. But there's a little spark, and that little spark is they're making jokes about each other. They keep pitching on them and they try to make it better.You can see that it's a creative turn-on for them. So for us the idea that these women, in the process of creating art together, become more and more entrenched in each other's lives, and it changes them as people, and therefore changes the work as well. I think we're really interested in the way that the material comes from their lives, and their lives then bleed back into the material.That was something that I don't think we had really ever seen before, and it was really exciting to explore.Gender comes up in the show over and over. Both of these women, in a variety of ways, deal with sexism, with gender dynamics, with gender tropes. What have you have seen and experienced in Hollywood that feeds into the way that's portrayed to the audience?Downs: One of the things that is really central to the show is that these are two women who are cast aside from the industry. You know, Deborah had to carve her own path and get a residency in Vegas after a very public divorce and a media shaming. I think that we really wanted to explore what it means to be a woman in comedy in particular, because so many women in comedy didn't have the same opportunities that their male counterparts had.One example being hosting a late-night show, which becomes a central part of our series. I think it also comes out at a time when luckily we're having a reckoning with the narratives around gender and around women in particular. When we were pitching the show, it was around the time that the Britney Spears documentary was coming out—or, you know, whether it's Monica Lewinsky or Paris Hilton or any number of women who we got wrong.I think that was another thing that was a lens through which we wrote the show, just women's stories being either untold or misconstrued because they weren't the ones who were getting to author them.In terms of your backgrounds in show business and your experience in the industry, how much of that informed creating the series, creating the supporting characters, and delving into what you do in seasons 1 through 5?Aniello: Not a ton, very directly, just because we came up from making Broad City. That was our first big break. So we worked on all five seasons of that. We had also done a little bit of work on the web series before it was a television show. Then we went on to work on some other projects.For example, I worked on a show for a bit called Awkwafina is Nora From Queens. Day one of going into that writer’s room, there were women who were literally emotional because it was the first time they were in a writer’s room where they weren’t only one of two women. It was predominantly women. And I was like, "Oh, babe, this is my life. This is what my life is like. I only work on shows like this."Downs: For the record, I only work with women. I haven't worked with men; don't know if I will. I really surround myself with cool women.Aniello: We've had such an opposite experience of what Deborah Vance had. If anything, we're just like, "Hey, this is the way that we see the world," which is definitely more of an Ava experience. I don't think Ava has necessarily had the experience of being a woman getting in the way of her career. I think she's the person who's gotten in the way of her own career.Yes.Aniello: I directed one movie, Rough Night, that Paul and I wrote. I was the first woman in almost 20 years to direct an R-rated comedy. That’s crazy.That is crazy.Aniello: That was in 2017. If anything, we've been so blessed and lucky to have such a different experience than Deborah had. But I think we appreciate and understand the kind of path that women like her had to forge for us to have these lucky experiences. We are so grateful, and I think in a way, the show is an homage to the kinds of women who had to deal with so much sexism and not having the opportunities that their male counterparts had. So this is our way of saying thank you.I love that.Downs: I think in some ways it is very pulled from our own lives, though there's a lot of meta in the show just in terms of, you know, we were doing sketch and improv comedy at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater and this other theater called the Magnet Theater in New York.There was this sense of what cool comedy was, what progressive alternative cool comedy was. We were interested in the idea of cool comedy versus someone who maybe had aged out a little bit. Also, because the show ultimately is about these two women and their creative collaboration, the fact that Jen, Lucia, and I have found each other, we found our comedy people, in that way—maybe not really in terms of our experience of gender in the industry, but in the way in which the story’s backbone is the love language that they share in terms of their creative collaboration—that is very much pulled from our life.I want to talk about some of the themes that you have tackled, whether intentionally or not, throughout the series. I want to start with media censorship, which is very salient for us at WIRED.It's something we think about a lot. It's something we cover a lot right now, unfortunately. At the end of Season 4, Deborah has this huge moment. She's finally hosting her own late-night show. It's been her dream. And she gives an impassioned speech supporting Ava. She blasts the network. She quits the show. It's a very dramatic way to end. I think it came out a couple months before Colbert was canceled, right?That was the timing. And you were seen as prescient. What were you trying to say at that moment at the end of Season 4? Was it purely a plot decision and a creative decision, or was there a bigger message that you intended to be conveying?Downs: We really wanted to explore the complicated intersection of art and commerce. Because, as Deborah says in that episode, she knows it's not regional theater, it's a business. What she's doing is a business. But ultimately, what the show keeps returning to is the sanctity of their work, the fact that comedy is sacred for her.The one thing that she can't abide is censoring herself and also firing her voice, which is the thing that makes the show good. She admits and she acknowledges that she's a capitalist pig herself, and that she loves to make money, but she cares more about comedy than making shareholders happy.So we wanted to talk about this thing, which is we're experiencing this disruption in our industry. What was a very lucrative industry for a century has become something different because tech has disrupted it.And whether it's tech or not, more and more under capitalism it's about growth. It's not just about profit. It's not enough to be profitable for the creatives and the executives. It has to be grown. The profit has to grow. The only way to do that is to exploit. So we did want to explore that, even though we had no idea. We knew that there was a decline in late-night viewership, but the fact that then Colbert experienced censorship, and rather than being able to say, “Well, I'm going to quit,” they told him it was over. It was really weird. It was really crazy.Now we have the FCC investigating Disney and ABC over diversity, but really it's because—and my fact-checkers are going to be upset at me here—Jimmy Kimmel made a joke that the president didn't like about his wife potentially becoming a widow.How do you feel, sitting where you sit and overseeing the show you oversee, watching that play out?Aniello: I think part of the reason that it, in some ways, was prescient that that happened is because we are in a spreading authoritarian regime here. You know, we have concentration camps in our backyards. You know, AI is becoming something that's being forced upon us in so many ways.Nobody can afford health care, nobody can pay their rent, gas [prices], whatever. My point is, it's becoming increasingly unlivable in this country, and as a result, people are really frustrated, and this government is clamping down further and further. Then who's on the front lines saying, "Hey, this is really bad"?Most often, comedians are the people speaking truth to power. So of course the first people they're clamping down on are the people who are saying, "Hey, this is really bad. This administration is not great. People can't live. This is really bad."And because comedians are able to get that message across the most effectively, naturally, that's the first group of people that they're going after in terms of free speech.Downs: And journalists.And journalists.Aniello: And journalists, you guys, which is why I'm a member, and I love my WIRED subscription. Subscribe now.We are so grateful, and thank you so much. I'm going to have you record that as a separate ad after this.Aniello: I will sing it, and I can't even sing.Wow. Thank you. I'm sure audiences will love that.Downs: If you want subscribers, don't do that. Don't do that.The consolidation piece in the media industry and the entertainment industry is really interesting to me, and it's something that Hacks comes back to in a few different ways. I think one of the ways that stood out to me in Season 5, without giving too much away, is Deborah having this very startling realization that she pissed off the wrong boss.She pissed off a guy who had the ability to take a lot of her work out of her hands and ensure that audiences would not be able to access it. I'm wondering how you see that parallel with what's happening in your industry now, in terms of fewer and fewer players at the top having that kind of control over so many different networks and streaming platforms.What does that mean for you in the real world outside of the show?Downs: It's really terrifying, because that was something that has happened. You know, things are removed from streamers, and then you can't find them. In an era where physical media is becoming less and less common, it's really scary.We feel very, very lucky that we've been able to make this show. We've been able to say what we want on this show. We've been very supported by HBO and HBO Max. We don't have complaints there, but it is scary that even in our position it's still something where you're like, "Well, it could be deleted. It could be deleted and go away.”Aniello: And you hear stories of people’s personal vendettas against other people being the reason why their shows die. And those rumors are chilling, because one person can just be like, "Oh, all of your work can just be deleted, and then no one can ever see it." Of course, this is a career and it's a livelihood, but it's an expression of oneself, and for those things to be taken down is really scary.You have overall deals with Warner Bros. right? You're getting a new dad at some point in the next few months, and I have a lot of friends in the news industry who are affected by Paramount Skydance’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery and everything that encompasses. Does that worry you?Aniello: We just don't know what it will look like, so of course anything new is scary. But Warner Bros. has been so amazing, obviously as has HBO Max, and the support that we have there.[Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group chairs] Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy have made hit after hit after hit for that company. It's been a generational run, just nonstop huge hits. So you look at these people who are running the departments and you're just thinking, "These are people who obviously are so good." So for us, we just would love to continue to work with these people who have been nothing but supportive, so fabulous to the creative process, and have been just the best.All we can do is say, "We love working with these people. We wanna continue to work with these people." And that's all we can say or know.I have to ask you a reality-check question that fills in a blank spot for me in terms of what I do and don't know about how contracts work. Deborah’s contract becomes a major plot point at the end of Season 4 and going into Season 5. She has this on-air outburst. She quits the show, which, per her contract, means she cannot perform for 18 months. For the non-entertainment-industry among us, have you seen non-competes like this? Is that pretty standard protocol?Downs: This was a big topic for us in the writers' room, and luckily Guy Branum, who's a great stand-up, wonderful comedian, and very funny comedy writer, is also a lawyer. He helped us make sure that we threaded the needle in the right way because non-competes are very hard to uphold, apparently. But in our world, Deborah was paid out through her exclusivity clause, which was also under Florida law, which notoriously has not been the most friendly to employees. So, because Florida law governed it and because of this we were able to say, "OK, there can be a restraining order put in place so that if she were to perform or to break that restraining order, then legal action could be taken."You were really rigorous with how you …Downs: We kicked the tires, yes.OK.Downs: We really kicked the tires because, you know, we were painting our character into a corner, which gave us a lot to explore, but we also wanted to make it justifiable and have people not say, “Well, that could never happen.” Truth is so much stranger than fiction.Don't we know it.Downs: I'm like, “That could happen.” It feels absolutely within the realm of reality.I was sort of like, “Who fucked up there?” Why didn't Jimmy read the contract more closely and make sure that this woman was not signing a deal with the devil?Aniello: I think Jimmy did know. Not to defend my man, but Jimmy knew the contract, and I think Deborah knew the contract too. She just never, ever could have imagined a world where she would have left.Because she was living the dream, so why would she?Downs: She's like, “I might get fired. Fine, then they have to pay me out. I'm not gonna leave.” You know, that seemed so far-fetched to her, but as she says in the show, she didn't realize it, but her dream changed. The landscape changed, and so did she.Good reminder for everyone. Read the fine print and then negotiate a better contract.I want to talk about AI, which is obviously a huge and very fraught topic for us, for our audience. It's been top-of-mind for me recently. We just closed our next print issue, which is all about AI and work.One of the pieces is from an underemployed—I hope she doesn't mind me saying that—Hollywood writer who's now making ends meet by doing gig work training LLMs.It's a very bleak story about not only artificial intelligence and how it's trained, but also about the entertainment industry and employment prospects. I'm curious about how you're seeing AI affect your world right now.Aniello: You know we are hearing about it and talking about it so much, but we personally do not use it in any way, shape, or form. We personally won't work with people who use it. We are completely anti-AI in the creative process in any possible way.I think it's been completely forced upon the creative world as a way to minimize our talent, minimize our ability to have employment, and it's frankly insulting. I feel badly for this woman because, yes, there should be a more sustainable industry that doesn't force her to be in this position. I'm not necessarily frustrated at her, but the system that is forcing her to be in this position.But for us, and this is something that we do explore in an episode, we do not need AI coming in and disrupting the thing that is about humanity. The last thing we need in the expression of humanity is robots coming in and telling us how it should feel and how it should look.It's so deeply offensive to me on every level. I know that people feel differently about this, but even if it's like, “Oh, I don't wanna write that email. I'll have AI write that email for me.” Ju

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