CAN WE TALK ABOUT?
AI WRITING SCREENPLAYS ARE HUMAN SCRIPTWRITERS ABOUT TO BECOME A THING OF THE PAST?
‘WE CAN ONLY HOPE THAT AI STICKS TO PENNING TRANSFORMERS 17
Filmmakers have long evidenced a fear of AI, preaching of its dangers in the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Westworld, Tron, The Terminator, The Matrix, Ex Machina, Avengers: Age of Ultron… to name but a few. But what they didn’t foresee – or maybe they did, but didn’t make a movie about it because it’s far less exciting than a muscleman robot shooting up a discotheque – was the idea of AI scripting the movies themselves.
Now, however, Hollywood is abuzz at just such a prospect, for artificial-intelligence programmes such as ChatGPT are being prompted to create semi-passable essays, poems and news articles. OK, so Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson and Martin McDonagh don’t need to look over their shoulders just yet – an article published by The Hollywood Reporter observed that ‘top film and TV writers are sceptical that the technology in its current state imperils their livelihoods in any way’. But note that ‘current state’. The same article also said that writers ‘remain cautious about future advancements’. There’s no doubt about it: the march of ‘progress’ is underway, and AI is sure to jostle a space at the writers’ table just as computer graphics, pre-visualisation programmes and de-aging software are now part and parcel of the industry.
Back in 2016, science-fiction short Sunspring, starring Silicon Valley’s Thomas Middleditch, was released online. Authored by a neural network called long short-term memory, or LSTM for short (or Benjamin, as the AI named itself), it was clunky and nonsensical but also rather astonishing. In December 2022, a Filipino short, The Safe Zone, was written and directed by AI, with ChatGPT giving a complete breakdown of camera placements, cast positions, lighting, props, costumes, etc. So while AI is currently used in Hollywood more to generate ideas and beats for plots via algorithms, you can be sure that full drafts of screenplays, replete with plot, dialogue, character nuance and themes, are on the horizon.
Is a line about to be crossed? Possibly, though it’s hard to take the moral high ground when so many McMovies are written by committee. We can only hope that AI sticks to penning Transformers 17. But if Benjamin ever strong-arms Greta Gerwig out of a job, we have a serious problem.
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