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The Last Screenwriter was boycotted for using AI (The Last Screenwriter)
“This machine can produce a 5,000-word story, all typed and ready for despatch, in 30 seconds. How can the writers compete with that?” So asks Roald Dahl in his short story The Great Automatic Grammatizator, published in 1953.
The eponymous machine learns from existing works and can write entire novels in response to manual prompts. By pressing buttons and pulling stops similar to that of an organ, the machine’s inventors “pre-select literally any type of plot and any style of writing”. They choose between “historical, satirical, philosophical, political, romantic, erotic, humorous, or straight” categories, then between themes such as childhood, civil war, or country life, and finally between literary styles such as “classical, whimsical, racy”,or specific authors such as Hemingway, Faulkner and Joyce. Within a year, half of new writing is generated by the machine. The ending of Dahl’s tale is harrowing.
More than half a century later, the fear felt by some writers, artists, and musicians, when faced with generative artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT, is not unfounded or foolish. Those who dismiss it as posing no threat to the creative industries, on the grounds that it can never be good enough, are the deluded ones; AI is more than capable of producing content comparable to that created directly by humans.
Contrary to popular opinion, however, this is not intrinsically dangerous. Rather, the danger is us — or, more specifically, our refusal to engage with it seriously. The current state of AI in the film industry, and the varied reactions to it, exemplifies this. Already, generative AI’s role in film ranges from writing scripts to creating visual imagery, and its adoption has sparked a range of reactions including celebration and anger. Few and far between are those who say simply and rationally: it’s here, so let’s see what it can do, and let’s talk about it, because in doing so, we can shape our creative future.
In this camp sits Swiss director and producer Peter Luisi. When ChatGPT 4.0 was released, Luisi wondered whether it could write an entire feature film. He set about finding out, ensuring his input was that of a typical director, and was not enough to grant him a writing credit. ChatGPT 4.0 was given the initial prompt to “write a plot to a feature-length film where a screenwriter realises he is less good than artificial intelligence in writing”, and asked to generate each scene in turn. Screenshots of the prompting process are available on the project’s website along with the film itself: The Last Screenwriter.
London’s Prince Charles Cinema was hired for the premiere in June, and in keeping with the aim of stimulating discussion, the team made tickets publicly available (although the film is not-for-profit, they decided to charge admission to discourage no-shows) and agreed to pay for promotion. But when posts went up on the cinema’s Twitter and Instagram, there was a furore; many were angry that the cinema was apparently supporting the use of AI in film. The Prince Charles cancelled the screening, citing “the strong concern held by many of our audience on the use of AI in place of a writer”.
When I spoke to Luisi the next day, he was sanguine — “We were sort of hoping that this discussion would happen, we were just hoping it would happen inside the cinema” — and invited me to the relocated premiere. Sitting there felt utterly surreal, a new page in a history book. How good ChatGPT’s screenplay was didn’t seem to matter: what was significant was that we were watching the first film written by a machine. This was just the start.
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SubscribeWhilst far from being dismissive of AI-generated content (which would be foolish) there’s a problem with it that just won’t go away.
A film, a book, a painting that’s been created as a result of the cumulative experience of an individual human being with a brain, heart, eyes, central nervous system, hands and – dare i say it – a soul, speaks to us in a way that AI generated content just can’t.
I use the term “content” because that’s exactly what it is. It may be entertaining, it may be informative, but only a human creative act can entrance us where we seek to be entranced by a work of art.
So much that Hollywood and tv stations produce is just content, to fill the time for those who need their time filling and that’s just fine. Even though it’s currently produced by humans, it’s still just content; producing something doesn’t make it truly creative. No reason why AI can’t replicate that, but nothing can replicate the distinct frisson of our humanity portrayed back to us by another human being, who’s lived, loved, lost and then found themselves again in a unique and groundbreaking way. Can AI do that? The same applies to all artistic media.
What this article (and others of the same type) are therefore about is simply a category error – content, or “artifice”, not art.
….what a silly silly comment full of typical capitalist gibberish. (Just doing ChamSoc’s thing for him while he’s still asleep.)
Very nicely phrased. Fully agree, and hope that once the initial excitement dies down, this will be more popularly appreciated.
This comes across as the desire to define humans as different, come what may. You can wish the world to be like that, but it sounds like therapy.
Different from what, I wonder?
Different from machines? Certainly.
Different from other animals? Yes, to the degree that our species is distinct. No, to the degree that we share common features.
More to the point, what is art? I’d say it is a form of human communication. And without humans at each end, I don’t see how that can happen.
Artificial Intelligence gets better by one order of magnitude every 2 years. It is easy to forsee it producing high quality output that is indistinguishable from human generated celebrated works of art. Even better though it wil be able to create bespoke films for anyone in which they can control the stars. This will make all entertainment individualised.
Sometimes it’s nice to be surprised and not have everything individualised.
The rest of us are told that AI is coming for our jobs and there is nothing that we can do about it.
Why should luvvies expect a different outcome?
If AI does take us all down it would at least be a silver lining to see the over paid, over privileged, self-important luvvie class get theirs.
And since Hollywood/Tv have done very little that is original or good from many years, we might actually get some new, innovative, non-woke, non-virtue signalling content that people actually want to watch
The luvvies and the rest of the film industry will be early victims of the jobs apocalypse along with lawyers, accountants and people who drive for a living
I cant see drivers being replaced anytime soon by AI or for that matter lawyers or accountants
Exactly.
Ethniciodo, I make my living in this industry. It’s how I support my family. And I’m no “luvvy”. Still very much a blue collar working stiff, terrified that the only high paying skill I have is going to become obsolete, and I and my family end up in poverty.
AI art, all the modalities haven’t been put to the test – the double-blind test. I would love to see a few films be made by both AI and humans and then judged by a group of humans who don’t know which is which. As with brilliant art forgeries, it may be impossible to tell the difference. And the fact that humans have been duped says it all. Art is big business and why should it be? Most great art was made by starving artists and hijacked by the greedy art world for obscene profits. Movies, and the entertainment business have benefitted the same people over and over again. Why not give others a chance? There are so many awful movies out there I’d be happy to watch some good ones created by AI.
I really want to agree with this, but having tinkered with generative AI over the past year to make images and music I find that the things I prompt these systems to make are more imaginative, mischievous, and emotionally affecting than most things currently made by people.
What they don’t have is texture or solidity. I foresee a revival in physical crafts: painting, drawing…things with rough edges, things you can hold.
This could be a good thing. It’ll separate “art” from “content”.
Those who prefer to work in the field of art can do so. Even today their audience is small. If it’s money they want then let them take part in content. Putting on a play for a group of keen supporters is still possible: it only requires a stage and actors. AI doesn’t stop someone from sitting down and writing a poem or novel then passing around copies. The Russians did it in secret for years under Stalin and company. Music can still be played in the streets. Maybe it’s a good thing, to make a clear demarcation between art and content, and more importantly art that’s embraced without the financial interests that lead to artists being ripped off, abused and their work forced to conform.
AI generated content is trawled from the sum of what has gone before. Is the human brain any different? Does it produce something that couldn’t be generated from the past?
“Does it produce something that couldn’t be generated from the past?”
Do you mean there is nothing original?
Is what appears to be original, just an opaque repackaging of elements from the past?
Sure, AIs can create the appearance of original. But your suggesting the AI is no different from the human brain, And yet the brain does create original forms and ideas,
How do you define ‘original’. Is new knowledge from science ‘original’, as in complex numbers? Is this the same in the world of the arts? What makes a novel original? How do you separate something that’s a bit different, from something that hasn’t been done before?
At its most radical: if you’re an atheist then you must wonder where the idea of a god came from. In a way closer to home the work of Picasso.
All good ideas stand on the shoulders of previous ones. And I don’t say that as a fan of AI.
The conversation is not about “good” ideas but originality.
Oh boy, I could go on for a while with this article…
I’m a filmmaker who works a lot with post production, so I will probably be okay as AI takes over, at least for the time being. Post production people in general might even benefit for a while. However, I work with a lot of dedicated and decent people who will have their lifelong livelihoods decimated by this revolution – production people (camera, lighting, costume, makeup, production managers, assistant directors, etc.). All of these people also have large ecosystems that their work supports (equipment hire, food and accommodation, etc). To phrase the AI revolution as ‘liberating for creatives’ is to be cavalier about the very real damage this will do to a far larger number of talented working people. Not a great journalistic standard there.
Another point that I’d push hard against is the comment ‘there is no limit to how many of us can be creative’. It might be true if we were talking about paint-by-numbers colouring books, but that’s not remotely the same as the creativity that motivates important works. The idea that you can make meaningful work for a fraction of the effort is highly questionable (which is of course not to say that everyone who swears over their work makes good art – more that there’s a relationship between the two).
But the main practical problem with AI and this article’s rose-tinted view on it, is that it’s going to drown small independent films in a deluge of content and hand even more power to streaming services and the industry’s gatekeepers. When I made my debut, I hadn’t realised just how many films it would be competing against upon its release, and how hard it is to get people to hear about my little film – it is a mere drop in a sea. Add to that the fact that, even though my film has been picked up by Amazon and is available dozens of other places, the streaming service’s algorithms and marketing departments naturally steer views to their own works. In earlier days, you had stronger national and local stations and cinemas that made for a richer system that could help independents. Now there’s a globalised monoculture acting as the primary gatekeeper. When these streaming services start churning content out with AI, you can see it’s going to be even harder for any independent filmmaker to get a foot in the door. This is all far more likely to create a crop of ‘gentlemen’ filmmakers who can afford spending the time for little to no views or remuneration – hardly the article’s utopia of liberation and empowered excluded voices.
It sounds a bit like an “internet influencer” driven film scene. The previous generation had Scorsese and Coppola and Spielberg. The next will have “cash me ousside” girl and Hawk Tuah and Andrew Taint. Ugh.
The balance is that although machines threaten existing roles, in practice they greatly expand the amount of content that will be produced. To use historical examples, photographs didn’t eliminate artists, calculators didn’t eliminate accountants, desktop processing didn’t eliminate graphic designers and synthesizers didn’t eliminate musicians. In all cases the volume of content created went up astronomically.
AI will do the same – and remember we’re at the crawling/toddler stage of what AI will be able to do. At some point AI will be capable for generating personalised films and stories for individuals (like your own personal dream-maker) with elements of game play where the viewer is also the hero. In the same way movies challenged theatre, then TV challenged movies, then video-sharing challenged TV, AI will change everything, but at such volume that things like film will need to expand enormously to keep up.
The movie industry is starting from a poor place. How many films nowadays are ‘remakes’, ‘reimages’ or built into series of basically the same plot?
For instance The Magnificent Seven, Battle Beyond The Stars and Seven Warriors are all considered reworked versions of the epic Seven Samurai.
The Magnificent Seven was then followed by Return of the Seven, Guns of the Magnificent Seven and The Magnificent Seven Ride! In 2016 the Magnificent Seven was remade.
And the Magnificent Seven has appeared in a number of TV series.
The big worry for those of us on the Right side of the political aisle is the fear that AI will further entrench the progressive Left’s hegemony in the creative arts (for half a century and more now). I think of the English critic William Hazlitt’s words about the kind of people who politicise art in that way and how AI might turbocharge the tendency: “their brains are turned with the glittering, but empty and sterile phantoms of things…without any ground-work of feeling”. In my recent essay ‘Art Will Keep Us Alive’ https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/art-will-keep-us-alive I quoted these words by a young artist who’s agonised doubts gave expression to a profound truth about the nature of great art – words that are equally true whether it be AI enhanced or not: “One trembles to pose the question but: could it be that a great work of art can only emerge from a great amount of effort on the part of the artist? A Raphael, whatever else it is, clearly resulted from a great deal of effort; a symphony immensely so. Writing a novel – even a bad one – is a huge and exhausting creative undertaking. Recording a decent pop song, even, takes considerable effort.”
AIs are not stopping anyone from creating great art.
Well said.
As a script editor, I would like to point out that Peter Luisi’s project misses out an enormous part of the creative process of writing, directing and producing a film and as such, isn’t in any way comparable to what film makers do on a daily basis.
Film making is a collaborative process. To suggest that one director asks one writer one request and then that director produces the first thing that writer writes in isolation to all the other inputs that regularly occur through the film development and production process is naïve to the point of irrelevance. Just the script alone goes through endless iterations. Meanwhile the script is not the end product. Every hand in the process has an effect on the end result which is a FILM. Peter Luisi’s project should have been striving not to make the film ChatGPT wrote in one effort (however good or bad it was) but to make as good a film as possible with all of the creative inputs available to him so that it finds an audience – usually the bigger, the better. The fact that they made the film as they did suggests at heart they only wanted to show how bad the AI was at doing this job as they didn’t even begin to try to follow the process any other writer would or should follow.
There are so many other things I could describe that the writer(s) bring the process of creating a script (that is worthy of being made into a film) that I don’t really know where to start. I would like to say one thing however in response to a thread in the comments about whether any creative act is ‘original’ or not. The most basic answer to this question is that copyright exists for a reason. The fact that it’s already generally accepted that search engines like ChatGPT will slowly descend into nonsense because they can’t make any valuation judgement over what is accurate or not amongst the vast content online which is often not accurate is also something of a tell.
Meanwhile the comment made about the ecosystem of people who work in film being damaged by the use of AI in film production is a valid one but one should remember that previous digital revolutions have already disrupted numerous creative endeavours this way. Talk to a live musician that might have made their living as a session musician in a recording studio. However also look at the constant expansion of live performance and the 1000s of people who work in special effects teams to understand that the ecology of commercial exploitation of creative endeavours is always finding new ways to tap into the human marketplace.
Ultimately humans will decide what they want to spend their time and money on and the likelihood that an AI will be able to ever understand what that ephemeral quality actually is when humans still find it so difficult to work out suggests to me that we don’t need to worry about AI in creative industries for quite a while yet and that, if it’s embraced to any degree, it won’t be via the versions we currently have available to us which are purely creative in their nomenclature. Artificial Intelligence, my arse.
Much of the discussion around the merits of AI seems to start from the idea that we humans are constantly creating wonderful works of art. Much of the time, it’s just junk. Hollywood might produce blockbusters, but the endless woke ‘product placement’ is tiresome.