LOS ANGELES — Netflix revealed plans Tuesday to transition entirely to AI-generated content by 2027, describing human creative workers as "a legacy cost structure" incompatible with sustainable profit margins.

The initiative follows successful pilots in which AI-produced romantic comedies and crime dramas performed identically to human-created equivalents in viewer retention metrics, the only measurement the company considers meaningful.

"Audiences don't actually care," explained Chief Content Officer Rebecca Sterling during an investor presentation. "They want something playing in the background while they scroll their phones. AI delivers that at a fraction of the cost."

The announcement triggered immediate layoffs affecting 12,000 actors, writers, and production staff. Company representatives emphasized that displaced workers are "free to retrain" for positions in prompt engineering or AI model supervision, roles that pay 70% less than their previous employment.

Subscribers interviewed expressed general indifference. "I honestly can't tell the difference," said Chicago resident Mark Patterson. "Everything already felt kind of AI-generated anyway. At least now it's honest."

The move has won praise from Wall Street analysts who noted that eliminating human creativity removes the "unpredictable quality problem" wherein some shows succeed while others fail. AI-generated content, calibrated to historical performance data, produces perfectly mediocre results with reliable consistency.

Competing services announced similar initiatives within hours. Disney, Warner Bros., and Amazon each committed to "AI-first content strategies," with one executive noting that "storytelling is just pattern recognition, and machines recognize patterns better than humans."

Netflix projected that AI-generated content will reduce production costs by 90%, savings that will be retained as profit rather than passed to subscribers. The company's stock rose 28% on the news.

When asked whether eliminating human creativity might affect cultural vitality, Sterling appeared confused by the question. "Culture is content," she explained. "And content is data. We're simply optimizing the data production process."