Shallow HAL

The Use of AI in Screenwriting

Geisler: Ever act?
Barton: …Huh? No, I’m—
Geisler: We need Indians for a Norman Steele western.
Barton: I’m a writer. Ted O—
Geisler: Think about it, Fink. Writers come and go; we always need Indians.

‘Barton Fink’ screenplay Ethan & Joel Coen

The film and TV industry is scared. Why?
The Rise of the Machines.
One of the key concerns of last year’s writers’ strike was that AI would take over from human screenwriters; if you look into large language models (LLM) like Chat GPT it’s easy to see why. There are already online tutorials showing you how to get AI to originate ideas, outline the story, write scenes, suggest characters, and feed back on drafts – basically all the major elements of screenwriting. We might as well go home. Are we looking at the end of screenwriting as a profession?

Let me preface this by saying that AI has led to some amazing new tools for filmmakers. Documentaries have benefited from automated transcription services, now incorporated into editing software. An editor can now type in a word or phrase and immediately be taken to the moment/s in an interview when it is used – no more waiting for the footage to be manually transcribed and then shuffling through the resultant script. AI can be used for removing background sounds from dialogue, with remarkable results; it can automatically rotoscope subjects without need for a green screen. There is AI-assisted grading software, which will automatically match the colour of shots from different cameras. The list of AI-reliant tools is growing every day.

AI can also be used to digitally de-age actors and create voiceovers, (though this is leading into territory that contributed to the Hollywood actors’ strike, with fears that AI will scan actors and turn them into digital puppets, rendering the originals redundant). We’ve just seen the world’s first AI short film, Air Head, ‘shot’ using Sora (also from Open AI), which magics fully-realized shots out of written prompts, although there’s no mention of whether the story was created by humans or AI. While these things are confronting for filmmakers, the challenges they present are still at early stages; so I’m just going to talk about AI for screenwriting here.

Given that Open AI is actively pursuing Hollywood right now, I decided to put their writing LLM, Chat GPT 4.0 through its paces, you can see my full review of it here. The big take-home is that I’d been expecting working with it to be the writer’s equivalent of creating AI imagery through Midjourney or similar: eerily naturalistic but undermined by the occasional psychedelic gaff that shows that the machine doesn’t understand the physical world. But writing with AI is not like this. There was little, if anything, it wrote which seemed outlandish or obviously wrong; quite the reverse. The failing of the system was that nothing it came up with was in any way new, and precious little of it was very interesting. Any sci-fi fans imagining Artificial Intelligence developing a soul, or even a personality, need not worry yet. Chat GPT generated exactly what a machine that’s read thousands of commercial screenplays would be likely to generate, and it stays well within the borders of material that has been done before. I saw from one online tutorial that you can even ask the program to deliver you an outline in ‘3 Act’, ‘Hero’s Journey’ or ‘Save the Cat’ story structures.

Thinking about it, those story structures are in themselves algorithms of a sort; the script gurus have identified what makes stories alike, with the unintended result that they have caused the stories that follow them to become more alike. For that matter, the Hollywood system of production itself can already be machine-like in its churning out of similar and uninventive product? As director Ben Blaine recently pointed out, corporations are in themselves a form of AI.

But back to LLMs – you can, of course, direct them to rewrite scenes as per your directions, in which case you’re essentially co-writing with the machine. So if you want a co-writer who is fast, hardworking, but lacking in originality, then… you’re probably a Hollywood Executive.

‘The Player’ written by Michael Tolkin

There’s a scene in Robert Altman’s The Player, where a hotshot executive questions the need for screenwriters. He challenges his fellow execs to throw him any headline from the front page of that day’s newspaper – and instantly turns each news story into an attractive movie pitch (even for financial news stories). He doesn’t address the irksome task of turning ’25 words or less’ into 90-120 pages, but now there’s a machine that can do that in minutes. I’ve already heard from one LA-based writer who tells me that they’ve been approached by a production company to tweak a script generated by AI to make it feel more human. While this was paid work, he was paid only for his time and that’s the problem.

Screenwriting is already a precarious profession. The business model (if you can call it that) for early career scribes is one of staggering amounts of up-front work chasing the hope of a handsome payday if the script is picked up. An ‘option’ fee might keep you going for a week or two, a sale leading to the film being shot might keep you going for a year. But that’s all based on the writer having ownership of the core Intellectual Property. Reduce screenwriting to the occasional day’s work and the profession collapses.

The irony is, of course, that Chat GPT and other LLMs are taught partly using pre-existing screenplays by human writers. If they destroy professional screenwriting, they destroy that well-spring of original dramatic tricks and ideas, and the scripts the technology produces would become more and more samey and derivative. Audiences would soon get bored. There might then be a move to return to organic, artisanal screenwriting, by which time a lot of the skills and infrastructure of the writing profession might already be lost.

But all this is missing the really ‘big picture’ points: why we humans love being told stories. Hollywood is very much focussed on entertaining us—and being entertained is important—but there’s more to consuming stories than that. Stories are part of the glue of society; they link us to other people who aren’t present at the time the tale is told. The story fosters a sense that we belong to a group, that we are not alone, that there are other people out there who think and feel the same way that we do. Successful stories ‘read the room’ of society, recognising what we are concerned about at any particular moment in history – our collective hopes and fears. Maybe one day an algorithm will learn to pick up on the zeitgeist, but I think we’re a way off that.

But we don’t just need to be told stories, we need to tell them too. A story is our best tool for communicating our experience of the world. AI-generated stories feel so empty because they are: no experience or emotion is being communicated, because the storyteller has none to offer. They are tales told by an idiot, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing.

All this being said, the centre of the industry can usually tell lead from gold. They know that you can shoot 8K footage on an iPhone, but that shooting on an Arri Alexa with Cooke S5 lenses will always look better, even if it costs 1000 times more. Hopefully, executives seeing what a slave mind produces will learn to cherish what is human and individual about a flesh and blood screenwriter. I’m not sure how confident I am that they will, but we shall see.

Copyright © Guy Ducker 2024

Edited by Dr Sara Lodge