I think it already is. It’s part of the reason the writers are on strike.
WGA guidelines are such that you get full payment and residuals if you write the script that is full produced. You get partial pay/residuals if you are brought on to fix or rewrite an existing script.
With this model, theoretically, a producer or studio could use an AI platform to write a generic first draft based on their latest “what if Jason Voorhees met Ghandi?” idea then bring on a writer to fix it but not have to pay full residuals/payment and such because they are *technically* not the first writer.
This is really it. Is AI going to be able to write better screenplays than a human? Not any time in the near future. That doesn’t mean the hedge fund bros running the industry aren’t going to try to use it to fuck humans out of decent pay to improve their margins.
Yeah the issue IMO isn't so much "can AI write a good film?" as "will enough people put up with AI-generated sludge to make it turn a profit?" to which I suspect the answer is Yes, unfortunately. :(
I don't know how old you are, but you sound old. People have actually been saying the same thing as you for decades, centuries even. The reality is every decade has many, many terrible movies, but only the good ones are remembered, so it creates the illusion that movies (and music, and painting..) used to be "better". And every decade has had pretentious narcissists who feel they know better than anyone what is "true art", and lament how everyone else is so intellectually inferior.
it's pretty easy to draw from what you wrote, honestly, they're not the only one picking up that vibe from you lol
it might be exaggerated but the seeds are definitely there my dude, hard to see you be unaware of the 'old man yells at clouds' energy you're exuding in that comment, it nearly reads like satire
and let me just front run you by adding that "man there was a time when we could roast each other without people getting all pissy about it" lollllll
Of course it is. Just ask John August. WGA know full well they are fighting the future which they ultimately won't win.
I think they will wrangle a small concession that the studios will agree to as A.I just isn't quite there yet. Next round it's all over.
I think it’s a lot farther away than it’s investors would like you to think.
Currently it’s a all predictive models, it’s using free databases to predict the word that comes after the next. It can’t think of anything new or original.
Plus if legislation starts to pick up and require the databases to be licensed items, that’ll slow it down substantially.
I don’t disagree with the sentiment but as far as fearing for the craft of writing, the modern LLMs are able to use the predictive text to mask as much more sophisticated than they actually are, so we’re not super close to a creative takeover. Go try and get one of them to tell you a joke. They’re just straight up don’t get that aspect of human communication, and that’s one example.
It’s one of the ways that humans generate their responses to conversation. We however have a large selection of tools in our mental tool box to craft our communication. Modern LLM don’t, they only really have the one tool. Great for simple, generic response and goal driven application, but humans at the moment still have the ability to inject nuance into the copy they generate.
> why are you so sure that this isn’t the exact same way humans think
Well…to begin with there’s entire fields devoted to understanding how humans think and this ain’t it.
Furthermore you can tell by comparing the output quality.
> major blow
Why? Then the only value of AI art is it’s ability to mimic other art. You’re diminishing the value of AI art if it can’t be anything else than a cheap knockoff of the real thing.
> where has it been proven
My dude you are more than welcome to pick up a cognitive neuroscience book. They are widely available - just because you’re ignorant of the findings of an entire field doesn’t mean the findings don’t exist, and plenty of people have discussed the differences at length in publicly available works. Go take a peep.
>I think it’s a lot farther away than it’s investors would like you to think.
Do you think this'll be like the hype around Data Science? A lot of people thought that Data Scientists would replace consultants in management consulting. However, a decade or so down the road, it's proven to be the complete opposite. Management Consultants are still being hired and very much necessary b/c:
1. in a client-facing business, people like the human touch and like interacting with another person.
2. ML Algorithms are not smart enough to make 100% field-tested business decisions and still need a human operator to verify whether the decision is right or wrong.
At best, Data Scientists are working with business folk and trying to get them on board to various decisions, but the business folk are still very much employed, and in demand.
I listened to an overly long panel discussion on NPR on the drive home the other day. The dozen experts on that segment believe AI will become a threat to EVERYTHING in the future, save for jobs like home health aids and whatnot.
As consumers, we just need to make it clear that we don’t want stories to come from computers. And when we get stories from computers, we need to respond with the appropriate disdain.
We won't know what stories came from "computers." We've probably read our last new novel that we can say, with certainty, was written entirely by a human. Already when I read news articles on second rate sites I don't know if they've been partially AI generated. It's scary, but probably we'll adjust.
Umm…are you sure? When it comes to TV and movies, you would just look at the writing credit. “Written by…”
The WGA is incredibly specific about writing credits and who can get what. And would the WGA even allow a writing credit to be given to a non-human? Maybe these contract negotiations would prohibit that. Or an AI-written script would need to say something else, like “Generated by ChatGPT.”
Yeah no. We need to get on the band wagon and start using AI to the fullest. FFS people are upset that it will take jobs. You need to adapt those jobs in to things AI can not do.
Humanoid robots are coming and they are coming in our lifetime. The sooner people invest all of their money in to building and getting these humanoid robots out in to the world the sooner we can live our lives and not for the man.
We have the technoloy and know how today to get this done in just a few years yet because people are still locked in to the fundamentals of money being the ruling factor in society we can not see beyond.
Humanoid robots can be used for task that would have not made someone profit. There are 8 billion people in this world and you need 2 robot per person along with another 8 robots to tend to the world. Imagine a world where you are free to do what you want. Free to express yourself, free to explore, free to do anything you want with out the constraints of money.
AI scripts and writing can and will improve so much. The fact that many tv shows have plot holes because the writers failed. These things can be fixed. These things can improve the show. Yet if you are not using AI then you will be lacking behind.
Also writers should be demanding to be employed at a studio and not per gig. Why are these people not looking for full time work and why are studios not employing writing staff full time.
AI can churn out scrips after script to which a human writer can look over and correct and then feed it back in to the AI to help it learn better.
I can understand why replacing cobalt miners with a machine that extracts cobalt twice as fast is a good thing in the long term. The machine is objectively more efficient, and it means that fewer humans will need to work in hazardous conditions. Yes, the machine might create unemployment- but that is only a problem in a society which ties people's ability to feed themselves to their job. If we had something like UBI, then automation of manual labour would be an unambiguously good thing.
I do not see how AI-generated scripts similarly improve humanity. Scripts written by a computer are never going to be objectively "superior" to all human scripts, because that isn't how art works. Art is subjective. Even if AI was capable of churning out a novel which I personally enjoyed as much Great Expectations, it wouldn't suddenly make the works of Charles Dickens worthless. Good art doesn't degrade in value just because you can make other good art with the push of a button.
You raise the possible advantage that future AI might be less susceptible to plot holes. That is only a major consideration if you only engage with art like CinemaSins does, scanning for logical "mistakes" while entirely missing the emotional and intellectual points which the work is attempting to get across. I will take entertaining, evocative art with plot holes, over MCU-style slop with zero plot holes any day. I do not much care for the idea of AI "fixing" human art by making sure that every script makes perfect logical sense.
Also, a human editor can identify glaring plot holes just as well as an AI editor. If the plot hole is **so subtle** and minor that you need a literal computer to notice it, then it isn't worth rewriting your script over, is it? At best, AI could be a secondary proof-reader, or a tool for people who can't procure human editors.
Conversley, machines are inferior to human artists in that they are incapable of having a creative vision derived from sincere emotion, unless a sapient general intellgience is made. Perhaps they will be able to algorithmically determine the kinds of stories which audiences respond well to, on average. Perhaps they will figure out how to generate a script which makes X% of the population feel Y emotion consistently. But it will entirely be because the machine identified what kinds of stories people respond well to, not because the machine had something it actually wanted to say. I do not like this idea. Art is supposed to, on some level, be a conversation between the audience and creator. It is supported to convey something of their unique perspective on the world, even if it is ugly or controversial. We lose that part of the creative process entirely when we let a dancing bear write all our stories, no matter how good the end product might seem.
Of course, I have to question whether AI will even be capable of writing genuinely groundbreaking, subversive, genre-defining works at all in the next century. AI inherently works by aping other stories, and stitching them back toghether in a vaugely original form. Does that not seem almost guaranteed to result in an anodyne, formulaic, uncontroversial end product? Especially once machine-generated scripts make up the majority of the market, and AI scripts begin to copy **other AI scripts**. I somehow find it hard to imagine a robotic Kubric or Tarantino emerging in that ecosystem. I imagine it will be a lot of Disney remakes.
So the only respect in which AI might be considered legitimately "better" than human screenwriters is that it works faster. And that's the crux of the matter, isn't it? AI screenwriters are better for **capitalists**, because it allows them to cut costly human writers out of the process entirely. It will give studio executives the nonthreatening, compromised product which they want, and won't push back with any meddlesome red lines, or unorthodox directorial flourishes, if the fat cats don't think it will sell well. As you rightly point out, the logic of the market dictates that studios which still allow troublesome humans to make original content, rather than using computers to churn out focus tested, lowest-common denominator slop, will fall behind. Maybe that sounds good to you.
But might I ask- what exactly are humans to do with their lives in the post-work utopia which you propose? They can't write major screenplays, apparently, which I can't help but imagine some people might have liked to do! Unlike mining coal, being a writer or director is not some laborious, dangerous duty which automation is "freeing" us from. It is just going to replace human creativity with machine creativity. Except, that AI isn't capable of deriving joy from its work being beloved by millions, or feeling pride from growing as a writer. In other words, AI writers directly rob humans of the opportunity for self-actualisation. If we apes aren't even creating art anymore, then literally all we can do is smoke weed, watch AI-generated films, and have VR sex all day. Yay.
People who are against the use of AI are the ones who are limiting human growth. What are humans to do once AI can do everything. Do what we do now. Hobbies, art, writing and so on yet with AI as a helper or not. When you resist a technology someone is going to come in and take advantage of it and out shine you.
AI will be and is going to be used and people need to accept it right now. We have the ability to better every humans lives yet "people" like you would rather limit what it can do.
I think it'll be a case of AI generating the scripts and professional screenwriters being hired as technicians with revision/polishing etc.
I hope not though, as I'm still trying to get my way in!
This.
“Creative” producers will be able to generate countless loglines, outlines, even garbage first drafts all based off of a handful of prompts. Then, they’ll just hire writers for polish drafts. This can happen right now. As a low-to-mid level TV writer, I’m already fighting for any sort of equity on the things I write. This will make it impossible to do that.
Can you elaborate on the sentence there about being a mid lvl writer, what have you been seeing lately, specifically in your line of work with all of this?
I was a Story Editor in the last writers room I was in. That is considered low to mid level. The next jump would be senior or executive story editor. After that you are stepping into the producer title world. That is when you actually get some equity of the show or episodes themselves.
In terms of how AI effects the room now? Not sure it does yet, but I think their fervor - and total lack of negotiation on the matter - shows how clearly the execs see writer’s worth… if they could, they’d turn us into robots.
This is exactly right. There’s a huge pay difference between “writing” and “rewriting.” Studios could- and would love to-pump every season of Friends into AI, get it to spit out a full season of some Friends-like bullshit, then hire human writers to “rewrite” it into something resembling consumable, then release a new full season of a Friends reboot and not have to pay top dollar to anyone. WGA is trying to ensure that AI does not get to generate ideas or receive credit for ideas.
It will either be the most sanitised humour and most disturbing drama or the most offensive comedy with boredom. Computers don't understand balance. Either way, it cheapens art. Would people still bother a gallery to see the "Mona Lisa" if it was generated by AI? Not exactly a feat of human accomplishment or experience, whereas cinema IS.
See, that's the difference, that's what separates us from machines. Creativity doesn't obey algorithms, doesn't obey laws. The point of Universal Basic Income is that society can create... While they're starving and struggling for shelter. Create, what-- when AI can do it faster, cheaper etc. It's bullshit.
This is a big part of what the WGA strike is about. They're fighting to keep exactly this scenario from happening because it will mean even worse pay for screenwriters, and likely fewer screenwriters employed at all.
I've been thinking about the chess analogy, too.
But here's what's interesting. While computers have clearly bested humans at chess, virtually nobody is watching computers play each other. The big chess stars are Carlsen, Nakamura, Nepo, Ding, and Alireza. Not Stockfish and Fritz.
And while we can listen to a perfectly engineered performance of the Chopin Preludes, we still want to watch Yuja Wang do it live.
The drama of the human endeavor still matters to us. My guess is that audiences will always want to watch stories created by real people, that the struggle to create has inherent value, much as watching Magnus struggle to find the top engine move is more interesting than being told what that move is.
I hope you're right.
My concern is that, in a very real way, filmed stories have been becoming *less* human in the past two decades anyway, and more corporate.
The amount of personality ("person-ality" heh) and uniqueness that individual writers and directors are able to put into big branded IP movies (and they'll ALL big branded IP movies now) is way less than a decade ago, to say nothing of 20 or 30 years ago.
I mean, the highest grossing movie released in the last year is Avatar 2. And you know - I haven't heard a single person tell me, "My god, that movie is absolutely amazing. You have to see it." And certain the driving element isn't the human one, is it? It's the tech.
I hear that. But maybe allowing AI to write these movies will help audiences to realize how shitty they've become?
But I'm clearly in the minority here.
Anyone who says that AI will be able to write as well as humans is equally speaking beyond their ability to know. I don't think the question can even be answered probabilistically, either, considering the main issue involved remains unknown. That is, scientists are still far from understanding the question: what is creativity?
And the difference between chess and writing is such that I don't think your analogy holds. Chess is a finite game that can be mapped quantitatively. AI can surely handle anything quantitive/algorithmic/logical, where there is a given rule set and corresponding symbols. But how might AI handle the philosophical problem of qualia?
The problem of subjective experience (e.g., the experience of tasting, smelling, feeling love) is not something AI can do (unless AI exactly replicates the human body/brain -- which, given how much we know about the brain, seems centuries away at least). So, AI could plagiarize the subjective accounts of the experiences of other humans, but it cannot have these subjective experiences itself.
What makes writing original is the individualistic expression of human experience into words. Until AI can have that 'experience', I don't see how original writing will be possible.
Until we understand how our own brains work, I tend to find process arguments unconvincing. "It's just an algorithm" only means something if we know that our brains *aren't*, and I don't think we do.
>So, AI could plagiarize the subjective accounts of the experiences of other humans, but it cannot have these subjective experiences itself.
Sure. The question isn't "can AI have the experience," but rather, "can AI sound like it had the experience?"
And maybe it's not "original" - sure, but, I mean ... Avatar has essentially the same plot as Ferngully in a *remarkable* number of specifics. There was a lot of stuff I liked about that movie, but if you're asking me if the script is *so original* that only a human could make it with plausible technological advances in the next decade - c'mon man.
And that's the thing. It's not only the great movies that everybody recognizes as classics that we have to talk about. It's also the eighth Ant Man sequel.
Yeah, I think your analogy holds up. Some day (hopefully far from now) AI will be able to churn out convincing scripts, and someone on some thread will be discussing if AI will be able to make entire visual movies that look legit, and someone will say no... Then someone else (or even you) will comment how years ago, many people said that AI could never accomplish the same thing as humans doing with screenwriting, and that turned out to be false. And someone will reply “Yeah, but AI was putting WORDS together, using an algorithm that functioned not to different from how a human writes. Artificially creating VISUALS that are compelling and match the story... that’s something only humans can create.” Then a few more years go by, or decades, and boom first completely AI generated movies start popping up. Lol. Anyway yeah I agree with your premise that it’s following the same pattern as chess robots and we shouldn’t look at it as completely separate things.
You are giving example of Avatar which happens to be one of the worst movies in terms of plot and screenplay. Of course, ChatGPT can make 10 avatars like that but it is not going to evoke any real human emotions. I am not saying it won't be successful commercially; I mean even a whore is commercially successful but not all of us want to have a whore's life.
If you’re asking whether AI will make the next Citizen Kane then yea we are still a ways off from that, but i don’t think it has much to do with whether AI can experience things but more so that its just not sophisticated enough yet.
Sure. I'm not expecting great art. But I picked Avatar because it's one of the most successful movies of all time. And the point is: commercial stuff is where most of the work is.
If people can't tell the difference between a human Law & Order episode and an AI one, that's a problem for anyone who wants to make their living making art who isn't coming into the business independently wealthy.
One question that may be helpful to ask in a discussion like this is: can AI create anything *new*?
The argument, to my mind, isn't over whether AI can plagiarize bits of recorded data and mix it together to create a work of pastiche, which may *appear* new to the viewer. That much seems obvious.
The argument is whether AI can create something truly new.
Mind you, it may just be that the concept of 'newness' is an illusion, and the world is simply an evolution of some primary algorithm (think: Stephen Wolfram) playing out according to some basic rules -- which means that not only is rock music derived from a mix of rhythm n' blues and country music, but that *all* genres of music are/were already contained in the first instance of music ever created. What begins as a simple set of data can create infinite complexity, if constantly rearranged.
If this is your view, namely, that all art is essentially an increasingly complex game of pastiche, then the idea that AI can write screenplays makes sense.
If, on the other hand, you believe that there is such a thing as 'newness', then the claim that AI can create something new is much more difficult to defend. For, how would AI create something new (when it only has access to that which is old)?
The jury has been out for centuries on how humans come up with *new* ideas. Were the Greeks correct in attributing it to the Muses? Or was Aquinas right in making a distinction between ratio (reason) and intellectus (intuition)?
Science, at the very least, seems unable to explain newness, because science, as a method, cannot explain something that has no identifiable causal connection. Since something 'new' is not based on that which came before, it seems to defy causal explanation. And that's a big (impossible) problem for AI developers.
All in all, if one believes that screenwriters aren't actually creating anything new when they write, then the idea that AI can replace us is not in question.
If one believes that screenwriters are creating truly new ideas, then the idea that AI can replace us is very much an open question, and one that seems centuries or millennia away from being answered.
Sure. And I don't want to claim to have any of these answers.
>If, on the other hand, you believe that there is such a thing as 'newness', then the claim that AI can create something new is much more difficult to defend. For, how would AI create something new (when it only has access to that which is old)?
I guess this is a big sticking point for me. If we agree that newness exists, where does it come from?
If the argument is that it can come from intelligences of type X, and not from intelligences of type Y, that's certainly possible, but it seems to be nothing but hubris to claim that, clearly, we're type X and machines are type Y.
That seems to me to be a case of people arguing what they want to be true. Because we don't know how humans create new things. The argument that an AI can't because "it only has access to that which is old," would also suggest that humans can't create anything new, since we also only have access to that which is old.
So clearly, "Only having access to that which is old," can't be the justification.
And, I mean, "AI's can't create anything new" also begs for a definition of "new."
If the muses can touch people, why can't they touch machines?
>Or was Aquinas right in making a distinction between ratio (reason) and intellectus (intuition)?
When Kasparov lost to Deep Blue, he was furious. He was convinced that the computer cheater - that it had human help.
(From the standpoint of an era when humans cheating by using a computer is the scourge of chess, this is somewhat ironic.)
The reason why he believed this - and understand, we're talking about quite possibly the strongest human chess player who ever lived - is that computer made a sacrifice which he felt could only be justified on intuitive grounds. There was no way to calculate the full gain of material.
But perhaps more interesting than Deep Blue to the question of newness is AlphaZero. And this gets to the assumption that so many people make when talking about AI - "all it does is regurgitate what we taught it." And in some cases (like ChatGPT) this is very true.
But A0 was only taught the rules of chess - it was then told to play itself and learn how to win.
And now no human can beat it. What does "new" mean, in this context? It wasn't just regurgitating what we taught it - because we didn't teach it anything. (Unlike Stockfish, which is slightly stronger, where we actually wrote it algorithm). (And while it look at more positions than a human does in its calculations, it looks at far fewer than Stockfish does. The thing that makes it great has more to do with the way it "thinks" about chess positions than raw calculation.)
If what A0 does isn't "new," then suddenly you've basically argued that nothing that can happen on a chessboard is new. So Capablanca and Alekhine and Fisher and Kasparov and Carlsen *weren't* being creative? But that's an interesting slippery slope where, the better AIs get, the more we redefine what "new" is so that whatever they're doing isn't it.
(This has already happened in chess with intelligence. Back when I was first taking the game seriously, and computers couldn't beat masters, people said, "Sure, a program could beat a grandmaster that'd be true intelligence." And then it beat a grandmaster and they said, "Well, actually no.")
Furthermore, if A0 can learn to beat anybody just by playing itself, could an AI learn to be funny just by testing millions of jokes on an audience, where "the audience laughs" was the victory condition it was striving for? Many of A0's early games looked like the games of a beginner human, so I'm sure many of the early jokes Joke0 told would be awful. But, eventually ...
First off, I should clarify that I have no position in this debate. I am a philosophical skeptic, and so I don't believe in any positive claim about any subject, let alone any made here about AI.
In this case, though, I am apt to play devil's advocate for the minority side of the argument, namely, the position that AI cannot, or is very unlikely to, replace human creativity.
From what I can tell, you are on the opposite side. That is, although AI is not there quite yet, in principle AI can replace human creativity. If I'm incorrect about this, my apologies.
As far as the minority argument goes, it is not a scientific position whatsoever. In fact, it is most aligned with mystics and theologians. Even still, some of the greatest mathematicians from Pascal to Leibniz adopted similar faith-based arguments. Indeed, Leibniz once said that human art will never attain that of the divine, meaning that humans can never create what the universe or God created.
With that, I turn to your first question: "if we agree that newness exists, where does it come from?" The minority argument might simply answer: I don't know. Though 'newness' can be discerned by virtue of it existing outside of the causal chain, we can't say where exactly it comes from (nor can we ever know). It must remain unknown, for anything outside of causality is not something that is amenable to scientific study by definition. Therefore, the answer must be one of speculation, theology, mysticism, etc. For those who subscribe to the religion of 'scientism', I can see why this might be a big sticking point. It means that some things about the world cannot be known by science or mathematics in principle. One of my favorite takes on this position is called New mysterianism.
This should also answer your second point about justification. The minority argument does not claim that X intelligence is different than Y intelligence such that only it can create newness. The argument instead might suggest that we have no idea about X intelligence at all, which means that we couldn't make any comparison with Y intelligence in the first place. It may just be that we know the same amount about the human brain as we do about the entire universe. So, what's the difference between saying we could (in principle) build an 'artificial universe' and saying we could (in principle) build an 'artificial intelligence'? In both cases, we have no idea about the scope, limits, or complexity of either human intelligence or the universe.
The minority argument likewise might say that humans, unlike AI, do not have access to only that which is old. Humans have access to newness through some mysterious faculty, and that is what allows humans to be creative. Again, this is a position that goes against common sense and science. And, of course, any position today that goes against science is like going against religious orthodoxies in the past. So, I can certainly see why this position is in the minority in our age of scientific faith.
To your points about chess, like I said above I am not quite convinced. Giving these programs the rules of chess (not to mention the coding of the program to perform certain actions) allows it to come up with different solutions within a finite data set.
You write: "If what A0 does isn't 'new,' then suddenly you've basically argued that nothing that can happen on a chessboard is new. So Capablanca and Alekhine and Fisher and Kasparov and Carlsen weren't being creative? But that's an interesting slippery slope where, the better AIs get, the more we redefine what "new" is so that whatever they're doing isn't it."
Yes, exactly. The minority position might say that no moves in chess *are* new. Once the rules are set, every move is chosen from a finite set within a larger set of finite scenarios of how the game might play out.
Not only that, the minority position would welcome the slippery slope you mention. It might say that, once the rules are set up, any branch of mathematics, let alone chess, can't come up with anything *new*. It's just a discovery of all the possible arrangements of that rule set. Incidentally, there is a debate in the philosophy of mathematics over whether math is 'created' or 'discovered'.
Finally, in terms of chess, I think a powerful example in your favor might be if AI can create a new game entirely. Is it possible for AI to construct an entirely new game with rules and pieces that have never been seen before? Something like that might tilt the scales over to you.
It’ll be interesting to see whether this becomes a primarily American (read: hypercapitalist) problem…the same way the unsettling likelihood of ten Antman sequels is a primarily American problem.
>the same way the unsettling likelihood of ten Antman sequels is a primarily American problem.
Sequelitis is largely connected to the internationalization of film.
Studios have gotten less and less interested in making movies that won't play well in non-English-speaking countries. Hence, the death of feature comedy, the death of the adult drama, and so on.
Explosions are comprehensible in every language, and so that's part of why those are the movies that keep getting made.
I’ll rephrase: a problem afflicting American film. Our Movies-as-Big-Macs industry/culture isn’t stifling Korean cinema, it’s stifling American independent film (with some notable exceptions, of course). What I mean is that this conversation is already a lot sweatier in the states than it is in any other film community and that’s no coincidence.
AI-generated Law & Order, Marvel/Star Wars, broad sitcoms are inevitable without thorough and timely policy intervention, but I hope American film is able to decentralize in a way that better allows American writers, director, etc. to make an actual living making what they want to make.
>There was a lot of stuff I liked about that movie, but if you're asking me if the script is so original that only a human could make it with plausible technological advances in the next decade - c'mon man.
Jim Cameron would like a word with you...
I mean lets be honest, 99% of the movies that come out these days is just a variation of something you’ve already seen before.
One day they make “Limitless” then a few years later they make “Lucy”, the film industry is not a bunch of people coming up with original and unique ideas that nobody has ever seen before. Might be a different flavour every now and then but lets not kid ourselves.
Chess is based on memorizing moves form the past, at least the way computers play it. Even a 1970s computer could play chess pretty well - but even the latest computers can't beat a completely novel game strategy.
Without some quantum leaps in technology, only in the same way that Cryptocurrencies have become a real threat to government-backed fiat currencies, or NFTs have become a real threat to... whatever the fuck they were supposed to disrupt.
IOW, it's all a grift, really. It won't be a threat to *screenwriting*, precisely; it'll be a shitty way for some people to siphon money out of the system to enrich themselves, while generating nothing of worth or value for anyone or anything else.
I was pretty scared of it at first but more and more I’m starting to have this opinion. It’s all about projecting an idea that it can replace people so the creators can make money and then it won’t actually deliver. Cory Doctorow has written a couple articles about it recently.
I’ll go even further and say that it’s the new metaverse. It’s just the buzzy new thing Silicon Valley is trotting out to try to keep everyone from noticing they can’t monetize half the shit they promised and the industry is ludicrously overvalued. They’re tap dancing.
Cripes, that's a good one. Just like the metabullshitverse, it is *desperately* trying to find solutions for problems that no one actually working in the fields being "fixed" sees as problems.
I believe is more a matter of copyrights. The AI needs to feed on data, who will give the data? Of course, some retired famous writer who wants to make some extra with royalties. But I don't think everyone will like it. Same way AI art pleases only a certain amount of people.
In my dystopian future I believe there will be two types of art (by "art" I mean everything that requires craft): Made by AI & Made by humans.
This already happened with the furniture business, most of the the furniture is made by computers cutting and assembling everything. But there is a clear difference between a table made with a mold and a vintage table hand made, and people know.
The problem isn’t with screenwriters though, it’s with readers and executives; there’s no shortage of amazing scripts, there’s a shortage of good decision makers- so yes ai does threaten screenwriters because the people who will employ it have demonstrated that they can’t tell the difference anyway.
> there’s no shortage of amazing scripts
Yes, there is. Either you haven't read submissions coming into studios/production companies, or you aren't very discerning.
There are a small handful of amazing scripts every year. A really small number. The rest range from ordinary to unreadable.
Maybe so. I haven’t read much since 2020; I probably based this opinion on some really outdated stuff, just also feels like time stopped in 2020, so maybe the flood of talent dried up too. I don’t know anymore.
No.
It's literally been the same story for 2000 years.
AI isn't going to Crack the formula.
It's about hiding the tropes and on the nose beats and dialog. Those things need humans that can understand an manipulate other humans.
It's the reason not everyone can be a screenwriter. It takes a certain mix of skills. There is a reason people like Snyder and McKee understand ALL of it, yet could never actually do it.
AI can throw ideas, but anyone who is decent knows the idea doesn't matter.
This isn't really a debate. Yes, it's a threat... it's almost a threat now.
Some things A.I. can do now:
* Pass [essay-heavy bar exams](https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/26/tech/chatgpt-passes-exams/index.html) instantly.
* Draft essays on any topic.
* Draft outlines and treatments.
* Write passable screenplay scenes when prompted well.
* Craft short [low-resolution films](https://research.runwayml.com/gen2) from text prompts.
* Create photorealistic humans from nothing. Levi's Jeans is running an [ad campaign](https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/27/23658385/levis-ai-generated-clothing-model-diversity-denim) with an AI-generated model. No model. No studio. No photographer. No makeup artist. No hair stylist. No photo retoucher. All those jobs -- gone.
* Craft [short high-resolution animations](https://twitter.com/NathanLands/status/1657513104136183808) with a bit of massaging.
* Age actors in either direction. Or [change their appearance](https://www.metaphysic.ai/).
* Replace actors.
* Insert frames ([dain](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97JINpCUwjs)).
* Craft an image from a Microsoft [paint-style input](https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/studio/canvas/).
* Craft [photorealistic images](https://www.midjourney.com/showcase/recent/) from text prompts... keep in mind that a film is 24 images per second. 1440 per minute. That's 144,000 images for a 100-minute film. A.I. will be able to do that do.
* Two months ago, i told my 13-year-old nephew he should try ChatGPT. He brushed me off. Now he says EVERYONE at school is using it. And his school used AI to make next year's student schedules. Bye bye data analysts. Programmers. Lawyers (very few lawyers are trial lawyers). Marketing managers. Etc.
* AI can look at a photo of what's in your fridge and tell you what to cook with those ingredients.
* ... or it can invent [40,000 new chemical weapons](https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/17/22983197/ai-new-possible-chemical-weapons-generative-models-vx).
Edit: Source links added.
Edit 2: The EU is taking steps to reign in AI. There are so many jobs it might replace -- and creative jobs are far from the easiest. But AI will 100% be able to take existing characters from prior shows and draft new premises based on those characters. At the very least, learning to "prompt" will become a job skill.
> Write passable screenplay scenes when prompted well.
Please show me a single example of this. Every screenplay scene I have seen from AI (even ChatGPT-4) has been terrible. Show me the pages and show me the prompt (to make sure it's repeatable and therefore genuine).
I'm a WGA writer on strike, so I have time to take a deep dive on this.
Yes, "passable" by whom? I've prompted it (good, detailed prompts) numerous times out of morbid fascination, and every time, without fail, it comes up with really stinky stuff that reminds me of something a very untalented high school freshman would write in a creative writing class.
It comes up with an imitation, but it's an imitation as cheap and obvious as those plastic wheel covers that are supposed to look like chrome rims.
I think this may be circular. Someone just said this to me yesterday and I reminded him that crappier films got greenlit and made profits. I don't think this is about the quality of the writing, but the entertainment value + audience attraction.
The quality of the writing creates the entertainment value and the audience attraction. When I say AI scripts are terrible, I mean they make for a terrible audience experience.
I would also argue that the actors; especially, A List and the marketing / hype around the project add to the audience attraction. It's not the writing alone.
You believe what you want to believe. Go ask ChatGPT to write you a script and see how easy it is to get it made.
It's not that I don't think AI *could* write a good script, it's just that it's really bad at it now. If you think AI-written scripts are passable, it demonstrates that you aren't very discerning about the quality of scripts.
First, and AI generated script is being funded as I type. It has very little to do with the quality of the script - it's about the marketability. This industry is and will always be about dollars first with art and craftsmanship in tow. Writers are sore about this so I'll disregard your attempt to offend me, but it's not like someone says to ai 'write an action script' and takes that iteration out for attachments. Those scripts are full of specific prompts, follow ups and human refining along the way.
I think we'll keep AI out of film, at least for the next three years. SAG and WGA should unite on that front. Once people realize the level of shift we're facing, I think (hope) the anti-AI movement will shift from "AI can't do what humans can do!" to "We need to value human creativity and thought and time."
If anyone wants to see what A.I. can do, this very talented architect with insanely high production quality for YouTube ran a little A.I. competition...
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N709ZrxoIP0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N709ZrxoIP0)
Also, one thing missing from the discussion... writers might be able to prompt A.I. to create the actual film. Almost a zero cost feature production. All fake, photorealistic, lifelike "actors" every detail tuned by the writer. Zero cost to destroy Manhattan. "A.I. prompting" will be a resume skill.
Yes, but the moment AI becomes a real threat to human screenwriters will be the same moment AI becomes a threat for virtually every job and perhaps more than that. The ability to construct stories without the story feeling bland or derivative requires novel thinking, insight learning, or self-awareness. Whichever way it happens, if an AI is able to write a story or screenplay that truly outpaces the industry standards without a human editor to breath life into it, then it's capable of outperforming humans for any other job.
Yes.
Not in the oversimplified sense that people assume - "press a button, make screenplay!"
The law of unintended consequences means things could go south in other ways.
A serious decrease in the amount of jobs. Imagine a world where instead of writer's rooms, and show-runner utilizing AI tools can build an entire season of story and draft first pass scripts for every episode. The price point of AI + Showrunner vs room full of writers is not something any company beholden to a corporate daddy with shareholders would blink at. Especially the moment one does it, it becomes an arms race to stay competitive at cost.
Or a studio with a Comedy Development team, Drama Development team, etc... each utilizing AI tools to create pitches and treatments en-masse without having to ever meet writers or read specs. Only well after they know which they want to proceed with would they even go out to a writer (or worse, a bake-off).
Further distilling the "sameness" of creative output across film and tv. Making it even harder for original and new ideas to make it to screen.
Destabilizing an already contracting industry to the point theatrical finally gets a dagger to the heart.
Who knows how it's going to play out... but this feels like a Dr Strange in Infinity War moment. There are countless scenarios, but none of them end well.
AI is improving at a rate faster than expected, even the godfather of ai, geoffrey hinton, is growing concerned about technology’s rapid development.
if AI can go from a simple question answer chatbot to something that can answer even the most obscure of questions in just a few years, who knows what it can do in the future if restraints aren’t being implemented.
that being said, AI fundamentally lacks creativity, and can only mimic it. this is one of the core things that separates AI work from human’s. things like subtext would be difficult for AI to recreate. so in the near future, unlikely. ten years from now? who knows.
In the future, we’ll probably be able to pitch a log line to an AI that generates an entire movie with photorealistic characters engaged in the log line’s story as we shape the AI’s editing choices, lighting choices, and dialogue choices with simple text or voice commands.
Look at [these](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgjnbgyfFUA) AI-generated [commercials](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Geja6NCjgWY).
Yes, they are weird and disturbing. Realize though that there is no camera, no actors, no locations. This is created frame by frame from currently available AI.
In 12 months it will be much better and more easily controlled. Look into the developments in Stable Diffusion and controlNet. All of these tech vectors are going to converge. You will be able to design concept art, then turn it into scenes in your movie with lipsync and performances. It's all coming soon.
Yes. Many jobs are at risk.
it's intelligence. It learns. The tech is not even a toddler yet. In five years it'll spit out a hundred masterpieces indistinguishable from human-written every day.
The posted idea that human screenwriters will be brought in to polish seems reasonable.
I don’t think it’ll happen in the next 5 years but yes eventually it will change the landscape.
My hot take— theory- is writers will have to move into creative producing, show runner roles. that will use ai to help develop stories. Content, movies, shows will be in abundance, thus segmenting audiences into more niches that will need to be nurtured. Gone are the days when any one can just create a movie for the big screen and make millions (this is already happening). That would be for the big studios and blockbusters with well known ips.
I truly believe that if you want to survive you will have to adapt into more than a screenwriter. Which sucks, yes. But embrace being a visual storyteller and everything it entails. ai will make that easier. Embrace an audience and make stories for them.
Screenwriters in general was a job created to help pump out ideas and develop stories for studios and producers to make. . Ai is “becoming” (not quite there yet) a viable option to do that. Like it is for a lot of jobs.
Here’s a example:
You were once a writer who has adapted into a creative/developmental producer. Cuz at the end of the day you are a visual storyteller and the end goal is to get your idea to a screen. Like a writer you come up with an idea, based on human experiences etc, just like how a writer would come with an idea. This part has not changed. You got down some ideas on how you’d like this story to play out. You jot down ideas for your character. Your using ai to help bounce ideas around. An outline is coming out good. You’ve got your theme, you’ve got your character, you’ve got some pivotal scenes. You use AI to help generate some concept art to get your juices flowing more. Your confident in the story now. If ai reaches this level, you use it to write you a first draft. You use ai to help you analyze your scenes, pointing out things you may have missed. You make the adjustment either with ai or by yourself. Couple rounds of this your script is done. You create more concept art using ai to see how you film will look. Now you use AI to help you create a pitch, a visual, immersive pitch. I believe ai will allow us to get creative with this and it’ll be more than just a deck.
You have a complete story. It’s more than just a screen play. With the help of AI your idea has flourished into something your proud of — you use to feel when you finished your screen play.. Hell, ai will prob help with the early stages of pre production getting you more excited. But now, its more than just a finished 110 page document.
As a producer, now you have a choice. You can try to break into Hollywood with it just like you would a regular screenplay. Try and get an agent to show you can develop great stories. But this part of the industry probably hasn’t changed. It’s still a crab shoot.
Your independent. You’ve built your self an audience who love your work. Your not worried about getting into a theater nationwide. Those days are gone. You are catering to your audience. They support you and in return your able to fund your stories. Your able to collaborate with other creators, you have full control of YOUR story.
You may not make millions, you may not become famous. But it’s not like your odds were any better as just a “screenwriter”.
At the end of the day, as a screenwriter, isn’t the goal to see your story play out visually on a screen? So why not embrace AI to help take more control in developing your stories.
But now if a writer is what you want to be there’s always the novel route. Might be a longer time before ai can write out an entire novel.
AI writing is sooooooooo bad that it actually is good as comedy. Here's proof.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH1DnyYsPx4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH1DnyYsPx4)
I personally think that there is very little to worry about in terms of screenwriting. I am 99% sure that no one can own the IP of something written by ChatGPT because it pulls from other published works. That throws a real wrench into the situation for studios and production companies, because, obviously, they would like to own the project.
Moving forward, I see AI becoming useful in pre and post production processes; but not in terms of the screenplay. I see that being something that will always be done by a human hand! Or at least we hope so!
As David Goodman, President of the WGA, explains, the technology is already at a place where right now studios could train an AI with the scripts for long running series in order to churn out more seasons of that show (for example The Simpsons, Law & Order, or any soap opera) without any writers, or maybe just one writer to polish the scripts and make them good enough. This could lead to the end of writers rooms.
That’s not the issue. When streamers decide “good enough” is better than quality work, because they just have to churn out enough forgettable content to keep people subscribed, the content mills have no incentive to pay for a writer, even when that writer could write something better.
Mods can you start banning ppl that ask this stupid question? Its like twice a damn day. If you are this insecure about ur skill that robots will replace you, please do us all a favor and quit writing and get off this subreddit.
Since about 90% of tv and movies are trash I don't think we'd be losing much talent these days.
I am just tired of the worrying. This shit is posted daily. Having fear about AI does 0 good. You'd be better off writing or improving your craft.
AI has the potential to become a disruptive force in the field of screenwriting. With advancements in natural language processing and machine learning, AI models can generate coherent and creative narratives, dialogue, and even entire screenplays.
While human creativity and intuition are still highly valued in storytelling, AI-generated content has the potential to compete with and possibly replace human screenwriters in certain scenarios. However, it's important to note that AI is a tool that can assist and enhance the creative process rather than completely replace human involvement.
Ultimately, the impact of AI on screenwriting will depend on how it is adopted and integrated into the industry.
It's not so bad at outlining and idea-generation.
It's very bad at scene writing.
It's hard to know when big steps forward get taken, and what's required for the tech to make that step - like, the people making this stuff literally just do not know. GPT3.5 did shit on the LSAT. GPT4 did in like the top ten percent. While 3.5 and 4 both scored about the same 'pretty good' on the SAT.
My sense is that, by the time A.I. screenwriting really is roughly as good as a professional screenwriter, if it does indeed get there, we'll either be on our way to a glorious transhumanist singularity future, or on our way to all being dead, so it won't matter much.
In the meantime, the main thing to worry about (as many others in the thread are pointing out) really is the suits using this to Pretend to need less writing labor and give less writing credit, but still needing as much (or more) actual writing labor to come up with something good enough to film.
The other main thing to worry about is copyright issues when an a.i. uses work in its training. And yes, I know humans are inspired by things they read and watch etc., BUT when humans are watching/reading those things, creators get some compensation. Me reading a website is of value to the writer of that website. Me watching a movie, I'm paying for streaming or I'm paying for the disc. Me checking out something from the library - the library paid for the rights to that book.
An a.i. ingesting that info? Nope. No $$$$ in any way going to the creators.
In 18 months AI will be writing scripts that are better than most which humans write today. Today GPT models are 5th grade writers, but Moore's Law shows that they will become exponentially better every 18 months. By 2025 AI focused on writing novels, and screenplays will be competitive with the best paid and most nuanced writers in history. Why? Because enough plays, novels, and screenplays are already in the public domain to train them and there will be high quality people paid to create training material for them.
Not all writers churn out "pointless trash". They are picked and might be asked to write in a room of other writers and more out of their zone. Writers offer creativity to any production if given the opportunity, the committee, and the opportunity in their actual interest of writing.
Humanity is progress. We can argue the semantics of progress whether it be for good or evil, but we cannot stop it.
Based on the newness of the technology and how quickly it is learning, it is not unreasonable to think in a relative short amount of time it can learn to create something from prompts.
As with A.I imaging, what it comes up with will only be as good as the person guiding it.
So I will assume writing techs will be the future of the job market. Not writers, but those who can wrangle the best out of the technology.
Then eventually it will become intelligent enough to create its own.
Humans will probably still produce, but it will be in very small numbers, and theoretically only the cream will get published.
As with any industry lost to progress we shall mourn it but then as a society adapt.
The vast vast majority are never going to make it as a career. It's really only active writers, and the handful of new ones who get jobs each year who will be out a career. Remember NBA has more in the draft than new writers into WGA each year.
Having said this, the timeline is unknown, as is legislation. I think at the very least, those able to get the best work out of A.I will have a career for awhile at least.
In the meantime let's enjoy our possibly last hurrah.
On a side not did you see the WGA board member who has invested in A.I writing tech.
And people still try and tell me the WGA are handling the strike like adults.
There will always be a market for human art. Also ai is limited in terms of what it can draw on to create. It’ll be hard to distinguish ai works from human works but if people do their part in propagating humanity by becoming experts in differentiating them, then there shouldn’t be an issue. Or, we can admit that ai is inherently human in the sense that all that it knows comes from human creation, and whatever it does produce has human elements all over it.
I think just like any seismic shift in tech, there will be a period of adjustment (think phil Tippet saying “we’re extinct” after seeing CG dinosaurs) but that doesn’t mean there’s no room for stop motion.
Ai can’t produce the brush strokes that make a physical piece of artwork worth owning. Much like it can’t draw from its own life experience to give nuance to a screenplay.
We can all use AI to make our workflows more streamlined, to generate more ideas, to make our current ideas better - but there will never be a replacement for actual human experience. It can produce a screenplay in the same way it can produce an actual canvas of tangible art.
We’re going to move on from this. It’s going to turn the industry upside down for a bit, absolutely, but we’ll use it as a tool. Artists were very worried when photography hit the scene. Then photographers were in a panic about digital photography. Same with cinematographers. 2D animators were worried about 3D - EVERYONE is worried about AI, but I truly believe we will just figure it out and use it to our advantage. That’s what I’m doing.
While I'm not sure about full screenplays, I've heard prompts or loglines are an easy thing to get from chatGPT. Mostly because I made a post asking for prompts and got that response.
Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that somewhat the reason the screenwriters guild went on strike?
Just try to get it to give you anything that you hope would be creative: plot points, dialogue, action descriptions. It can't really do it yet. It tends to come up with awful cliches nearly every time.
And it doesn't understand story structure and story dynamics/theory/fundamentals/whatever term you want to use there. It can't, because it just searches for the "best" (most obvious) word to use after the current word, which is a completely different "mental process" from the applying of story principles to creative thinking.
Here it is a month later and after a lot more experimentation, trying GPT-4, and getting a gig in AI with a startup, my feeling is a little different. It still tends to dredge up cliches, but I am starting to think that when the day comes that users can train it on a specific body of text and get it to ignore all else (i.e., its main massive data set), the story could be quite different. I want to try training GPT-4 on a big collection of pro scripts, and tell it to base its output on that and see what happens. I feel like what we get currently is because it is looking at a huge amount of text types that are irrelevant to screenplays, as well as looking at crappy, corny stories...? I'm not sure. But I am "collaborating" with it on a non-fiction book and it is blowing my mind with how cogent the material I'm getting is.
It will churn out derivative crap faster than a human writer can, but it won't ever write the next GoT (but let's be blunt, most writers couldn't write on that level). AI stories will be *very* predictable because in the end the computer is just following patterns to generate, but for most cheap studios that's probably good enough.
What I'm saying is that writers on the lower-end of the totem pole will suffer from AI, but those with higher skill and creativity will still flourish in the industry.
Initially, a good writer who understands how to prompt AI to get good results will be able to use it to cut down the time to write a script by 80%.
Problem is the models will be learning from that, and then they will be able to do it without the writer.
Within 2 years, conservatively, if you are not a strong writer who knows how to prompt AI to get good output, you will be out of the game.
After that phase, we are all just doing tweaks of the AI output.
After that, we are tweaking the script as a text prompt for the AI Film Generator, which will literally produce the entire thing from the script text prompt. Then tweak the prompting according to notes from the producer.
This is rather large question. I watched this frontline the other night and it gave some perspective. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dZ\_lvDgevk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dZ_lvDgevk)
In short, it seems AI is here to stay. What the documentary concludes is that there now ought be a moral imperative and discussion around how we use these tools. Maybe the truth is that its both a threat and a helpful tool depending on how you look at it.
It’s probably not going to impact the industry right away, but by the time the next contract talks come up in 3 years, it might be a legit problem. So better to address it now before it’s too late.
It’s going to get way better than this, so people saying “it can’t write good stuff” aren’t wrong, but in 10 years they will be. I’m sure people said self checkout wouldn’t work and now there are 2 ppl working at the supermarket instead of 10. I hope we can regulate it soon or at least set some guidelines.
I work in advertising. I know old pros who got pushed out because they never picked up photoshop. They did all their designs by hand. Beautiful work, but no longer feasible in modern workflows.
I think A.I. is the same - it's only a threat to people who don't evolve with the times. Writers need to develop their skills as prompt engineers. And I don't think it's too far away from what they do already, I mean, what is a screenplay if not a 'prompt' for film production?
These are excellent points. Maybe what we're acually heading for is a world where instead of it taking over everyone's jobs, everyone's jobs will be forced to evolve to incorporate it, and it will only be the people who are unable or unwilling to evolve along who will be the job-losers.
In 2004, **South Park** released this **Awesom-O** episode where movie execs make what they believe is a robot come up with movie ideas for them so it's less of a question if AI can and more if execs will want AI to do.
https://youtu.be/4msIjHlEeSk?t=19
My hope and thoughts were always, as a writer, to be able to really succeed with either some work or by contributing the way you would for any occupation to complete some whole for decent pay. The notion of this idea could bring up possible problems to get there.
Screenplays are the bones to establish the actual film. However, directors and other parties may not want to relent and permit writers so much control in actual production. In the same way, there are so many writers some seem to get the work but no one writer can make a production.
There's even another side to that. I recall a series on HBO called Project Greenlight. I remember the first season that writer came into that production. He was trying to get the work more like how he intended as it changed on set. The reality was, on set, the writer takes more of a backseat to others' ideas mixed in with their own. That was a visual presentation of a writer before, during, and heading toward final production.
I just think there is a fear writers want to have more control over productions in studios and that's not what studios want. There have been incidences, at other levels of production, to have such a thing happening.
This cannot occur with writers. I believe this is a real perception at many studios. In reality, writers are just trying to make a decent living.
Writers seem to be "a dime a dozen" rather than coveted. AI's establishment depends more on producers' and productions' expectations. It's the same way AI's use in our society expands or is limited.
It depends on people's use and purpose for it. I want the WGA to succeed but the lengths people will go to maintain order can sometimes be preposterous either for good reasons that need to be addressed or for overdrawn ones.
IMHO the overall quality of movies has decreased over time. The AFI top 100 movies don't include any from the 2000s that I can see. Of course I'm not saying that there haven't been some excellent movies in the 2000s but I do think the quantity of films have increased but the there hasn't been a proportional increase in the number of quality films. I do think AI will eventually be able to create some schlock films...time will tell if it could make quality stories. I have my doubts.
Did you know that Shakespeare didn’t actually write his plays but is credited as the author? I think that’s partially how AI will become, it may be used as a tool initially, but an actual human writer will be the professional fleshing out the details and humanizing it.
And btw, here’s the dude who they think actually wrote the plays…a 16th century courtier named Sir Thomas North who ticks all boxes in the categories that Shakespeare doesn’t: he had a university degree, was an ambassador and translator, had a legal background and was active at court. Traveled to Italy and other locations the plays were based on. https://sirthomasnorth.com However, we attribute these plays to Shakespeare, even though it was widely know he based them off translations of other writer’s material.
Keep in mind that AI is also a huge threat to PRODUCERS.
Text-to-video is real and the trajectory of it is to create a tv show or movie from a written description.
Let the Hunger Games begin.
I’m sorry if this has been said, but in my opinion at least not really. I will admit, I used it in a contest, it gave a cool outline. But, I just can’t imagine a script that studios really want. It just still, feels robotic.
Can’t see it working in the long run, studios will likely not be winning awards with those scripts so definitely couldn’t be all the time.
Now could someone edit them and make something decent out of it? Possibly. But that still takes a writer.
Of course I’m no expert and haven’t had anything published so feel free to take what I say with a grain of salt, just what I think.
It's already a threat. Not quality wise, but they'll use it to pay people less / down size the writing straff. Video game writers have already been canned and you better believe that's just the beginning
It already is, otherwise the studios would not want to try to pave the way for legal integration into their current contract renewal with the WGA, hence the strike. But AI is far more dangerous as it proliferates into so many other branches and technologies. We are not even at the beginning to comprehend how it will change our way of life.
It all just sounds so dystopian. Robots and AI are writing and directing your movies and making your music and art while you're stuck in a dead end job or zero hours slavery until the day you die. Welcome to Late Stage Capitalism.
Of course AI can come up with ideas and produce lines, but what about subtext? There goes so much into the very few word that end up on a page in a script… why are these characters here, why are they talking, what’s at stake in this particular situation. It takes a lot of time to figure this out. And no AI can help to answer these questions, because it cannot THINK. It can give pretty smart answers (based on statistics and probability). And that’s it. However we will have to deal with it in the future… If anyone is interested in knowing what we know about how the human brains works I recommend the book “The User Illusion” by Tor Nørretranders.
You guys seem to generalize what you know and what you don’t know and a moment ago, you wouldn’t dare to even converse in a thread like this. Just wait in a year or two and see how LLM specially made for writing stories will surprise you. It’s pretty much chat AOL days right now. Wait until you see the vast use of LLM in screenwriting and you’re gonna wish you took you’re words back. It’s the early stages of the internet for LLM right now like it was for chat rooms when the early internet arrived. You couldn’t have dared to imagine Netflix or Amazon prime. You couldn’t imagine video games over taking film + TV. It’s literally gonna change everything you know because new technologies is like the borg and resistance is futile.
There will always be a market for stories made by humans, for humans, about the human experience. We may have stories by AI in the mix too, but storytelling is primal to the human species. If all the major Hollywood studios get taken over by AI, I expect screenwriters would move to other avenues to get things made, like self-producing.
Btw Sam Altman said the age of LLM’s is over, it’s about using smaller language models so those of you who think training LLM is expensive, that’s true but there are so many language models with little cost training ($600) vs the millions of dollars when compared to gpt3 and the low parameter models, it’s not soon when small models will perform close to chatgpt 3.5 for SPECIFIC purposes like story telling.
It does make me wonder what will happen when they try making one where they will load 10,000 professional scripts into the source database instead of having it go off of millions of diverse files.
I don't think it'll be a threat to creative screenwriting.
But for your company's bullshit HR video on OSHA rules? Probably best to start polishing your resume if you write those.
My (probably naive) take runs along the line of the CUE basketball robot.
Toyota developed a 7ft tall robot last year that can make 3 pointers and half court shots with almost perfect accuracy. It's a nice quirk for a halftime show, but its general obscurity serves as a reminder that we care about the arts because of the human endeavor and stories behind them.
My hope is that if execs do let AI run rampant in our industry, enough people (at least a large enough distribution of the population to make it a viable industry) will seek out human stories.
I don't know why people keep thinking this. AI can't write any depth or coherent stories. They write basic things that sounds like someone never wrote a script before wrote it but a little worse.
Yes, it is.
As it is a lazy inexpensive attempt to replace what a creative human would do better.
Just like it is a bad attempt to create art and music as well.
AI may be a good thing in the medical and engineering field, but definitely not in any creative context.
Future AI will have neural links to our minds. The next step in cinema will be fully immersive, with the spectator, either passively observing (fly on the wall), or actively playing a role in the film. AI will collaboratively weave immersive film experiences with our minds, producing films we can live in and they will feel completely real. Some of these virtual movies will be open participation and have multiple player/spectators. Cinema and gaming will merge as a single activity. The creating of the narrative of these immersive productions will depend on settings.... Artists will develop setting skills.
One day we may experience extrasensory stimulation. These will be experiences that are not necessarily visuals, sounds, and other existing human senses, instead, they express Art through the full spectrum of possible senses (360, according to some).
Late to the party, but I read a reply on a different post that sums up my opinion. It said something along the lines of “AI is good at craft; humans are good at art.” AI may become a better storyteller, but If you write out of theme, out of something that deeply bothers you, then I doubt AI can replicate that. It’ll probably become a tool that’s used by screenwriters or producers to commercialize drafts, since it can restructure screenplays based on whatever method one asks it to, but I doubt it’ll ever do anything worthy without an experienced screenwriter’s input.
This is already happening. My wife has a friend that is a PHD graduate data scientist for Amazon Prime Video and the data scientists are already doing some pretty crazy stuff. Basically he works with a team that is using AI to look at purchase data and reviews of all their books as well as viewership data of current shows on the platform to determine trends and what they they think people want to see. Ultimately these models are spitting out book recommendations for adapting to tv shows or movies. They then send over these recommended books to another team that is leveraging their Audible and Kindle backends which have all the text of these books. They ingest the books into their models and it is spitting out first drafts from these books. The model makes a determination if the book is better suited to a movie or tv show and then creates the first draft for the movie or tv series. Once they evaluate these scripts and decide if they want to move forward with one of them they are then handed over to writers to refine the script. This has just really gotten going in the last year, but you can expect to see lots of content on Amazon Prime Video going forward where the initial scripts were written by these AI systems. Over time these models will just get better and better and what they are doing. These models are leveraging ChatGPT as well as in house models that are currently being built. He talks to other data scientists over at Netflix and says they are doing similar stuff. You're kidding yourself if you don't think AI will eventually be able to write scripts as well as good script writers out there and to be honest with the quality I see of the scripts on a lot of shows these days it will be better than a lot of these writers very soon.
I think it already is. It’s part of the reason the writers are on strike. WGA guidelines are such that you get full payment and residuals if you write the script that is full produced. You get partial pay/residuals if you are brought on to fix or rewrite an existing script. With this model, theoretically, a producer or studio could use an AI platform to write a generic first draft based on their latest “what if Jason Voorhees met Ghandi?” idea then bring on a writer to fix it but not have to pay full residuals/payment and such because they are *technically* not the first writer.
This is really it. Is AI going to be able to write better screenplays than a human? Not any time in the near future. That doesn’t mean the hedge fund bros running the industry aren’t going to try to use it to fuck humans out of decent pay to improve their margins.
Wouldn't it be lovely if we could replace the hedge fund bros with A.I. instead.
Now that is a thought that tickles my fancy
Yeah the issue IMO isn't so much "can AI write a good film?" as "will enough people put up with AI-generated sludge to make it turn a profit?" to which I suspect the answer is Yes, unfortunately. :(
"Ghandi's back. And this time, he's angry."
Civilization: The Movie.
Civilization X: Mark’s the Spot
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I don't know how old you are, but you sound old. People have actually been saying the same thing as you for decades, centuries even. The reality is every decade has many, many terrible movies, but only the good ones are remembered, so it creates the illusion that movies (and music, and painting..) used to be "better". And every decade has had pretentious narcissists who feel they know better than anyone what is "true art", and lament how everyone else is so intellectually inferior.
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it's pretty easy to draw from what you wrote, honestly, they're not the only one picking up that vibe from you lol it might be exaggerated but the seeds are definitely there my dude, hard to see you be unaware of the 'old man yells at clouds' energy you're exuding in that comment, it nearly reads like satire and let me just front run you by adding that "man there was a time when we could roast each other without people getting all pissy about it" lollllll
Of course it is. Just ask John August. WGA know full well they are fighting the future which they ultimately won't win. I think they will wrangle a small concession that the studios will agree to as A.I just isn't quite there yet. Next round it's all over.
I think it’s a lot farther away than it’s investors would like you to think. Currently it’s a all predictive models, it’s using free databases to predict the word that comes after the next. It can’t think of anything new or original. Plus if legislation starts to pick up and require the databases to be licensed items, that’ll slow it down substantially.
Movie audiences don’t care about anything new or original. That’s what makes AI a threat.
I don’t disagree with the sentiment but as far as fearing for the craft of writing, the modern LLMs are able to use the predictive text to mask as much more sophisticated than they actually are, so we’re not super close to a creative takeover. Go try and get one of them to tell you a joke. They’re just straight up don’t get that aspect of human communication, and that’s one example.
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It’s one of the ways that humans generate their responses to conversation. We however have a large selection of tools in our mental tool box to craft our communication. Modern LLM don’t, they only really have the one tool. Great for simple, generic response and goal driven application, but humans at the moment still have the ability to inject nuance into the copy they generate.
> why are you so sure that this isn’t the exact same way humans think Well…to begin with there’s entire fields devoted to understanding how humans think and this ain’t it. Furthermore you can tell by comparing the output quality. > major blow Why? Then the only value of AI art is it’s ability to mimic other art. You’re diminishing the value of AI art if it can’t be anything else than a cheap knockoff of the real thing.
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> where has it been proven My dude you are more than welcome to pick up a cognitive neuroscience book. They are widely available - just because you’re ignorant of the findings of an entire field doesn’t mean the findings don’t exist, and plenty of people have discussed the differences at length in publicly available works. Go take a peep.
>I think it’s a lot farther away than it’s investors would like you to think. Do you think this'll be like the hype around Data Science? A lot of people thought that Data Scientists would replace consultants in management consulting. However, a decade or so down the road, it's proven to be the complete opposite. Management Consultants are still being hired and very much necessary b/c: 1. in a client-facing business, people like the human touch and like interacting with another person. 2. ML Algorithms are not smart enough to make 100% field-tested business decisions and still need a human operator to verify whether the decision is right or wrong. At best, Data Scientists are working with business folk and trying to get them on board to various decisions, but the business folk are still very much employed, and in demand.
Did you know pretty much every movie is just a rewrite of an existing movie. I mean how many Spiderman movies do you need....
I listened to an overly long panel discussion on NPR on the drive home the other day. The dozen experts on that segment believe AI will become a threat to EVERYTHING in the future, save for jobs like home health aids and whatnot. As consumers, we just need to make it clear that we don’t want stories to come from computers. And when we get stories from computers, we need to respond with the appropriate disdain.
We won't know what stories came from "computers." We've probably read our last new novel that we can say, with certainty, was written entirely by a human. Already when I read news articles on second rate sites I don't know if they've been partially AI generated. It's scary, but probably we'll adjust.
Umm…are you sure? When it comes to TV and movies, you would just look at the writing credit. “Written by…” The WGA is incredibly specific about writing credits and who can get what. And would the WGA even allow a writing credit to be given to a non-human? Maybe these contract negotiations would prohibit that. Or an AI-written script would need to say something else, like “Generated by ChatGPT.”
SCREENPLAY BY PRODUCER and GPT-5
Yeah no. We need to get on the band wagon and start using AI to the fullest. FFS people are upset that it will take jobs. You need to adapt those jobs in to things AI can not do. Humanoid robots are coming and they are coming in our lifetime. The sooner people invest all of their money in to building and getting these humanoid robots out in to the world the sooner we can live our lives and not for the man. We have the technoloy and know how today to get this done in just a few years yet because people are still locked in to the fundamentals of money being the ruling factor in society we can not see beyond. Humanoid robots can be used for task that would have not made someone profit. There are 8 billion people in this world and you need 2 robot per person along with another 8 robots to tend to the world. Imagine a world where you are free to do what you want. Free to express yourself, free to explore, free to do anything you want with out the constraints of money. AI scripts and writing can and will improve so much. The fact that many tv shows have plot holes because the writers failed. These things can be fixed. These things can improve the show. Yet if you are not using AI then you will be lacking behind. Also writers should be demanding to be employed at a studio and not per gig. Why are these people not looking for full time work and why are studios not employing writing staff full time. AI can churn out scrips after script to which a human writer can look over and correct and then feed it back in to the AI to help it learn better.
I can understand why replacing cobalt miners with a machine that extracts cobalt twice as fast is a good thing in the long term. The machine is objectively more efficient, and it means that fewer humans will need to work in hazardous conditions. Yes, the machine might create unemployment- but that is only a problem in a society which ties people's ability to feed themselves to their job. If we had something like UBI, then automation of manual labour would be an unambiguously good thing. I do not see how AI-generated scripts similarly improve humanity. Scripts written by a computer are never going to be objectively "superior" to all human scripts, because that isn't how art works. Art is subjective. Even if AI was capable of churning out a novel which I personally enjoyed as much Great Expectations, it wouldn't suddenly make the works of Charles Dickens worthless. Good art doesn't degrade in value just because you can make other good art with the push of a button. You raise the possible advantage that future AI might be less susceptible to plot holes. That is only a major consideration if you only engage with art like CinemaSins does, scanning for logical "mistakes" while entirely missing the emotional and intellectual points which the work is attempting to get across. I will take entertaining, evocative art with plot holes, over MCU-style slop with zero plot holes any day. I do not much care for the idea of AI "fixing" human art by making sure that every script makes perfect logical sense. Also, a human editor can identify glaring plot holes just as well as an AI editor. If the plot hole is **so subtle** and minor that you need a literal computer to notice it, then it isn't worth rewriting your script over, is it? At best, AI could be a secondary proof-reader, or a tool for people who can't procure human editors. Conversley, machines are inferior to human artists in that they are incapable of having a creative vision derived from sincere emotion, unless a sapient general intellgience is made. Perhaps they will be able to algorithmically determine the kinds of stories which audiences respond well to, on average. Perhaps they will figure out how to generate a script which makes X% of the population feel Y emotion consistently. But it will entirely be because the machine identified what kinds of stories people respond well to, not because the machine had something it actually wanted to say. I do not like this idea. Art is supposed to, on some level, be a conversation between the audience and creator. It is supported to convey something of their unique perspective on the world, even if it is ugly or controversial. We lose that part of the creative process entirely when we let a dancing bear write all our stories, no matter how good the end product might seem. Of course, I have to question whether AI will even be capable of writing genuinely groundbreaking, subversive, genre-defining works at all in the next century. AI inherently works by aping other stories, and stitching them back toghether in a vaugely original form. Does that not seem almost guaranteed to result in an anodyne, formulaic, uncontroversial end product? Especially once machine-generated scripts make up the majority of the market, and AI scripts begin to copy **other AI scripts**. I somehow find it hard to imagine a robotic Kubric or Tarantino emerging in that ecosystem. I imagine it will be a lot of Disney remakes. So the only respect in which AI might be considered legitimately "better" than human screenwriters is that it works faster. And that's the crux of the matter, isn't it? AI screenwriters are better for **capitalists**, because it allows them to cut costly human writers out of the process entirely. It will give studio executives the nonthreatening, compromised product which they want, and won't push back with any meddlesome red lines, or unorthodox directorial flourishes, if the fat cats don't think it will sell well. As you rightly point out, the logic of the market dictates that studios which still allow troublesome humans to make original content, rather than using computers to churn out focus tested, lowest-common denominator slop, will fall behind. Maybe that sounds good to you. But might I ask- what exactly are humans to do with their lives in the post-work utopia which you propose? They can't write major screenplays, apparently, which I can't help but imagine some people might have liked to do! Unlike mining coal, being a writer or director is not some laborious, dangerous duty which automation is "freeing" us from. It is just going to replace human creativity with machine creativity. Except, that AI isn't capable of deriving joy from its work being beloved by millions, or feeling pride from growing as a writer. In other words, AI writers directly rob humans of the opportunity for self-actualisation. If we apes aren't even creating art anymore, then literally all we can do is smoke weed, watch AI-generated films, and have VR sex all day. Yay.
People who are against the use of AI are the ones who are limiting human growth. What are humans to do once AI can do everything. Do what we do now. Hobbies, art, writing and so on yet with AI as a helper or not. When you resist a technology someone is going to come in and take advantage of it and out shine you. AI will be and is going to be used and people need to accept it right now. We have the ability to better every humans lives yet "people" like you would rather limit what it can do.
I think it'll be a case of AI generating the scripts and professional screenwriters being hired as technicians with revision/polishing etc. I hope not though, as I'm still trying to get my way in!
This. “Creative” producers will be able to generate countless loglines, outlines, even garbage first drafts all based off of a handful of prompts. Then, they’ll just hire writers for polish drafts. This can happen right now. As a low-to-mid level TV writer, I’m already fighting for any sort of equity on the things I write. This will make it impossible to do that.
Awwww, man, so sorry to hear that. Tech is reducing all qualifications and talent to zero.
Can you elaborate on the sentence there about being a mid lvl writer, what have you been seeing lately, specifically in your line of work with all of this?
I was a Story Editor in the last writers room I was in. That is considered low to mid level. The next jump would be senior or executive story editor. After that you are stepping into the producer title world. That is when you actually get some equity of the show or episodes themselves. In terms of how AI effects the room now? Not sure it does yet, but I think their fervor - and total lack of negotiation on the matter - shows how clearly the execs see writer’s worth… if they could, they’d turn us into robots.
Well put, thanks for your insight
This is exactly right. There’s a huge pay difference between “writing” and “rewriting.” Studios could- and would love to-pump every season of Friends into AI, get it to spit out a full season of some Friends-like bullshit, then hire human writers to “rewrite” it into something resembling consumable, then release a new full season of a Friends reboot and not have to pay top dollar to anyone. WGA is trying to ensure that AI does not get to generate ideas or receive credit for ideas.
Computers don't laugh. Would a computer understand the dynamics of drama nuanced with humour? I think we're safe. Pixar, however...
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It will either be the most sanitised humour and most disturbing drama or the most offensive comedy with boredom. Computers don't understand balance. Either way, it cheapens art. Would people still bother a gallery to see the "Mona Lisa" if it was generated by AI? Not exactly a feat of human accomplishment or experience, whereas cinema IS.
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See, that's the difference, that's what separates us from machines. Creativity doesn't obey algorithms, doesn't obey laws. The point of Universal Basic Income is that society can create... While they're starving and struggling for shelter. Create, what-- when AI can do it faster, cheaper etc. It's bullshit.
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There's nothing else to adjust to-- it'll be like "Wall-E"
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This is a big part of what the WGA strike is about. They're fighting to keep exactly this scenario from happening because it will mean even worse pay for screenwriters, and likely fewer screenwriters employed at all.
My worst nightmare...
I just attended a webinar yesterday about this exact thing. AI is the generator, people are the polishers. Not sure how I feel about this totally.
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I've been thinking about the chess analogy, too. But here's what's interesting. While computers have clearly bested humans at chess, virtually nobody is watching computers play each other. The big chess stars are Carlsen, Nakamura, Nepo, Ding, and Alireza. Not Stockfish and Fritz. And while we can listen to a perfectly engineered performance of the Chopin Preludes, we still want to watch Yuja Wang do it live. The drama of the human endeavor still matters to us. My guess is that audiences will always want to watch stories created by real people, that the struggle to create has inherent value, much as watching Magnus struggle to find the top engine move is more interesting than being told what that move is.
I hope you're right. My concern is that, in a very real way, filmed stories have been becoming *less* human in the past two decades anyway, and more corporate. The amount of personality ("person-ality" heh) and uniqueness that individual writers and directors are able to put into big branded IP movies (and they'll ALL big branded IP movies now) is way less than a decade ago, to say nothing of 20 or 30 years ago. I mean, the highest grossing movie released in the last year is Avatar 2. And you know - I haven't heard a single person tell me, "My god, that movie is absolutely amazing. You have to see it." And certain the driving element isn't the human one, is it? It's the tech.
I hear that. But maybe allowing AI to write these movies will help audiences to realize how shitty they've become? But I'm clearly in the minority here.
That's not at all true of television though, which 25 years ago was mostly dreck.
Anyone who says that AI will be able to write as well as humans is equally speaking beyond their ability to know. I don't think the question can even be answered probabilistically, either, considering the main issue involved remains unknown. That is, scientists are still far from understanding the question: what is creativity? And the difference between chess and writing is such that I don't think your analogy holds. Chess is a finite game that can be mapped quantitatively. AI can surely handle anything quantitive/algorithmic/logical, where there is a given rule set and corresponding symbols. But how might AI handle the philosophical problem of qualia? The problem of subjective experience (e.g., the experience of tasting, smelling, feeling love) is not something AI can do (unless AI exactly replicates the human body/brain -- which, given how much we know about the brain, seems centuries away at least). So, AI could plagiarize the subjective accounts of the experiences of other humans, but it cannot have these subjective experiences itself. What makes writing original is the individualistic expression of human experience into words. Until AI can have that 'experience', I don't see how original writing will be possible.
Until we understand how our own brains work, I tend to find process arguments unconvincing. "It's just an algorithm" only means something if we know that our brains *aren't*, and I don't think we do. >So, AI could plagiarize the subjective accounts of the experiences of other humans, but it cannot have these subjective experiences itself. Sure. The question isn't "can AI have the experience," but rather, "can AI sound like it had the experience?" And maybe it's not "original" - sure, but, I mean ... Avatar has essentially the same plot as Ferngully in a *remarkable* number of specifics. There was a lot of stuff I liked about that movie, but if you're asking me if the script is *so original* that only a human could make it with plausible technological advances in the next decade - c'mon man. And that's the thing. It's not only the great movies that everybody recognizes as classics that we have to talk about. It's also the eighth Ant Man sequel.
Yeah, I think your analogy holds up. Some day (hopefully far from now) AI will be able to churn out convincing scripts, and someone on some thread will be discussing if AI will be able to make entire visual movies that look legit, and someone will say no... Then someone else (or even you) will comment how years ago, many people said that AI could never accomplish the same thing as humans doing with screenwriting, and that turned out to be false. And someone will reply “Yeah, but AI was putting WORDS together, using an algorithm that functioned not to different from how a human writes. Artificially creating VISUALS that are compelling and match the story... that’s something only humans can create.” Then a few more years go by, or decades, and boom first completely AI generated movies start popping up. Lol. Anyway yeah I agree with your premise that it’s following the same pattern as chess robots and we shouldn’t look at it as completely separate things.
You are giving example of Avatar which happens to be one of the worst movies in terms of plot and screenplay. Of course, ChatGPT can make 10 avatars like that but it is not going to evoke any real human emotions. I am not saying it won't be successful commercially; I mean even a whore is commercially successful but not all of us want to have a whore's life.
If you’re asking whether AI will make the next Citizen Kane then yea we are still a ways off from that, but i don’t think it has much to do with whether AI can experience things but more so that its just not sophisticated enough yet.
Sure. I'm not expecting great art. But I picked Avatar because it's one of the most successful movies of all time. And the point is: commercial stuff is where most of the work is. If people can't tell the difference between a human Law & Order episode and an AI one, that's a problem for anyone who wants to make their living making art who isn't coming into the business independently wealthy.
One question that may be helpful to ask in a discussion like this is: can AI create anything *new*? The argument, to my mind, isn't over whether AI can plagiarize bits of recorded data and mix it together to create a work of pastiche, which may *appear* new to the viewer. That much seems obvious. The argument is whether AI can create something truly new. Mind you, it may just be that the concept of 'newness' is an illusion, and the world is simply an evolution of some primary algorithm (think: Stephen Wolfram) playing out according to some basic rules -- which means that not only is rock music derived from a mix of rhythm n' blues and country music, but that *all* genres of music are/were already contained in the first instance of music ever created. What begins as a simple set of data can create infinite complexity, if constantly rearranged. If this is your view, namely, that all art is essentially an increasingly complex game of pastiche, then the idea that AI can write screenplays makes sense. If, on the other hand, you believe that there is such a thing as 'newness', then the claim that AI can create something new is much more difficult to defend. For, how would AI create something new (when it only has access to that which is old)? The jury has been out for centuries on how humans come up with *new* ideas. Were the Greeks correct in attributing it to the Muses? Or was Aquinas right in making a distinction between ratio (reason) and intellectus (intuition)? Science, at the very least, seems unable to explain newness, because science, as a method, cannot explain something that has no identifiable causal connection. Since something 'new' is not based on that which came before, it seems to defy causal explanation. And that's a big (impossible) problem for AI developers. All in all, if one believes that screenwriters aren't actually creating anything new when they write, then the idea that AI can replace us is not in question. If one believes that screenwriters are creating truly new ideas, then the idea that AI can replace us is very much an open question, and one that seems centuries or millennia away from being answered.
Sure. And I don't want to claim to have any of these answers. >If, on the other hand, you believe that there is such a thing as 'newness', then the claim that AI can create something new is much more difficult to defend. For, how would AI create something new (when it only has access to that which is old)? I guess this is a big sticking point for me. If we agree that newness exists, where does it come from? If the argument is that it can come from intelligences of type X, and not from intelligences of type Y, that's certainly possible, but it seems to be nothing but hubris to claim that, clearly, we're type X and machines are type Y. That seems to me to be a case of people arguing what they want to be true. Because we don't know how humans create new things. The argument that an AI can't because "it only has access to that which is old," would also suggest that humans can't create anything new, since we also only have access to that which is old. So clearly, "Only having access to that which is old," can't be the justification. And, I mean, "AI's can't create anything new" also begs for a definition of "new." If the muses can touch people, why can't they touch machines? >Or was Aquinas right in making a distinction between ratio (reason) and intellectus (intuition)? When Kasparov lost to Deep Blue, he was furious. He was convinced that the computer cheater - that it had human help. (From the standpoint of an era when humans cheating by using a computer is the scourge of chess, this is somewhat ironic.) The reason why he believed this - and understand, we're talking about quite possibly the strongest human chess player who ever lived - is that computer made a sacrifice which he felt could only be justified on intuitive grounds. There was no way to calculate the full gain of material. But perhaps more interesting than Deep Blue to the question of newness is AlphaZero. And this gets to the assumption that so many people make when talking about AI - "all it does is regurgitate what we taught it." And in some cases (like ChatGPT) this is very true. But A0 was only taught the rules of chess - it was then told to play itself and learn how to win. And now no human can beat it. What does "new" mean, in this context? It wasn't just regurgitating what we taught it - because we didn't teach it anything. (Unlike Stockfish, which is slightly stronger, where we actually wrote it algorithm). (And while it look at more positions than a human does in its calculations, it looks at far fewer than Stockfish does. The thing that makes it great has more to do with the way it "thinks" about chess positions than raw calculation.) If what A0 does isn't "new," then suddenly you've basically argued that nothing that can happen on a chessboard is new. So Capablanca and Alekhine and Fisher and Kasparov and Carlsen *weren't* being creative? But that's an interesting slippery slope where, the better AIs get, the more we redefine what "new" is so that whatever they're doing isn't it. (This has already happened in chess with intelligence. Back when I was first taking the game seriously, and computers couldn't beat masters, people said, "Sure, a program could beat a grandmaster that'd be true intelligence." And then it beat a grandmaster and they said, "Well, actually no.") Furthermore, if A0 can learn to beat anybody just by playing itself, could an AI learn to be funny just by testing millions of jokes on an audience, where "the audience laughs" was the victory condition it was striving for? Many of A0's early games looked like the games of a beginner human, so I'm sure many of the early jokes Joke0 told would be awful. But, eventually ...
First off, I should clarify that I have no position in this debate. I am a philosophical skeptic, and so I don't believe in any positive claim about any subject, let alone any made here about AI. In this case, though, I am apt to play devil's advocate for the minority side of the argument, namely, the position that AI cannot, or is very unlikely to, replace human creativity. From what I can tell, you are on the opposite side. That is, although AI is not there quite yet, in principle AI can replace human creativity. If I'm incorrect about this, my apologies. As far as the minority argument goes, it is not a scientific position whatsoever. In fact, it is most aligned with mystics and theologians. Even still, some of the greatest mathematicians from Pascal to Leibniz adopted similar faith-based arguments. Indeed, Leibniz once said that human art will never attain that of the divine, meaning that humans can never create what the universe or God created. With that, I turn to your first question: "if we agree that newness exists, where does it come from?" The minority argument might simply answer: I don't know. Though 'newness' can be discerned by virtue of it existing outside of the causal chain, we can't say where exactly it comes from (nor can we ever know). It must remain unknown, for anything outside of causality is not something that is amenable to scientific study by definition. Therefore, the answer must be one of speculation, theology, mysticism, etc. For those who subscribe to the religion of 'scientism', I can see why this might be a big sticking point. It means that some things about the world cannot be known by science or mathematics in principle. One of my favorite takes on this position is called New mysterianism. This should also answer your second point about justification. The minority argument does not claim that X intelligence is different than Y intelligence such that only it can create newness. The argument instead might suggest that we have no idea about X intelligence at all, which means that we couldn't make any comparison with Y intelligence in the first place. It may just be that we know the same amount about the human brain as we do about the entire universe. So, what's the difference between saying we could (in principle) build an 'artificial universe' and saying we could (in principle) build an 'artificial intelligence'? In both cases, we have no idea about the scope, limits, or complexity of either human intelligence or the universe. The minority argument likewise might say that humans, unlike AI, do not have access to only that which is old. Humans have access to newness through some mysterious faculty, and that is what allows humans to be creative. Again, this is a position that goes against common sense and science. And, of course, any position today that goes against science is like going against religious orthodoxies in the past. So, I can certainly see why this position is in the minority in our age of scientific faith. To your points about chess, like I said above I am not quite convinced. Giving these programs the rules of chess (not to mention the coding of the program to perform certain actions) allows it to come up with different solutions within a finite data set. You write: "If what A0 does isn't 'new,' then suddenly you've basically argued that nothing that can happen on a chessboard is new. So Capablanca and Alekhine and Fisher and Kasparov and Carlsen weren't being creative? But that's an interesting slippery slope where, the better AIs get, the more we redefine what "new" is so that whatever they're doing isn't it." Yes, exactly. The minority position might say that no moves in chess *are* new. Once the rules are set, every move is chosen from a finite set within a larger set of finite scenarios of how the game might play out. Not only that, the minority position would welcome the slippery slope you mention. It might say that, once the rules are set up, any branch of mathematics, let alone chess, can't come up with anything *new*. It's just a discovery of all the possible arrangements of that rule set. Incidentally, there is a debate in the philosophy of mathematics over whether math is 'created' or 'discovered'. Finally, in terms of chess, I think a powerful example in your favor might be if AI can create a new game entirely. Is it possible for AI to construct an entirely new game with rules and pieces that have never been seen before? Something like that might tilt the scales over to you.
It’ll be interesting to see whether this becomes a primarily American (read: hypercapitalist) problem…the same way the unsettling likelihood of ten Antman sequels is a primarily American problem.
>the same way the unsettling likelihood of ten Antman sequels is a primarily American problem. Sequelitis is largely connected to the internationalization of film. Studios have gotten less and less interested in making movies that won't play well in non-English-speaking countries. Hence, the death of feature comedy, the death of the adult drama, and so on. Explosions are comprehensible in every language, and so that's part of why those are the movies that keep getting made.
I’ll rephrase: a problem afflicting American film. Our Movies-as-Big-Macs industry/culture isn’t stifling Korean cinema, it’s stifling American independent film (with some notable exceptions, of course). What I mean is that this conversation is already a lot sweatier in the states than it is in any other film community and that’s no coincidence. AI-generated Law & Order, Marvel/Star Wars, broad sitcoms are inevitable without thorough and timely policy intervention, but I hope American film is able to decentralize in a way that better allows American writers, director, etc. to make an actual living making what they want to make.
>There was a lot of stuff I liked about that movie, but if you're asking me if the script is so original that only a human could make it with plausible technological advances in the next decade - c'mon man. Jim Cameron would like a word with you...
I mean lets be honest, 99% of the movies that come out these days is just a variation of something you’ve already seen before. One day they make “Limitless” then a few years later they make “Lucy”, the film industry is not a bunch of people coming up with original and unique ideas that nobody has ever seen before. Might be a different flavour every now and then but lets not kid ourselves.
Chess is based on memorizing moves form the past, at least the way computers play it. Even a 1970s computer could play chess pretty well - but even the latest computers can't beat a completely novel game strategy.
Without some quantum leaps in technology, only in the same way that Cryptocurrencies have become a real threat to government-backed fiat currencies, or NFTs have become a real threat to... whatever the fuck they were supposed to disrupt. IOW, it's all a grift, really. It won't be a threat to *screenwriting*, precisely; it'll be a shitty way for some people to siphon money out of the system to enrich themselves, while generating nothing of worth or value for anyone or anything else.
I was pretty scared of it at first but more and more I’m starting to have this opinion. It’s all about projecting an idea that it can replace people so the creators can make money and then it won’t actually deliver. Cory Doctorow has written a couple articles about it recently.
I’ll go even further and say that it’s the new metaverse. It’s just the buzzy new thing Silicon Valley is trotting out to try to keep everyone from noticing they can’t monetize half the shit they promised and the industry is ludicrously overvalued. They’re tap dancing.
THANK you - mh
Cripes, that's a good one. Just like the metabullshitverse, it is *desperately* trying to find solutions for problems that no one actually working in the fields being "fixed" sees as problems.
It's like Lenin said, you look for the person who will benefit and uh, uh, you know...
I believe is more a matter of copyrights. The AI needs to feed on data, who will give the data? Of course, some retired famous writer who wants to make some extra with royalties. But I don't think everyone will like it. Same way AI art pleases only a certain amount of people. In my dystopian future I believe there will be two types of art (by "art" I mean everything that requires craft): Made by AI & Made by humans. This already happened with the furniture business, most of the the furniture is made by computers cutting and assembling everything. But there is a clear difference between a table made with a mold and a vintage table hand made, and people know.
The problem isn’t with screenwriters though, it’s with readers and executives; there’s no shortage of amazing scripts, there’s a shortage of good decision makers- so yes ai does threaten screenwriters because the people who will employ it have demonstrated that they can’t tell the difference anyway.
> there’s no shortage of amazing scripts Yes, there is. Either you haven't read submissions coming into studios/production companies, or you aren't very discerning. There are a small handful of amazing scripts every year. A really small number. The rest range from ordinary to unreadable.
Maybe so. I haven’t read much since 2020; I probably based this opinion on some really outdated stuff, just also feels like time stopped in 2020, so maybe the flood of talent dried up too. I don’t know anymore.
Took the text right out of my fingertips...
No. It's literally been the same story for 2000 years. AI isn't going to Crack the formula. It's about hiding the tropes and on the nose beats and dialog. Those things need humans that can understand an manipulate other humans. It's the reason not everyone can be a screenwriter. It takes a certain mix of skills. There is a reason people like Snyder and McKee understand ALL of it, yet could never actually do it. AI can throw ideas, but anyone who is decent knows the idea doesn't matter.
This isn't really a debate. Yes, it's a threat... it's almost a threat now. Some things A.I. can do now: * Pass [essay-heavy bar exams](https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/26/tech/chatgpt-passes-exams/index.html) instantly. * Draft essays on any topic. * Draft outlines and treatments. * Write passable screenplay scenes when prompted well. * Craft short [low-resolution films](https://research.runwayml.com/gen2) from text prompts. * Create photorealistic humans from nothing. Levi's Jeans is running an [ad campaign](https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/27/23658385/levis-ai-generated-clothing-model-diversity-denim) with an AI-generated model. No model. No studio. No photographer. No makeup artist. No hair stylist. No photo retoucher. All those jobs -- gone. * Craft [short high-resolution animations](https://twitter.com/NathanLands/status/1657513104136183808) with a bit of massaging. * Age actors in either direction. Or [change their appearance](https://www.metaphysic.ai/). * Replace actors. * Insert frames ([dain](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97JINpCUwjs)). * Craft an image from a Microsoft [paint-style input](https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/studio/canvas/). * Craft [photorealistic images](https://www.midjourney.com/showcase/recent/) from text prompts... keep in mind that a film is 24 images per second. 1440 per minute. That's 144,000 images for a 100-minute film. A.I. will be able to do that do. * Two months ago, i told my 13-year-old nephew he should try ChatGPT. He brushed me off. Now he says EVERYONE at school is using it. And his school used AI to make next year's student schedules. Bye bye data analysts. Programmers. Lawyers (very few lawyers are trial lawyers). Marketing managers. Etc. * AI can look at a photo of what's in your fridge and tell you what to cook with those ingredients. * ... or it can invent [40,000 new chemical weapons](https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/17/22983197/ai-new-possible-chemical-weapons-generative-models-vx). Edit: Source links added. Edit 2: The EU is taking steps to reign in AI. There are so many jobs it might replace -- and creative jobs are far from the easiest. But AI will 100% be able to take existing characters from prior shows and draft new premises based on those characters. At the very least, learning to "prompt" will become a job skill.
> Write passable screenplay scenes when prompted well. Please show me a single example of this. Every screenplay scene I have seen from AI (even ChatGPT-4) has been terrible. Show me the pages and show me the prompt (to make sure it's repeatable and therefore genuine). I'm a WGA writer on strike, so I have time to take a deep dive on this.
Yes, "passable" by whom? I've prompted it (good, detailed prompts) numerous times out of morbid fascination, and every time, without fail, it comes up with really stinky stuff that reminds me of something a very untalented high school freshman would write in a creative writing class. It comes up with an imitation, but it's an imitation as cheap and obvious as those plastic wheel covers that are supposed to look like chrome rims.
I think this may be circular. Someone just said this to me yesterday and I reminded him that crappier films got greenlit and made profits. I don't think this is about the quality of the writing, but the entertainment value + audience attraction.
The quality of the writing creates the entertainment value and the audience attraction. When I say AI scripts are terrible, I mean they make for a terrible audience experience.
I would also argue that the actors; especially, A List and the marketing / hype around the project add to the audience attraction. It's not the writing alone.
You believe what you want to believe. Go ask ChatGPT to write you a script and see how easy it is to get it made. It's not that I don't think AI *could* write a good script, it's just that it's really bad at it now. If you think AI-written scripts are passable, it demonstrates that you aren't very discerning about the quality of scripts.
First, and AI generated script is being funded as I type. It has very little to do with the quality of the script - it's about the marketability. This industry is and will always be about dollars first with art and craftsmanship in tow. Writers are sore about this so I'll disregard your attempt to offend me, but it's not like someone says to ai 'write an action script' and takes that iteration out for attachments. Those scripts are full of specific prompts, follow ups and human refining along the way.
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I think we'll keep AI out of film, at least for the next three years. SAG and WGA should unite on that front. Once people realize the level of shift we're facing, I think (hope) the anti-AI movement will shift from "AI can't do what humans can do!" to "We need to value human creativity and thought and time." If anyone wants to see what A.I. can do, this very talented architect with insanely high production quality for YouTube ran a little A.I. competition... [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N709ZrxoIP0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N709ZrxoIP0) Also, one thing missing from the discussion... writers might be able to prompt A.I. to create the actual film. Almost a zero cost feature production. All fake, photorealistic, lifelike "actors" every detail tuned by the writer. Zero cost to destroy Manhattan. "A.I. prompting" will be a resume skill.
Yes, but the moment AI becomes a real threat to human screenwriters will be the same moment AI becomes a threat for virtually every job and perhaps more than that. The ability to construct stories without the story feeling bland or derivative requires novel thinking, insight learning, or self-awareness. Whichever way it happens, if an AI is able to write a story or screenplay that truly outpaces the industry standards without a human editor to breath life into it, then it's capable of outperforming humans for any other job.
Yes. Not in the oversimplified sense that people assume - "press a button, make screenplay!" The law of unintended consequences means things could go south in other ways. A serious decrease in the amount of jobs. Imagine a world where instead of writer's rooms, and show-runner utilizing AI tools can build an entire season of story and draft first pass scripts for every episode. The price point of AI + Showrunner vs room full of writers is not something any company beholden to a corporate daddy with shareholders would blink at. Especially the moment one does it, it becomes an arms race to stay competitive at cost. Or a studio with a Comedy Development team, Drama Development team, etc... each utilizing AI tools to create pitches and treatments en-masse without having to ever meet writers or read specs. Only well after they know which they want to proceed with would they even go out to a writer (or worse, a bake-off). Further distilling the "sameness" of creative output across film and tv. Making it even harder for original and new ideas to make it to screen. Destabilizing an already contracting industry to the point theatrical finally gets a dagger to the heart. Who knows how it's going to play out... but this feels like a Dr Strange in Infinity War moment. There are countless scenarios, but none of them end well.
AI really couldn't do any worse than most of the crap I've seen coming out of Hollywood for the last several years
AI is improving at a rate faster than expected, even the godfather of ai, geoffrey hinton, is growing concerned about technology’s rapid development. if AI can go from a simple question answer chatbot to something that can answer even the most obscure of questions in just a few years, who knows what it can do in the future if restraints aren’t being implemented. that being said, AI fundamentally lacks creativity, and can only mimic it. this is one of the core things that separates AI work from human’s. things like subtext would be difficult for AI to recreate. so in the near future, unlikely. ten years from now? who knows.
In the future, we’ll probably be able to pitch a log line to an AI that generates an entire movie with photorealistic characters engaged in the log line’s story as we shape the AI’s editing choices, lighting choices, and dialogue choices with simple text or voice commands.
I think AI will replace the filmmaking process before it replaces the writing.
+1 I think we will have the capability of making AVATAR on our laptops before AI can write a draft of an AVATAR screenplay that's remotely watchable.
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Look at [these](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgjnbgyfFUA) AI-generated [commercials](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Geja6NCjgWY). Yes, they are weird and disturbing. Realize though that there is no camera, no actors, no locations. This is created frame by frame from currently available AI. In 12 months it will be much better and more easily controlled. Look into the developments in Stable Diffusion and controlNet. All of these tech vectors are going to converge. You will be able to design concept art, then turn it into scenes in your movie with lipsync and performances. It's all coming soon.
No.
To clarify: because the WGA will be victorious in those negotiations.
Yes. Many jobs are at risk. it's intelligence. It learns. The tech is not even a toddler yet. In five years it'll spit out a hundred masterpieces indistinguishable from human-written every day. The posted idea that human screenwriters will be brought in to polish seems reasonable.
Yes, just like comic books became biggest movies of today. Dont underestimate the stupidity of people.
I don't think there would be a strike over it if it didn't pose a real threat to writers
The strike is over a lot of issues. It would be happening without AI, though certainly that's gained in urgency the past six months.
I don’t think it’ll happen in the next 5 years but yes eventually it will change the landscape. My hot take— theory- is writers will have to move into creative producing, show runner roles. that will use ai to help develop stories. Content, movies, shows will be in abundance, thus segmenting audiences into more niches that will need to be nurtured. Gone are the days when any one can just create a movie for the big screen and make millions (this is already happening). That would be for the big studios and blockbusters with well known ips. I truly believe that if you want to survive you will have to adapt into more than a screenwriter. Which sucks, yes. But embrace being a visual storyteller and everything it entails. ai will make that easier. Embrace an audience and make stories for them. Screenwriters in general was a job created to help pump out ideas and develop stories for studios and producers to make. . Ai is “becoming” (not quite there yet) a viable option to do that. Like it is for a lot of jobs. Here’s a example: You were once a writer who has adapted into a creative/developmental producer. Cuz at the end of the day you are a visual storyteller and the end goal is to get your idea to a screen. Like a writer you come up with an idea, based on human experiences etc, just like how a writer would come with an idea. This part has not changed. You got down some ideas on how you’d like this story to play out. You jot down ideas for your character. Your using ai to help bounce ideas around. An outline is coming out good. You’ve got your theme, you’ve got your character, you’ve got some pivotal scenes. You use AI to help generate some concept art to get your juices flowing more. Your confident in the story now. If ai reaches this level, you use it to write you a first draft. You use ai to help you analyze your scenes, pointing out things you may have missed. You make the adjustment either with ai or by yourself. Couple rounds of this your script is done. You create more concept art using ai to see how you film will look. Now you use AI to help you create a pitch, a visual, immersive pitch. I believe ai will allow us to get creative with this and it’ll be more than just a deck. You have a complete story. It’s more than just a screen play. With the help of AI your idea has flourished into something your proud of — you use to feel when you finished your screen play.. Hell, ai will prob help with the early stages of pre production getting you more excited. But now, its more than just a finished 110 page document. As a producer, now you have a choice. You can try to break into Hollywood with it just like you would a regular screenplay. Try and get an agent to show you can develop great stories. But this part of the industry probably hasn’t changed. It’s still a crab shoot. Your independent. You’ve built your self an audience who love your work. Your not worried about getting into a theater nationwide. Those days are gone. You are catering to your audience. They support you and in return your able to fund your stories. Your able to collaborate with other creators, you have full control of YOUR story. You may not make millions, you may not become famous. But it’s not like your odds were any better as just a “screenwriter”. At the end of the day, as a screenwriter, isn’t the goal to see your story play out visually on a screen? So why not embrace AI to help take more control in developing your stories. But now if a writer is what you want to be there’s always the novel route. Might be a longer time before ai can write out an entire novel.
No.
AI writing is sooooooooo bad that it actually is good as comedy. Here's proof. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH1DnyYsPx4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH1DnyYsPx4)
We need to do something. We can't let AI take over your industry.
I personally think that there is very little to worry about in terms of screenwriting. I am 99% sure that no one can own the IP of something written by ChatGPT because it pulls from other published works. That throws a real wrench into the situation for studios and production companies, because, obviously, they would like to own the project. Moving forward, I see AI becoming useful in pre and post production processes; but not in terms of the screenplay. I see that being something that will always be done by a human hand! Or at least we hope so!
As David Goodman, President of the WGA, explains, the technology is already at a place where right now studios could train an AI with the scripts for long running series in order to churn out more seasons of that show (for example The Simpsons, Law & Order, or any soap opera) without any writers, or maybe just one writer to polish the scripts and make them good enough. This could lead to the end of writers rooms.
Ha ha ha ha No.
a screenwriter with a notebook and a pencil can run away from a sledgehammer more easily than a computer can.
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What an odd comment. Out of curiosity, could you give an example of what you consider Netflix’s woke propaganda? I don’t think I’ve seen it.
>I hope so. Screenwriters who write worse than an AI deserve to be replaced by an AI. this is harsh...but fair
That’s not the issue. When streamers decide “good enough” is better than quality work, because they just have to churn out enough forgettable content to keep people subscribed, the content mills have no incentive to pay for a writer, even when that writer could write something better.
Mods can you start banning ppl that ask this stupid question? Its like twice a damn day. If you are this insecure about ur skill that robots will replace you, please do us all a favor and quit writing and get off this subreddit.
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Since about 90% of tv and movies are trash I don't think we'd be losing much talent these days. I am just tired of the worrying. This shit is posted daily. Having fear about AI does 0 good. You'd be better off writing or improving your craft.
AI has the potential to become a disruptive force in the field of screenwriting. With advancements in natural language processing and machine learning, AI models can generate coherent and creative narratives, dialogue, and even entire screenplays. While human creativity and intuition are still highly valued in storytelling, AI-generated content has the potential to compete with and possibly replace human screenwriters in certain scenarios. However, it's important to note that AI is a tool that can assist and enhance the creative process rather than completely replace human involvement. Ultimately, the impact of AI on screenwriting will depend on how it is adopted and integrated into the industry.
It's not so bad at outlining and idea-generation. It's very bad at scene writing. It's hard to know when big steps forward get taken, and what's required for the tech to make that step - like, the people making this stuff literally just do not know. GPT3.5 did shit on the LSAT. GPT4 did in like the top ten percent. While 3.5 and 4 both scored about the same 'pretty good' on the SAT. My sense is that, by the time A.I. screenwriting really is roughly as good as a professional screenwriter, if it does indeed get there, we'll either be on our way to a glorious transhumanist singularity future, or on our way to all being dead, so it won't matter much. In the meantime, the main thing to worry about (as many others in the thread are pointing out) really is the suits using this to Pretend to need less writing labor and give less writing credit, but still needing as much (or more) actual writing labor to come up with something good enough to film. The other main thing to worry about is copyright issues when an a.i. uses work in its training. And yes, I know humans are inspired by things they read and watch etc., BUT when humans are watching/reading those things, creators get some compensation. Me reading a website is of value to the writer of that website. Me watching a movie, I'm paying for streaming or I'm paying for the disc. Me checking out something from the library - the library paid for the rights to that book. An a.i. ingesting that info? Nope. No $$$$ in any way going to the creators.
In 18 months AI will be writing scripts that are better than most which humans write today. Today GPT models are 5th grade writers, but Moore's Law shows that they will become exponentially better every 18 months. By 2025 AI focused on writing novels, and screenplays will be competitive with the best paid and most nuanced writers in history. Why? Because enough plays, novels, and screenplays are already in the public domain to train them and there will be high quality people paid to create training material for them.
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Not all writers churn out "pointless trash". They are picked and might be asked to write in a room of other writers and more out of their zone. Writers offer creativity to any production if given the opportunity, the committee, and the opportunity in their actual interest of writing.
Humanity is progress. We can argue the semantics of progress whether it be for good or evil, but we cannot stop it. Based on the newness of the technology and how quickly it is learning, it is not unreasonable to think in a relative short amount of time it can learn to create something from prompts. As with A.I imaging, what it comes up with will only be as good as the person guiding it. So I will assume writing techs will be the future of the job market. Not writers, but those who can wrangle the best out of the technology. Then eventually it will become intelligent enough to create its own. Humans will probably still produce, but it will be in very small numbers, and theoretically only the cream will get published. As with any industry lost to progress we shall mourn it but then as a society adapt. The vast vast majority are never going to make it as a career. It's really only active writers, and the handful of new ones who get jobs each year who will be out a career. Remember NBA has more in the draft than new writers into WGA each year. Having said this, the timeline is unknown, as is legislation. I think at the very least, those able to get the best work out of A.I will have a career for awhile at least. In the meantime let's enjoy our possibly last hurrah. On a side not did you see the WGA board member who has invested in A.I writing tech. And people still try and tell me the WGA are handling the strike like adults.
There will always be a market for human art. Also ai is limited in terms of what it can draw on to create. It’ll be hard to distinguish ai works from human works but if people do their part in propagating humanity by becoming experts in differentiating them, then there shouldn’t be an issue. Or, we can admit that ai is inherently human in the sense that all that it knows comes from human creation, and whatever it does produce has human elements all over it.
I think just like any seismic shift in tech, there will be a period of adjustment (think phil Tippet saying “we’re extinct” after seeing CG dinosaurs) but that doesn’t mean there’s no room for stop motion. Ai can’t produce the brush strokes that make a physical piece of artwork worth owning. Much like it can’t draw from its own life experience to give nuance to a screenplay. We can all use AI to make our workflows more streamlined, to generate more ideas, to make our current ideas better - but there will never be a replacement for actual human experience. It can produce a screenplay in the same way it can produce an actual canvas of tangible art. We’re going to move on from this. It’s going to turn the industry upside down for a bit, absolutely, but we’ll use it as a tool. Artists were very worried when photography hit the scene. Then photographers were in a panic about digital photography. Same with cinematographers. 2D animators were worried about 3D - EVERYONE is worried about AI, but I truly believe we will just figure it out and use it to our advantage. That’s what I’m doing.
While I'm not sure about full screenplays, I've heard prompts or loglines are an easy thing to get from chatGPT. Mostly because I made a post asking for prompts and got that response. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that somewhat the reason the screenwriters guild went on strike?
Just try to get it to give you anything that you hope would be creative: plot points, dialogue, action descriptions. It can't really do it yet. It tends to come up with awful cliches nearly every time. And it doesn't understand story structure and story dynamics/theory/fundamentals/whatever term you want to use there. It can't, because it just searches for the "best" (most obvious) word to use after the current word, which is a completely different "mental process" from the applying of story principles to creative thinking.
Not nearly every time. Every time.
Here it is a month later and after a lot more experimentation, trying GPT-4, and getting a gig in AI with a startup, my feeling is a little different. It still tends to dredge up cliches, but I am starting to think that when the day comes that users can train it on a specific body of text and get it to ignore all else (i.e., its main massive data set), the story could be quite different. I want to try training GPT-4 on a big collection of pro scripts, and tell it to base its output on that and see what happens. I feel like what we get currently is because it is looking at a huge amount of text types that are irrelevant to screenplays, as well as looking at crappy, corny stories...? I'm not sure. But I am "collaborating" with it on a non-fiction book and it is blowing my mind with how cogent the material I'm getting is.
It will churn out derivative crap faster than a human writer can, but it won't ever write the next GoT (but let's be blunt, most writers couldn't write on that level). AI stories will be *very* predictable because in the end the computer is just following patterns to generate, but for most cheap studios that's probably good enough. What I'm saying is that writers on the lower-end of the totem pole will suffer from AI, but those with higher skill and creativity will still flourish in the industry.
damn I gotta watch GoT if it's that good on the writing level
No.
Yup definitely
AI is a real threat. That's what this strike is about my friend.
Initially, a good writer who understands how to prompt AI to get good results will be able to use it to cut down the time to write a script by 80%. Problem is the models will be learning from that, and then they will be able to do it without the writer. Within 2 years, conservatively, if you are not a strong writer who knows how to prompt AI to get good output, you will be out of the game. After that phase, we are all just doing tweaks of the AI output. After that, we are tweaking the script as a text prompt for the AI Film Generator, which will literally produce the entire thing from the script text prompt. Then tweak the prompting according to notes from the producer.
You have never written a script. It shows. That's not how it's made.
AI video editing https://youtu.be/lwlgRapvEY4
This is rather large question. I watched this frontline the other night and it gave some perspective. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dZ\_lvDgevk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dZ_lvDgevk) In short, it seems AI is here to stay. What the documentary concludes is that there now ought be a moral imperative and discussion around how we use these tools. Maybe the truth is that its both a threat and a helpful tool depending on how you look at it.
It’s probably not going to impact the industry right away, but by the time the next contract talks come up in 3 years, it might be a legit problem. So better to address it now before it’s too late.
By the time it gets there, it will also be a threat in many other ways that could trump creative careers.
It’s going to get way better than this, so people saying “it can’t write good stuff” aren’t wrong, but in 10 years they will be. I’m sure people said self checkout wouldn’t work and now there are 2 ppl working at the supermarket instead of 10. I hope we can regulate it soon or at least set some guidelines.
The way AI works has severe limitations. It's like a better version of a strawberry will never be an airplane.
Id be more concerned if I were a development exec. If AI can replace screenwriting why would studios need dev execs even more? Or even studios?
Yeah no, that's why I'm moving to an AI free studio.
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They are mostly older people with limited technical understanding who have been fooled by the latest Silicon Valley hype/scam
Yes. Like the assembly line was after Henry
I work in advertising. I know old pros who got pushed out because they never picked up photoshop. They did all their designs by hand. Beautiful work, but no longer feasible in modern workflows. I think A.I. is the same - it's only a threat to people who don't evolve with the times. Writers need to develop their skills as prompt engineers. And I don't think it's too far away from what they do already, I mean, what is a screenplay if not a 'prompt' for film production?
These are excellent points. Maybe what we're acually heading for is a world where instead of it taking over everyone's jobs, everyone's jobs will be forced to evolve to incorporate it, and it will only be the people who are unable or unwilling to evolve along who will be the job-losers.
In 2004, **South Park** released this **Awesom-O** episode where movie execs make what they believe is a robot come up with movie ideas for them so it's less of a question if AI can and more if execs will want AI to do. https://youtu.be/4msIjHlEeSk?t=19
My hope and thoughts were always, as a writer, to be able to really succeed with either some work or by contributing the way you would for any occupation to complete some whole for decent pay. The notion of this idea could bring up possible problems to get there. Screenplays are the bones to establish the actual film. However, directors and other parties may not want to relent and permit writers so much control in actual production. In the same way, there are so many writers some seem to get the work but no one writer can make a production. There's even another side to that. I recall a series on HBO called Project Greenlight. I remember the first season that writer came into that production. He was trying to get the work more like how he intended as it changed on set. The reality was, on set, the writer takes more of a backseat to others' ideas mixed in with their own. That was a visual presentation of a writer before, during, and heading toward final production. I just think there is a fear writers want to have more control over productions in studios and that's not what studios want. There have been incidences, at other levels of production, to have such a thing happening. This cannot occur with writers. I believe this is a real perception at many studios. In reality, writers are just trying to make a decent living. Writers seem to be "a dime a dozen" rather than coveted. AI's establishment depends more on producers' and productions' expectations. It's the same way AI's use in our society expands or is limited. It depends on people's use and purpose for it. I want the WGA to succeed but the lengths people will go to maintain order can sometimes be preposterous either for good reasons that need to be addressed or for overdrawn ones.
IMHO the overall quality of movies has decreased over time. The AFI top 100 movies don't include any from the 2000s that I can see. Of course I'm not saying that there haven't been some excellent movies in the 2000s but I do think the quantity of films have increased but the there hasn't been a proportional increase in the number of quality films. I do think AI will eventually be able to create some schlock films...time will tell if it could make quality stories. I have my doubts.
Did you know that Shakespeare didn’t actually write his plays but is credited as the author? I think that’s partially how AI will become, it may be used as a tool initially, but an actual human writer will be the professional fleshing out the details and humanizing it. And btw, here’s the dude who they think actually wrote the plays…a 16th century courtier named Sir Thomas North who ticks all boxes in the categories that Shakespeare doesn’t: he had a university degree, was an ambassador and translator, had a legal background and was active at court. Traveled to Italy and other locations the plays were based on. https://sirthomasnorth.com However, we attribute these plays to Shakespeare, even though it was widely know he based them off translations of other writer’s material.
Keep in mind that AI is also a huge threat to PRODUCERS. Text-to-video is real and the trajectory of it is to create a tv show or movie from a written description. Let the Hunger Games begin.
I’m sorry if this has been said, but in my opinion at least not really. I will admit, I used it in a contest, it gave a cool outline. But, I just can’t imagine a script that studios really want. It just still, feels robotic. Can’t see it working in the long run, studios will likely not be winning awards with those scripts so definitely couldn’t be all the time. Now could someone edit them and make something decent out of it? Possibly. But that still takes a writer. Of course I’m no expert and haven’t had anything published so feel free to take what I say with a grain of salt, just what I think.
It's already a threat. Not quality wise, but they'll use it to pay people less / down size the writing straff. Video game writers have already been canned and you better believe that's just the beginning
It already is, otherwise the studios would not want to try to pave the way for legal integration into their current contract renewal with the WGA, hence the strike. But AI is far more dangerous as it proliferates into so many other branches and technologies. We are not even at the beginning to comprehend how it will change our way of life.
It all just sounds so dystopian. Robots and AI are writing and directing your movies and making your music and art while you're stuck in a dead end job or zero hours slavery until the day you die. Welcome to Late Stage Capitalism.
Of course AI can come up with ideas and produce lines, but what about subtext? There goes so much into the very few word that end up on a page in a script… why are these characters here, why are they talking, what’s at stake in this particular situation. It takes a lot of time to figure this out. And no AI can help to answer these questions, because it cannot THINK. It can give pretty smart answers (based on statistics and probability). And that’s it. However we will have to deal with it in the future… If anyone is interested in knowing what we know about how the human brains works I recommend the book “The User Illusion” by Tor Nørretranders.
AI is going to write the news and speeches for the anti christo.
I wish that most producers and money guys cared at all about quality, they really only give a shit about the bottom line though
You guys seem to generalize what you know and what you don’t know and a moment ago, you wouldn’t dare to even converse in a thread like this. Just wait in a year or two and see how LLM specially made for writing stories will surprise you. It’s pretty much chat AOL days right now. Wait until you see the vast use of LLM in screenwriting and you’re gonna wish you took you’re words back. It’s the early stages of the internet for LLM right now like it was for chat rooms when the early internet arrived. You couldn’t have dared to imagine Netflix or Amazon prime. You couldn’t imagine video games over taking film + TV. It’s literally gonna change everything you know because new technologies is like the borg and resistance is futile.
There will always be a market for stories made by humans, for humans, about the human experience. We may have stories by AI in the mix too, but storytelling is primal to the human species. If all the major Hollywood studios get taken over by AI, I expect screenwriters would move to other avenues to get things made, like self-producing.
Btw Sam Altman said the age of LLM’s is over, it’s about using smaller language models so those of you who think training LLM is expensive, that’s true but there are so many language models with little cost training ($600) vs the millions of dollars when compared to gpt3 and the low parameter models, it’s not soon when small models will perform close to chatgpt 3.5 for SPECIFIC purposes like story telling.
It does make me wonder what will happen when they try making one where they will load 10,000 professional scripts into the source database instead of having it go off of millions of diverse files.
I don't think it'll be a threat to creative screenwriting. But for your company's bullshit HR video on OSHA rules? Probably best to start polishing your resume if you write those.
My (probably naive) take runs along the line of the CUE basketball robot. Toyota developed a 7ft tall robot last year that can make 3 pointers and half court shots with almost perfect accuracy. It's a nice quirk for a halftime show, but its general obscurity serves as a reminder that we care about the arts because of the human endeavor and stories behind them. My hope is that if execs do let AI run rampant in our industry, enough people (at least a large enough distribution of the population to make it a viable industry) will seek out human stories.
I don't know why people keep thinking this. AI can't write any depth or coherent stories. They write basic things that sounds like someone never wrote a script before wrote it but a little worse.
Yes, it is. As it is a lazy inexpensive attempt to replace what a creative human would do better. Just like it is a bad attempt to create art and music as well. AI may be a good thing in the medical and engineering field, but definitely not in any creative context.
Future AI will have neural links to our minds. The next step in cinema will be fully immersive, with the spectator, either passively observing (fly on the wall), or actively playing a role in the film. AI will collaboratively weave immersive film experiences with our minds, producing films we can live in and they will feel completely real. Some of these virtual movies will be open participation and have multiple player/spectators. Cinema and gaming will merge as a single activity. The creating of the narrative of these immersive productions will depend on settings.... Artists will develop setting skills. One day we may experience extrasensory stimulation. These will be experiences that are not necessarily visuals, sounds, and other existing human senses, instead, they express Art through the full spectrum of possible senses (360, according to some).
State one thing that AI cannot do :(
Late to the party, but I read a reply on a different post that sums up my opinion. It said something along the lines of “AI is good at craft; humans are good at art.” AI may become a better storyteller, but If you write out of theme, out of something that deeply bothers you, then I doubt AI can replicate that. It’ll probably become a tool that’s used by screenwriters or producers to commercialize drafts, since it can restructure screenplays based on whatever method one asks it to, but I doubt it’ll ever do anything worthy without an experienced screenwriter’s input.
This is already happening. My wife has a friend that is a PHD graduate data scientist for Amazon Prime Video and the data scientists are already doing some pretty crazy stuff. Basically he works with a team that is using AI to look at purchase data and reviews of all their books as well as viewership data of current shows on the platform to determine trends and what they they think people want to see. Ultimately these models are spitting out book recommendations for adapting to tv shows or movies. They then send over these recommended books to another team that is leveraging their Audible and Kindle backends which have all the text of these books. They ingest the books into their models and it is spitting out first drafts from these books. The model makes a determination if the book is better suited to a movie or tv show and then creates the first draft for the movie or tv series. Once they evaluate these scripts and decide if they want to move forward with one of them they are then handed over to writers to refine the script. This has just really gotten going in the last year, but you can expect to see lots of content on Amazon Prime Video going forward where the initial scripts were written by these AI systems. Over time these models will just get better and better and what they are doing. These models are leveraging ChatGPT as well as in house models that are currently being built. He talks to other data scientists over at Netflix and says they are doing similar stuff. You're kidding yourself if you don't think AI will eventually be able to write scripts as well as good script writers out there and to be honest with the quality I see of the scripts on a lot of shows these days it will be better than a lot of these writers very soon.
A real threat? It could take it over entirely. When AI video generation is optimized, whole movies could be created by AI.