A Cyberpunk Blueprint for Hollywood’s AI Dreams

Revisiting Pat Cadigan’s 1991 novel “Synners” in light of dystopian developments in Los Angeles.

By Jeff HewittFebruary 12, 2026

• SF

• Film

WHEN PAT CADIGAN released her cyberpunk novel Synners, the only artificial intelligence anyone wanted to talk about was in a James Cameron movie. It was 1991, and Skynet—the nuclear-armed villain of the Terminator franchise—was on its way to global domination. Hollywood blockbusters ruled the international box office, supporting a thriving, unionized production industry. And for the city of Los Angeles, the future seemed bright.

Synners saw a darker version of that future. While Cadigan’s L.A. is still defined by Hollywood, the movie business has changed dramatically. In the book, media production has moved into the hands of the eponymous “synners.” Short for “synthesizers,” they are the kind of “high-tech, low-life” hackers that fill most cyberpunk stories. Armed with a laptop and a camera, they produce videos as fast as they can think them—and without the need for sprawling crews, or artists’ guilds, or even stable housing.

The story follows Gina Aiesi and “Visual” Mark, two synners poached by Diversifications, Incorporated, a production company that busies itself buying up smaller tech-savvy rivals. One of these acquisitions, EyeTraxx, develops advanced neural “sockets” that allow users to wire their brains directly into computer networks. Seeing the potential of such an interface, corporate antagonist Manny Rivera compels Gina and Mark to undergo experimental brain surgery. Jacked into Diversifications’ network, they can instantly produce content that would have taken the old creative teams days.

In the real world 35 years later, this fantasy of the one-person production crew looks increasingly plausible. Generative video apps like Sora and Runway are improving rapidly, and Hollywood’s boardrooms are taking note. Today, Cadigan’s dystopian vision of the entertainment industry is looking less like science fiction and more like a modern executive’s business plan.

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David Ellison, the new CEO of Paramount Pictures’ parent company, has a problem. After a leveraged buyout led by his company Skydance Media, he must answer the question facing all Hollywood executives: how do you run a legacy studio in the streaming era?

For many, the answer seems to be consolidation. The past decade has seen a wave of mergers, of which Paramount is only the latest. Faced with higher costs and streaming’s insatiable demand for new content, the old model of paying thousands of union workers on unproven projects is now seen as a liability. And unfortunately for those workers, this consolidation is coming just as AI tools promise to generate professional-looking video and audio with little more than a line of text.

David Ellison’s father is Larry Ellison, the billionaire CTO of Oracle. Oracle has seen its valuation skyrocket as AI companies use its cloud services. So, when David Ellison says Paramount is working with Oracle to build a “cutting-edge studio in the cloud,” it’s worth noting the family’s vested interest in artificial intelligence. By automating everything from preproduction to VFX, Ellison the younger claims AI will “turbocharge content creation” while supposedly cutting two billion dollars from the bottom line.

There is already a dizzying array of start-ups offering this kind of automation as a service. Many are backed by industry insiders, from James Cameron to Natasha Lyonne. According to a recent report, more than 65 “AI Native” studios have been established since 2022. Most are run by a handful of people and allegedly produce studio-quality work at a fraction of the cost. Even their names seem AI-generated: Promise, Luma, Pigeon Shrine, and Primordial Soup hardly evoke the old Hollywood glamour of United Artists or Universal.

But like Diversifications, Inc., the studios are quietly courting these new companies. Speaking with the Los Angeles Times, Verena Puhm, head of studio at Luma AI, expressed what many in the industry are thinking: “[W]e have to adapt to the reality of things.” And in Hollywood, that “reality” is the studios’ dream of tech-fueled cost cutting. It’s a line that has become surprisingly common, even from creatives once opposed to AI.

On a recent podcast episode (produced by Meta’s ironically named “Reality Labs”), director James Cameron claimed that future big-budget features would need to cut costs “in half”—largely by automating visual effects. This is coming from the man who convinced two rival studios to finance the epically expensive (and ultimately lucrative) Titanic (1997). Although Cameron stressed that this shouldn’t come at the cost of jobs, there’s an error in his business logic. If more work can be done by fewer people, then layoffs would seem inevitable.

Still, the growing consensus is that generative AI will eliminate the “routine work” of production—the tasks that keep artists from, as Cameron says, “other cool things.” The problem is that a huge part of filmmaking—a huge part of any art form—is routine work. Writers must sit at their desks day after day, churning out words to find the perfect phrase to capture their feelings. Photographers must wait for their decisive moments, sharpening their gaze so they can recognize them when they come. It’s a process, and one that defines how many artists think about their work.

Yet Hollywood’s studios seem intent on eliminating these “mundane tasks”—and at a time when jobs have already become scarce. According to the Writers Guild of America, the number of members reporting earnings has fallen by nearly a quarter since 2022. Shoot days in Greater Los Angeles have fallen by almost half compared to the prepandemic average, and the industry has shed over 40,000 jobs.

To be clear, not all of these losses are due to AI. Theater attendance has declined for decades. The writers’ and actors’ strikes in 2023 suspended most productions. When wildfires tore through Los Angeles in January 2025, work ground to a halt again. But on top of these crises, there’s a growing feeling that industry leaders see their struggling workers as a problem to be solved rather than a resource to be managed.

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Returning to an earthquake-shattered Los Angeles, Sam Ludovic—another of Synners’ unruly, rotating cast of characters—runs into her friend Beau. They quickly broach the inescapable topic of “the industry.” “All the studios want to go to complete simulation,” Beau laments. “Nobody home, you know? No people.” Sam agrees: “Maybe not tomorrow, but soon enough. Too soon for you and your union and all the other unions. It’s gonna be a stone dead end for you, unless you can make the stuff.” “I don’t want to make the stuff,” Beau gripes. “I want to be the stuff.”

Dwelling on Beau’s words, Sam wonders what would happen to all the aspiring actors running the city’s restaurants if the studios really went “complete simulation.” Who would be left to wait tables? Who would tend bar at Diversifications’ corporate events?

It’s a question worth asking of real-life Los Angeles. Underemployed actors are a cliché inseparable from the city’s image. And although AI is coming for them too, they’re a tiny part of the workforce. Instead, the people most likely to lose out from AI are the industry’s craftspeople.

Known as “below-the-line” workers (a trade term separating “top talent” from the production crew), they are Hollywood’s artisans. They are the camera operators, the set and costume designers, the grips and the gaffers—the specialized tradespeople that form the backbone of live productions. When they can get work, they command middle-class, union-defined salaries. But they are already the industry’s most precarious workers: moving from gig to gig, always on the hunt for a steady job that will pay the bills in one of the United States’ most expensive cities. They also make up most of the sector’s workforce. That’s nearly 100,000 workers dedicated to crafts that, at least to AI’s boosters, seem ripe for disruption.

What would L.A. be like without its artisans? What would happen to the city’s broader economy if the industry’s below-the-line workers were automated away? Even conservative estimates prove hair-raising. According to data from the Santa Monica–based Milken Institute, losing even half of Los Angeles’s below-the-line workers would represent a nearly three-billion-dollar hit to the local economy. Perhaps some might stay, finding jobs in different sectors. But many would probably leave, unable to justify the city’s expense.

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Depending on your circumstances, Cadigan’s futuristic Los Angeles is either a gritty hellscape or a disconnected paradise. On the streets, it’s a city defined by deterioration. Seaside piers have been abandoned, overrun by the city’s homeless population. “Hit-and-run” parties overtake disused spaces around town, revelers dancing in the ruins of Hollywood’s Golden Age. The well-off relax in penthouses and gated communities, diving into “simulation pits” that offer access to endless, immersive entertainment.

To be fair, this sounds a bit like Los Angeles today. But Synners is also full of thrash-metal fans and receding shorelines. Music videos are the pinnacle of popular culture. Yet the city also has self-driving cars, endless traffic jams, and inane reality TV. In classic sci-fi fashion, its world is both familiar and unfathomable. Still, its central metaphor—of artisans forced to “change for the machines”—is more relevant than ever, despite its cyberpunk style.

Gina, a sellout synner, eventually realizes that her neural sockets will render even Diversifications obsolete. Despite its acquisitions, it’s still just a production company. Given the same technology, distributors could “hire writers to sit around all day and all night dreaming up features,” with “no production work necessary.”

Companies like Paramount (and dynasties like the Ellisons) are setting the stage for such a system. While the sockets that allow synners like Gina and Mark to “dream up” content remain science fiction, the goal of enabling AI creators to replace the industry’s tradespeople is not. In fact, it’s where studios are placing their bets. As critically acclaimed, craft-led productions like last year’s One Battle After Another and The Smashing Machine struggle to recoup their investments, the financiers bankrolling these projects are starting to ask: if audiences don’t buy into art, why pay for artists?

The same logic is echoed by Manny Rivera, Gina and Mark’s antagonistic boss, after he learns that two newly socketed people have suffered strokes. “Just get rid of the bodies,” he says. “We’ll handle the media.”