PRODUCT REVIEW: Chat GPT for the Screenwriter

AI is here and its mission is to help screenwriters and democratise movie making / decimate the screenwriting profession (delete as appropriate). There are a number of different writing AIs, also known as LLMs,—Large Language Models—but Chat GPT is the best known. As the head of Open AI, the parent company, is currently wooing Hollywood, it feels like a good idea for screenwriters to know their friend / enemy.

Chat GPT has a number of potential uses, some of which are genuinely helpful, others less so, or just plain useless. It’s incumbent on the user to work out which are which. There are no buttons, it’s essentially just a box into which you write prompts, as you might with a web browser. There are user-generated GPTs on the site dedicated to a number of different tasks, including screenwriting, but I’ve not found any of these vary greatly from the central application – most of the results I describe come from plain old Chat GPT (4.0).

Here are some of the things it can do:

Origination

I put in the prompt “Suggest ideas for a new James Bond movie” and this is what it gave me:

1. The Digital Frontier
   Bond faces off against a tech mogul who’s created a revolutionary digital platform that threatens global security. The mogul’s true plan is to control the world’s data and manipulate global events for profit.
2. Eco-Terrorism Threat
   An environmental extremist plans to trigger natural disasters to reshape the global landscape and punish polluters. Bond must navigate the complexities of environmental ethics while stopping the catastrophic plan.
3. Global Pandemic
   In a world ravaged by a deadly virus, Bond investigates the outbreak’s suspicious origins, leading him to a conspiracy to control the world through fear and pharmaceuticals.
4. The New Cold War
   Bond delves into the murky world of espionage amidst rising tensions between global powers, uncovering a plot to ignite a new cold war that would destabilize the current world order.
5. Rogue Artificial Intelligence
   Bond faces his most unpredictable foe yet – an AI that has gone rogue, possessing control over military and civilian technology worldwide.
6. The Lost City of Gold
   Bond uncovers a map to a mythical city of gold, leading to a race against a wealthy treasure hunter and a corrupt government official seeking the city’s riches to fund a coup.
7. Bond Goes to Space
   A radical group seizes control of an experimental space station weapon. Bond must venture into space to thwart their plan to incite global conflict from above.

[It offered with these a list of locations and unique elements, which I’ve removed.] Most of these sound like Bond movies (although I’m not sure I’m going to trust Bond on environmental ethics), in fact some of these have already been Bond movies – I’m seeing very close resemblances to Tomorrow Never Dies and Moonraker, as well as the upcoming Daisy Ridley film Cleaner. To be fair, both Octopussy and A View to a Kill were rewrites of Goldfinger, so the real-world Bond franchise may not be the acme of originality.
When Chat GPT is being asked for plots in less tightly defined genres, the results are good, although whether these are ideas that it’s generated itself from online raw materials or has just taken wholesale from somewhere else on the web is not clear. I’ve not yet prompted it to come up with a plot that I’d feel compelled to read, let alone write. Most of the stories feel quite unoriginal, like existing ideas which have been tweaked just enough not to infringe copyright… which may be exactly what they are. Even so, I can see such ideas potentially sparking thoughts from the writer.

plotting

There’s a limit to the length of answer that Chat GPT can provide – it can’t write you a finished screenplay in one hit. Instead it’s more commonly used for producing outlines of movie ideas. You can even specify that you want the story structured as per ‘Save the Cat’, ‘The Heroes Journey’ or any other story shape. But you don’t have to. I asked it to write a storyline for the life of one of my favourite writers, Mervyn Peake. It was impressive and unnerving to watch the text appear line-by-line, producing in ten seconds what it would take most writers between half a day and two weeks to create. It did a solid job of slotting Peake into a 4 act structure (it’s choice, not mine). Very much ‘by the numbers’, taking his life step by step, in chronological order, but it made a decent fist of identifying a dramatic arc for his life.

Writing a Scene

This is not its strong point. Apart from the basic problem of the word limitation, which leads to quite short scenes, the dialogue varies between on-the-nose and dull – at one extreme – and at the other like the work of a twelve year-old. This is a sample of what it offered up in the first scene of the Mervyn Peake story:

YOUNG MERVYN
(perched on a chair, restless)
Father, why must we stay indoors? There’s a whole world out there!

MR. PEAKE
(smiling warmly)
Because, my boy, exploring the world of ideas is as grand an adventure as any. But remember, the greatest adventures are those of the mind and spirit.

YOUNG MERVYN
(pondering)
So, can our imaginations take us anywhere?

MR. PEAKE
Indeed, they can. And one day, your imagination will take you to places beyond even what you can dream of now.

I’ve seen worse from human screenwriters, but sadly that’s a pretty low bar. What’s more it does tend to write in a straight line, not offering up anything even remotely unexpected. It feels like it’s a long way off being able to write something like the opening of The Social Network or the Pinot Noir scene in Sideways.

Giving Feedback

Here’s where you have to be careful – anything you input to Chat GPT adds to its sum of knowledge and could be included in an answer to another user. Swiftly deleting the chat once you’re done might keep your material safe, but that’s not clear. I fed it the script for a short film that’s already avaialble openly online. The feedback it gave me was patchy. This is limited by the word count too: the number of words it can take in has the same cap as the number of words it will output, so you can’t give it a feature screenplay all at once and expect feedback. There are ways around this by breaking the material into chunks, but the feedback it gave me on the short film encouraged me to look no further. Most of the advice it offered took the form of Barnum statements that could apply to almost any script: ‘add depth to your characters’, ‘employ more visual imagery’, ‘use subtext to bring out the themes’. While there was the odd glimmer of a useful insight, it was certainly not feedback that I’d pay for.

conclusion

You can read more about my big picture thoughts on AI screenwriting here. As for Chat GPT specifically, isn’t yet going to come up with a script like Being John Malkovich or Everything Everywhere All at Once, in fact I’m not sure it ever will. Right now, the best it’s going to give you without a lot of help is a third rate script for a Ron Howard movie. In April 2024 it feels more like a trainee screenwriter that’s likely to learn more from you than you do from it. And, as with any trainee, you have to decide whether the amount of guidance you need to offer to get the job done well would take more time and attention than just doing it yourself. But such trainees have a way of quietly overtaking you and becoming major industry players, so let’s not be too sniffy. Things move like lightning in the world of AI – in the days between starting writing this article and putting it online I had to update it twice. So ask me again next year.
Or maybe in six months.

Copyright © Guy Ducker 2024

Edited by Dr Sara Lodge