“If I were young right now,” Marshall Herskovitz says, “I’d be scared shitless.”
He doesn’t leave it there. He describes the current moment as “a terrible moment.”
It is not a throwaway line. It lands as a diagnosis—delivered without hesitation, and without much optimism behind it.
Herskovitz has spent decades inside the machinery of American storytelling. An Emmy Award–winning writer, director, and producer—co-creator of thirtysomething, executive producer of My So-Called Life, and former president of the Writers Guild of America West—he has not only watched the system evolve. He has helped build it.
Which is what makes the assessment harder to dismiss.
The conversation unfolds on History of the Present, a series developed by The Intellectualist in collaboration with Lincoln Square Media, where Editor-in-Chief Brian Daitzman examines the forces reshaping modern life in real time. The premise is straightforward: to understand the present not as a collection of events, but as a system in motion.
The question that brings Herskovitz there is deceptively simple.
What is creativity—and does it survive the age of artificial intelligence?
His answer is immediate—and definitive.
He is unequivocal: creativity is entirely human.
Artificial intelligence, for all its capabilities, does not create in the way humans do. It recombines, reorganizes, and repackages what already exists. It can simulate novelty, but it cannot originate it. The distinction, for Herskovitz, is not semantic—it is structural.
And yet, outside rooms like this one, a different definition is consolidating. In Silicon Valley—and increasingly across the industries now reshaped by it—creativity is being reduced to output. If something produces a novel result that audiences respond to, the argument goes, the origin matters less than the performance. Under that logic, the distinction Herskovitz draws doesn’t disappear—it is rendered irrelevant.
It is precisely this shift that sharpens his concern.
The more pressing issue, he suggests, is not what AI is—but the system into which it has been introduced.
The fear, in other words, is not of the technology itself, but of the structures now governing creative work. Where the entertainment industry once relied on individuals—executives willing to trust instinct, take risks, fail publicly, and occasionally produce something extraordinary—it now operates through layers of abstraction. Algorithms, committees, and data-driven frameworks have replaced the singular decision-maker. What emerges is a system optimized not for originality, but for repeatability.
There was a time, Herskovitz recalls, when a project could live or die in a single room—an executive reading a script late at night, deciding, on instinct, that something in it mattered. No dashboard, no model, no consensus. Just judgment. Today, that same decision is routed through layers of coverage, metrics, comparative data, and risk modeling—each step reducing uncertainty, and with it, the possibility of surprise.
Creativity, in this environment, does not disappear.
It is filtered.
And that filtering, Herskovitz suggests, is not incidental—it is structural.
Over the past several decades, the creative industries have been absorbed into a broader economic logic—one defined by the prioritization of profit above all else. The term he uses is neoliberalism: a framework in which corporations are accountable primarily to shareholders, with diminishing regard for labor, community, or long-term consequence.
The effects are no longer confined to Hollywood—they are systemic. Power consolidates upward, and it stays there. Workers lose leverage. Decision-making moves further from the people actually producing value. What was once a system that distributed success now captures it.
Part of the problem, he suggests, is not just structural but human. He is sharply critical of how those operating at the top of the system prioritize short-term outcomes over long-term responsibility.
Hollywood, in this sense, is not an exception. It is an early signal.
What has changed in entertainment is not isolated—it is an early expression of a broader systemic shift now visible across sectors.
The cultural consequences are less visible—but more destabilizing.
A kind of quiet passivity has taken hold—less resignation than surrender. A baseline assumption now governs the environment: that systems like AI are inevitable, that their trajectory cannot be meaningfully altered. That belief is not incidental—it is functional. It narrows the field of possible action before any action is even taken.
At the same time, another force expands to fill the vacuum.
He describes what he calls an “industry of rage.”
Across media platforms, outrage has become both a product and a strategy. Anger drives engagement. Engagement drives revenue. The result is not just a feedback loop—it is a closed system. Economic frustration produces anger, anger is amplified, and the underlying conditions remain unchanged. The system feeds on its own consequences.
What emerges is a population that is both increasingly angry—and structurally disempowered.
History offers a familiar pattern. When large groups of people feel excluded—economically, politically, culturally—the consequences rarely arrive all at once. But they do arrive.
And when they do, they rarely remain contained.
Herskovitz does not frame the current moment as inevitable collapse. He frames it as something more volatile: an inflection point.
The same systems that concentrate power can, in theory, be challenged. The same assumptions that produce passivity can be rejected. But doing so requires something that, in his view, has eroded:
Agency.
He ultimately returns to the question of whether individuals still recognize their role in shaping the systems around them.
Because beneath the systems, beneath the technology, beneath the narratives that attempt to explain them, the problem is no longer theoretical.
It is lived.
And the risk is no longer whether machines will learn to create— but whether people have already begun to lose the sense that action is possible at all.
