This romcom lets you pick the ending — that doesn't make it good

This romcom lets you pick the ending — that doesn't make it good Enlarge this image toggle caption Nicola Dove/Netflix Nicola Dove/Netflix During the ongoing WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, one topic of interest has been AI, or artificial intelligence — really, more accurately, machine learning. Nobody seriously believes that AI is currently in a position to write its own movies with any success, but there have been scenarios floated in which perhaps consumers could use AI-generated scripts and digitally stored copies of actors to essentially choose their own film: "I want a romance starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone where she's a bank robber and he's a cop" or something like that. I did not watch every minute of the other two ways for the story to go, but I explored the other possible storylines enough to learn that there's no particular cleverness — it's not as if you pick one but end up with another one, or no matter who you pick, you end up with the same guy, or something like that. Enlarge this image toggle caption Nicola Dove/Netflix Nicola Dove/Netflix It's profoundly unsatisfying, and I think it conceptually fails to understand how much of fiction is about letting a creative person make creative choices and experiencing them as a viewer/reader.