Will we notice if AI replaces screenwriters?

We are edging into the third month of the strike by the Writers Guild of America, called because of shriveling residual royalty payments from streaming movies and TV, as well as concern about AI such as ChatGPT being used to generate story ideas — and indeed to write scripts. Hollywood’s screenwriters have now been joined by the 150,000 members of the Screen Actors Guild, which was demonstrated very visibly by the cast of Oppenheimer walking out of its UK premiere last week. “We are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines,” said union president Fran Drescher. Susan Sarandon has said of AI: “I would hope that in the future people understand the difference between real people making real choices and something that’s basically animation.”

But here’s an uncomfortable fact. When it comes to scripts, I’m not sure using AI instead of flesh and blood writers would make a whole lot of difference.

I’ve read tons of unsolicited or “spec” scripts in my time, written by people trying to break into the screenwriting industry — either as favors to friends of friends or in a professional capacity. When I was a script editor on the British soap opera Emmerdale, I once read fifty “try-out” scripts (from people with at least one produced TV credit) in a weekend. Luckily, I had built up a strong resistance. Fifty episodes of actual Emmerdale in forty-eight hours would kill a beginner, let alone fifty amateur episodes, every one of them based on the same storyline.

This is quite a soul-destroying activity, as you can imagine. It makes one feel alternately cruel, sad and bored. But something weird started happening about ten years ago. I noticed that the spec scripts I was reading were getting much more acceptably presented, easier to read, with all the correct technical terms and layout; superficially better — and yet strangely lifeless. They had the same flip, bantery dialogue (I’ve written plenty of that myself, but making it good is hard); the same “empowered” female lead characters with photostat quirky personalities and bags of sassy chat.

Eventually I figured out what had changed. There had germinated, in that grim word of our times, a “community” of online budding screenwriters who were all swapping the same tips, reading the same guides, watching the same “how-to” videos on YouTube. And the uncanniest thing of all? A lot of this stuff was perfectly acceptable and makeable.

I’ve sent scriptwriting prompts to ChatGPT — during that fleeting spring we all had when asking ChatGPT to write things was quite funny and diverting — and it spat back a remarkably similar brand of anodyne trash. I’ve just asked it to serve me up a pitch for a movie set in contemporary New York. Et voilà! Urban Resurgence follows the captivating journey of Maya Rodriguez, a fiercely independent and ambitious woman navigating the vibrant landscape of New York City. Maya, a talented architect in a male-dominated industry, faces countless obstacles and biases but is determined to prove her worth and secure a landmark project that could define her career.

Then I asked it for a scene:

INT. SKYSCRAPER OFFICE — NEW YORK CITY — DAY 

The sleek and modern office of a renowned architectural firm. MAYA RODRIGUEZ (thirties, confident, determined) stands before a panel of stern-faced, mostly male executives. Maya’s passion for her craft is evident in her eyes, but she also bears the weight of past dismissals. 

EXECUTIVE (raising an eyebrow) 

Maya, this project is high stakes. We can’t afford any missteps. 

Maya’s gaze intensifies as she steps closer to the executives, her voice unwavering. 

MAYA (challenging) 

Missteps? I’ve faced countless challenges in this industry simply because I’m a woman. I’ve had to prove myself at every turn, and yet here I stand, ready to push the boundaries of what this firm can achieve. If you’re looking for experience, let me remind you that it’s not always about how long you’ve been in the game, but about the fresh perspective and innovation that someone like me can bring. 

It’s “correct,” yes, but it’s lifeless and predictable — not even funny-bad, just bad-bad. Like many of the spec scripts I read in the past decade, and indeed much of the actually produced studio output, it simply takes as read that one of the central purposes of cinema and TV is to self-replicate the moribund ideology of the latter-day Western campus.

For my money, the BBC’s greatest recent drama successes — I May Destroy You and The Responder — worked partly because they, consciously or not, repudiated that orthodoxy and took place somewhere much more like the real world. All TV is necessarily collegiate, produced by committee to some extent, but these shows shone because there was an air of very human despotism about their writing. We could say the same for The White Lotus and Succession on the streaming platforms. That is the stuff we need more of. The GPT-ish writing of And Just Like That…, Emily in Paris, The Rings of Power or the endless British prestige dramas in which life before Tony Blair is rendered as a fascist hellhole/cultural wasteland, not so much. The transformation of more lightweight “content” — action, superheroes and sci-fi — by this mindset is a cultural tragedy, a vital vent for escaping steam now bunged up.

Streaming is another area of modern life where the true economic value of a product or service has been distorted by a tech innovation. Now the bills are coming in, and investors are wondering where exactly is their return. AI makes financial sense to the movie and TV industry in cutting their overheads. We writers only have ourselves to blame — because it will often be very hard to tell who is the robot.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.