I enlisted Vanity Fair ’s features editor and expert on all things Hollywood, Hillary Busis, for a dialogue about which tech CEO impersonations worked, scenes that felt like major scoops, and Aaron Sorkin’s inexplicable loathing of the journalism profession.

JULIA: So off the bat, how would you rate Artificial vs. The Social Reckoning ?

HILLARY: Artificial is a “like.” The Social Reckoning ...I forget, do Facebook posts have a thumbs-down option?

JULIA: Yes, and it’s worth five times a “like,” a quarter as much as a repost, and a tenth as much as Aaron Sorkin patting himself on the back. Anyway, I agree completely.

In a funny way, I think the elements that worked well for me in Artificial are the very same things that tanked TSR. Both felt pretty true to life.

But in the case of a film about OpenAI, which remains such a black box to the public, that felt revelatory and shocking. In the case of a film about Meta, it was like, “Yes, and…?”

HILLARY: The real problem, to me, is that both of these movies consciously (or subconsciously) follow the same blueprint as an undisputed modern-day masterpiece: The Social Network, which Sorkin (famously) wrote but also (famously) did not direct. Neither movie gets even close to the heights of that one, in my opinion, and both suffer by comparison—but TSR suffers a lot more.

You’re also right that it feels instantly dated. You’re telling me, Aaron Sorkin, that the January 6 rioters were radicalized by spending too much time online?!

Brand new information!

JULIA: When the trailer for The Altruists (Netflix’s forthcoming FTX series) dropped, I saw a tweet that said, “One of the facts of the universe is that no writer can create a character substantially smarter than themselves.” Sorkin, meanwhile, should not be allowed to write characters he believes are dumber than him. I’ll be the first to admit it can be hard to keep up with technical reporting as a journalist without a comp sci degree, but Jesus, we are not that stupid.

HILLARY: Julia, I’m old enough to remember when Sorkin was doing press for The Newsroom and got so mad at a (young, female) Canadian journalist that he ended their conversation by saying, “Listen here, internet girl. It wouldn’t kill you to watch a film or pick up a newspaper once in a while.” PS: She was writing her story for a newspaper!

JULIA: “Listen here, internet girl” will be entering my vocabulary immediately.

HILLARY: The only journalists who know what they’re doing, of course, are the journalists Sorkin imagines when he’s feeling generous. But seriously, this is the big issue with the movie: Sorkin needs to invent a bunch of ridiculous baloney in order to inflate the stakes of this story’s central conflict—an investigation into Facebook’s shady ethics—either because he thinks there isn’t enough to pin a screenplay on without it, or because he simply can’t help himself.

In his version of events, Wall Street Journal tech reporter Jeff Horwitz does not know how to use Google Maps. In the year 2019.

On what planet!