Fittingly, given the importance that an artificial intelligence plays in the show's plot, an AI also played a role in the show's creation. In an April 2023 interview with the Hollywood Reporter's Jackie Strause, co-creators Tara Hernandez and Damon Lindelof said that one of the show's writers, Jonny Sun (also a PhD candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) wrote an algorithm that the staff then used to generate the episode titles. This explains why some of the titles are odd or awkward in various ways: repetitive ("A Baby with Wings, a Sad Boy with Wings and a Great Helmet"' "A Great Place to Drink to Gain Control of Your Drink"); nonsensical ("Zwei Sie Piel mit Seitung Sie Wirtschaftung" is mostly garbled or mock German); or unwieldy combinations of unrelated elements ("Great Gatsby 2001: A Space Odyssey"). Soon after the first season began airing, the Writers' Guild of America went on strike; one of their main demands was for assurance that writers would be protected from being replaced partly or wholly by AI writing programs like ChatGPT.
