especially the lies

Quark - also knows little about sports and would be trying to turn the whole thing into an ad for his bar, 7/10 for the inevitable bitching

Rom - somehow knows more about the rules than he should but is too shy to correct Garak outright, would be more of the "yes, exactly, only [says the exact opposite of what Garak just said]" type, 8/10 for haha funny value

Julian - would devolve into a personal flirt argument only for their own amusement within 5 minutes and they'd forget about the game happening; it would actually be considered a good thing for people watching the game because no commentary is better than wrong commentary, 10/10 because it satisfied everyone

“The baseball episode was the one I really missed doing. I complained bitterly, but to no avail.”

And then generative ai was created.

And now I get it. I get why nobody on Star Trek spends all their free time in the holodeck. I get why all the crew are putting on stage plays, and holding music recitals, and building models, and playing poker. I get why everyone was so skeptical and mean to the Doctor on Voyager. I get why the ONE TIME we see someone obsessed with the holodeck it infringes on people’s likeness rights and permissions.

Because fundamentally at the end of the day we are human beings and we ENJOY working with our hands and making REAL human connections. A person who learns to play an instrument is always going to be viewed as an artist over someone who asks the computer to generate music for them.

Even as recent as Lower Decks they were making fun of the fact that the crew were putting on amateurish plays and holding music recitals. But after living with Ai for so long and seeing how detrimental it’s been to the world… I’d much rather watch my friends put on a stage play than “participate” in a holodeck movie.

What’s most amazing about this is that it was completely unintentional. I do not for one second think that the writers of the time in the 90’s were really thinking about the larger issues that generative ai and chatGTP would cause. How could they? Text to speech back then was still robotic as heck. More likely they wrote that stuff in because it was cheaper to film on sets the owned than try to build, film, or rent out different locations each week.

That’s the down to earth logistical real reason Data is reciting poems about his cat or Riker is in a play put on in ten forward. It’s just cheaper to do that than to build a whole new set or move production to a new location.

Yet at the end of the day, I think that unintentionally speaks to a very human need that ai is making more and more prevalent to us day in and day out.

That's insane to me. That's nuts. I'm so used to seeing ships where the actors are baffled that people shipped their characters, or even repulsed/annoyed. This was an era of Star Trek when Rick Berman was doing everything to censor or just get rid of anything non-straight and cis. And yet Andy Robinson and Alexander Siddig did all that anyway. And yet some of the writers were fully onboard.

This man is bisexual and polyamorous and it is 100% against his will. He wants so badly to be straight and monogamous and he isn't and it drives him crazy! His only choice in the matter was choosing to marry a free-love hippie botanist who sets him up with all of his friends so thoroughly and sneakily that he can't avoid it even if he tries.