…its very much like the “self-driving car” situation. We’ve been promised that “full self-driving” would be “just around the corner” since 2014. But it isn’t for a variety of reasons. The “fantasy” and the reality are two different things.
So I see AI script writing developing the very same way I saw full-self-driving develop: the tech-bros will say that it will “change the world”, and in many places, like copy-writing and some areas of design, it might have significant impact.
But when it comes to telling stories? There are significant barriers to overcome, and those some of those barriers are exactly the same as you see with self-driving cars. AI doesn’t have an imagination. Outside the parameters of its algorithm, it literally can’t think outside the box.
What does this even mean?
No I mean seriously, what are your benchmarks here?
I’ve already conceded that the AI scriptwriter would be faster. The AI literally put together the Wire script in seconds. AI wins here. It’s faster than every other scriptwriter in the world right now.
So what are the metrics here? And who is setting those metrics? Because obviously if the “success” or the “failure” of AI scriptwriting is determined by the studios, then they will withhold any information (like they are doing now) that says otherwise.
I’m sorry, but how are you imagining that this would work? How do you copy a writer?
This isn’t something that will happen in our lifetimes. We are not going to have an AI be able to experience the same things that David Simon has lived through. An AI will never do a ride-along with a cop. Will never smell the stench of a crime scene, feel the tension during an interrogation.
The AI might learn about these things. But where will it learn it from? From writers like David Simon. The people that have actually done this shit. And the AI will never write about this shit as good as a human will because it doesn’t understand it. It hasn’t lived, or breathed, or felt any of these things. And when it comes to telling stories, this makes all the difference.
The executives are very much not going to give away their jobs. They won’t be underestimating AI. They will embrace it, and use it to substantially profit from it right up until the point the industry becomes unsustainable and collapses.
I’m not sure the executives would see it that way. For starters: there isn’t single senior writer at this level in the guild right now who would work in this system. They are writers for goodness sakes. They write. Its what they do. There may be some utility to using AI in some capacity, and the WGA haven’t discounted this. But none of the writers at this level are stupid enough to think that taking a position like this will do anything more than bring the whole industry down. Because:
This isn’t “just a downside.”
It’s the entire point of the strike.
What the guild are fighting for is a system that means that a writer can afford to be able to do this for a living, and to ensure that the pipeline for new writers doesn’t get shut down.
The AI thing is just kinda the icing on the cake. The damage is already being done. AI would finish the job.
The system as it worked as short as ten years ago meant that writers had some measure of job security, that there was room and scope to be innovative and creative and also allowed junior writers to learn on the job.
But over the last few years, and especially since the start of the pandemic, the studios have been trying (and largely succeeding) in changing those dynamics.
And probably the easiest ways to show exactly how that is happening is to look at what is happening with the Marvel TV shows.
In the traditional model you might get a writer or a writing team pitch an idea for a show, and if it goes into development, a Showrunner is appointed, they build a writers room, and they start the process of breaking the story. Breaking the story is a critical part of the process. It’s how the show defines itself. It’s how a script or a show becomes more than just the log-line.
From there different writers would get allocated their episodes to write…but that doesn’t mean that the writer then disappears to a log cabin and knocks out their scripts overnight. The continue to break the story…this time instead of the breaking the direction of the show they are breaking down the direction of each script. They work through many the plot beats together, making sure the themes and the tone and the characters match the blueprint.
When the show goes into production, the Showrunner is still in charge. The Showrunner in television is the boss. They almost always come from the writers room. They are responsible for the show. In film the director calls the shots. When we think of film, we think of the Steven Speilbergs or the Alfred Hitchcocks, we don’t think of the Matt Charman’s or the Joseph Stefano’s.
In television that dynamic is reversed. Its the J . Michael Straczynski’s or the Joss Whedons that are the household names, not the David J Eagles or the David Grossmans.
In television, the Showrunner manages the production. They keep the story on track. And the writers are still very much part of the production. In the traditional model, one of the writers was always on set, typically the writer of that particular episode, but not always. And the reason for this was two-fold: it allows the script to be re-written or new lines added as need be, and it gives the writer valuable experience in what actually happens when their script goes into production.
So what model do the studios want to move towards?
There is a move to make a clear demarcation between the writers room and everything else. And we can see this most clearly with the Marvel TV shows.
Each Marvel show gets allocated a couple of executive producers. For the Falcon and the Winter Soldier it was Alonso and D’Esposito. For Ms Marvel it was Alonso
and Winderbaum. They oversee the production, taking on many of the roles that you would typically see being done by the Showrunner.
And the way each show was produced was much closer to a feature film production than a television show. The scripts would get written, then handed to the production team where the directors would take over. The “Creator” of each show doesn’t really fill the role of Showrunner any more. They are the Head Writer, they lead the writers room, they hand over the finished scripts to the production team then the director takes charge, with the executive producers overseeing the process.
On paper, this could work. And I think that the best of the Marvel TV shows (IMHO), Wandavision and Loki, show how it could work. Both of these shows (along with Falcon and the Winter Soldier) only had a single director, Kate Herron for Loki, Matt Shakman for Wandavision and Kari Skogland for FATWS.
And that singularity of vision made a strong difference because as a story, Wandavision and Loki both held together tonally from beginning to end. So in theory, this model could work.
But the realities of making a television show quickly caught up with Marvel. Episodes of television have to go through a pre-production process, then go into production, then into post. So in television you would have all of these things happening at the same time. One director would be working pre-production, another director on location shooting the show, another director working with the editing team helping them to put it together.
And so the television show Ms Marvel didn’t have a single director. It had three different directing teams, all of them extremely talented and very good at what they do, but they weren’t singing from the “same songbook.”
The two episodes directed by El Arbi and Fallah (episode 1 and episode 6) work really well together. So do the episodes by Obaid-Chinoy (episodes 4 and 6), and to a lesser extent (but not in any way her fault) the two episodes by Menon (episodes 2 and 3).
But as a whole? The show doesn’t work. Entire character arcs are introduced, played out and ended in the blink of an eye. Tonally things are all over the place. The playful sense of delight that we get in the first episode just disappears and doesn’t really come back until the finale.
Its a mess.
Because the “showrunners” here, the executive producers, are working from within a box. They paint with a broad brush. Fortunately they are fans of the genre, very experienced at what they do, so what we got wasn’t as bad as it could have been.
But they literally don’t have the same skllset that a Showrunner from the writers room would have. And part of that job is making sure that once a show goes into production things adjust and pivot and are tweaked so that the story continues to make sense. They see the bigger picture because they created that bigger picture. The directors can’t see that picture, because they are only seeing what is happening in the episodes they direct. And the producers can’t see that picture because that isn’t what they are good at.
And the thing is…I LOVE Ms Marvel. I think the show is great. Its one of my favourite Marvel things ever. And one of the reasons why it works for me is that despite the fact the story just falls apart, there is a genuine passion for telling comicbook stories baked into the Marvel infrastructure, they had rediculous amounts of money (in TV terms) that were spent on every episode, and that Marvel have made a genuine and ongoing committment to giving opportunities to and allowing diverse talent (both in front of and behind the camera) to step up and tell their stories.
That wouldn’t be how it worked outside of “fandom” lead studios like Marvel and Star Wars and (now with James Gunn) DC.
It wouldn’t be the Senior Writer who would be at the top of the production any more. Because none of them will cross the picket line. It will be, just like with the Marvel shows, the executive producers. Writers won’t be doing the pitches: new shows will be pitched at the EP level based probably on whatever it is the algorithm spits out. Breaking the story will also probably be done at this level, with the EP and a group of consultants tweaking the plot outlines to maximize whatever they determine is their metric of success, be it “watch minutes” or “impressions” or whatever the heck they come up with.
Its only then that it would get handed over to the writers. And it probably won’t be a “writers room” as we know it today. We’ve already seen the rise of the “mini-room.” What it will evolve into (if the studios get their way) are underpaid junior writers who are largely disconnected from the larger process using AI to flesh out the plot-outlines handed to them from the EP’s into a somewhat shootable script.
We won’t be getting the Sopranos or Lost or The Bear or Abbott Elementary anymore. Because the intent here is to cut costs to the bone. And at the moment, with all of the cuts the studios have already put in place, many writers are struggling to put food on the table. The writer for the TV show the Bear had no money in his bank account and had to get a bow-tie on credit when he turned up to accept the prize for best writer at the WGA awards. Thats with the system as it is now. If the studios get their way then people like Christopher Storer end up having to walk away from the industry.
And the other thing that will get killed if the studios get their way is that there will be no path for anyone who isn’t independently wealthy to ever work on a television show. It will utterly destroy diversity. Film and television are already the domain of largely white men. And you will only ever be able to work in film or television if pay is not a factor. We’ve seen how this plays out in industry after industry. And the end result is homogeneity, not just because much of the writing tasks will be undertaken by a computer, but also because diverse and marginalized voices will be locked out of the system.
The scene would never exist if not for the writers. Television isn’t improv. The script is the blueprint. It what drives the entire production.
The script is what everybody works off to create a televison show. The Art Director uses it as the basis of how to create a set. The Prop Master uses it to figure out what is needed in the scene. The script isn’t just “lines on the page.” Any production at any scale is a Behemoth, a thousand different moving parts and the only reason we ever get something enjoyable on screen is because hundreds, sometimes thousands of people, all working in a weird kind of synergy, are very good at their jobs.
But the script is at the centre of it all. And if you start changing the process, if the creation of the blueprint is handed off to in-experienced and automated architects, then that affects everything.
The goal of the strike is not to “hobble the production companies”, and there is absolutely nothing in any of the WGA demands that would result in this.
They would be able to make stuff faster and cheaper and very much more crappier. You know the golden rule. If you have “fast and cheap” you can’t have “good.” And the system the studio want to bring in will largely result in the production of even more garbage than you are seeing right now.
Shows like the Big Bang Theory or Two and a Half Men were written by human writers, lead by an experienced showrunner, with properly staffed writers rooms, all had full seasons of television and were written in the very system that the WGA are trying to defend.
If the studios win we won’t be getting more of the Big Bang Theory or Two and a Half Men.
Instead we get “Friends and the Avocado Invasion”, a 10 episode limited series only available if you subscribe to Nixflix, that will get filmed, get most of the way through post-production before getting shelved because the streaming company wants to take advantage of a tax loophole.