We believe the fight started when the dealer broke his calculator and couldn’t figure out how many grams were in a kilo. It was a slow speed chase as his GPS was broken and he had to keep stopping to ask directions. Those are the fax chief.
…the thing is: draft scripts don’t come out of nowhere. Someone has to come up the original idea. Come up with a pitch. A logline. Perhaps a series bible.
And typically those ideas will come from writers. The writers will make a pitch. A writers room gets formed. They will take the logline and break the story, a process that could take weeks or months. Only then do they start writing scripts.
So if "writers being “asked to rewrite draft scripts created by AI”, then who does the rest of the work? Who comes up with the idea in the first place? Who breaks the story? Who writes the elaborate framing story? Who decides on the relationships? Who lives and who dies?
It likely the job of “pitching” and creating a television show would be taken at the executive level. They will use an algorithm to design a show to “hit the right taste clusters.” To make a TV series that gets the “right verticals.”
I fed into ChatGPT the following prompt:
Write episode outlines for a 16 episode season for a show with the logline “A high school chemistry teacher diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer turns to manufacturing and selling methamphetamine in order to secure his family’s future.”
This is what ChatGPT gave me:
That just shows you how bad AI is right now. It didn’t come up with anything original. It recognized the logline and decided to call the show “Breaking Bad.” It randomly named the protagonist “Walter White” who has a wife randomly named “Skyler”. He has a former student, randomly named “Jesse Pinkman” and a brother in law randomly named “Hank”, who just randomly happens to be a DEA agent.
I tell ChatGPT off. “You stole the plot from breaking bad. This isn’t breaking bad. Rewrite this. But it must be original.”
Is it original? Probably not. Is it derivative? Sure. Would it be good enough for an executive to greenlight a set of draft scripts? Probably. Lets write the first page.
I pasted that into my script writing software (Fade In) to see how long that was: its about a page and a half, so about a minute onscreen and the plot is just MOVING along. David is in school for about 30 seconds then gets WHISKED to the doctors office to get diagnosed.
For comparison: here’s the original pilot script:
It starts with a teaser. A focus on cow shit. SPLAT. A car. A driver. Wearing a gas mask. And white underpants.
Heres the opening scene for reference. The shooting script differs from the original, which is typical. Things can change anywhere in the process: sometimes on the day, sometimes in post-production. And in television, especially in the old system leading up to 2020, there would be a writer on set that would make those change.
(TW, contains two dead bodies and Walter White in white underpants)
I won’t be posting the rest of the ChatGPT script, but what I will say is that by page 2 David is confessing to his wife that he is not only dying, but:
Which of course, is just shocking to his wife.
So this is about two minutes of screentime here. No character development. Just plot. ChatGPT gave me two more pages of them lying in bed having the most inane conversation.
I repeat: TWO PAGES OF THIS.
And the dialog doesn’t get any better.
Then a few more pages like this:
Several pages later:
On about page eight we are randomly introduced to David’s daughter, Lily. She is 8 years old and standing beside her locker. At High School.
And thats where ChatGPT gave up. But only after giving me this final notice:
I can imagine that whatever AI system the studios would use would be marginally better than this utter dribble. But only marginally.
But this is what a draft script created by AI based on a pitch designed to “hit the right verticals” would look like.
And if you were given the task of rewriting this dribble, where the hell would you start?
Here’s a bit of insight into the actual Breaking Bad Writers room.
Its people that make the difference. Its writers. Its conversation. Its life experience. Its random thoughts that just pop into your head.
Breaking Bad came about because someone made a joke about buying an “RV and put a meth lab in the back”. From that joke came an image, and that image turned into characters, and into a story. This is what writers do.
While some people are making the argument that “rewriters would get paid less” and while that is true, really kinda misses the point.
If writers aren’t pitching the stories, if writers aren’t breaking the stories, if writers aren’t writing the scripts, if writers aren’t on set to make changes on the fly, and if the Showrunner (the person who manages the entire production) doesn’t come from the writers room…then the very nature of television will change.
If writers aren’t breaking the story and only come onboard once the draft AI scripts are written, then they won’t have the time, resources nor the authority to upend the entire process.
Will the rewriter be able to add the teaser scene of Walter/David in gasmask and white underpants? Or move the revelation that Walter/David is sick off the first page and spend a bit of time on character development? Again, probably not.
Because if they did, then why do you need the AI draft in the first place? What value is it adding here? If the script is fundumentally unfilmable, if the story hasn’t been broken and only exists in sweeping, extemely general outlines, what even is the point?
The writers room evolved the way it did for some very good reasons. As Gilligan writes in the article above, “don’t make a TV show by yourself.” “That writer will fight the good fight.”
In the writers room they argue about who lives and dies. What motivates a particular character. They write on whiteboards. They use sticky notes. They map out seasons. They “write the show bible.” And when the show goes into production, and they are on location and one of the actors injures his leg meaning he has to sit down for the rest of his scenes, the writer steps in to rewrite accordingly.
Why the WGA are striking is because even without adding AI to the mix, the studios have already meddled with the process. You can go back and read the other thread where I provide real world examples. But writers rooms are getting smaller and shorter, writers are getting paid less, getting fewer opportunities, but expected to work significantly harder. Diversity in the writers room went down last year, and AI would drive it down even further. And significantly, the pipeline to showrunner is drying up. By not allowing writers on set it means they will never learn what it takes to run a production.
This is what the issue is here. The executives don’t understand the creative process. They want to turn television into content. Which might hit the right verticals, and it might get them the numbers to impress the shareholders. But we won’t be seeing the likes of Breaking Bad again. Or even the likes of the Big Bang Theory. Because writers don’t just write scripts. They are an essential part of a larger creative process and if you take them away it isn’t going to be the same.
You have suggested a couple times that if the product is crap, that’s a self-solving problem, though. That’s only true to the extent artistic integrity has anything to do with it. And the labor are the ones who have artistic integrity and care about artistic integrity.
The problem will not solve itself if labor doesn’t have a seat at the table. The end result will be churning out more iterations of the same work product, tweaked to be minimally marketable by exploited creatives trying to make ends meet, and everyone but the studio will lose.
What a ridiculously incorrect summary of my position. It’s like you haven’t bothered to read what I said. There’s no purpose in a back-and-forth with you when you’re this far off the mark.
It’s not about being better or worse, its free labor vs paid labor. They want AI writers so they don’t have to pay real ones.
Your position is not “our system is based on something being hard and scarce, and this tool might make it easy and abundant. This tool must be hobbled by new government regulations to maintain the scarcity”?
The game you propose is:
- I make a complex post.
- You make a ridiculous misinterpretation of that post.
- I reject that misinterpretation.
- You continue making misinterpretations and ask me to defend them.
I decline to play this game with you.
If you want to know my position, I’ll refer you to my posts, not to your summaries of them. Reading my posts is the price of admission to discussing the subject with me, and if you’re not interested in that price, I understand.
There’s nothing inherently wrong, per se, with getting machines to do something instead of having human workers do it.
The issue, as I see it, is whether the uses of AI that the writers are complaining about are just a matter of John Henry complaining about the use of a steam drill, or whether it’s something worse, ethically (e.g. it’s a way to make use of the work of human writers without fairly compensating them) and/or artistically (e.g. it will only produce hacky crap).
Well seeing as how “AI” is basically just copying what already exists and not actually creating anything I think there is currently good reason to not be cool with that. Maybe when some real AI actually exists instead of glorified parsers the discussion could be brought up again, right now its just taking the writers work for free.
I have read your posts where that is what you are saying.
I quote:
The law reflects that difference: I’m allowed to riff, but I’m not allowed to plagiarize. Riffing involves enough of my own labor that I can legitimately treat it as my own work; plagiarism doesn’t. Riffing is allowed; plagiarism isn’t.
AI changes that calculation. Riffing with AI is trivially easy, involving very little labor.
Then you admit that what is being done probably isn’t actually plagiarism and isn’t illegal, but laws should be changed to make it so. Again I quote:
There’s nothing in the law currently to prevents its use in this manner (AFAICT), but the law could be a lot better.
I think I have summarized your position quite accurately.
I agree that you think that.
Care to tell me which part I got wrong?
Between the previous thread and this one, you have made quite a few posts, and I have not read all of them. But the ones that I have read have left me with somewhat the same impression that @Darren_Garrison seems to have: that your objection to AI seems to be that it makes things too easy, that it removes the labor involved. (The sentence he quoted: “Riffing with AI is trivially easy, involving very little labor” is one example of this.) Several days ago, back in the previous thread, I remember thinking that you had failed to explain why this is any different from the countless other examples of labor-saving devices throughout history where a machine, or a human being using a machine, can do something much more quickly and with much less labor, than a human being alone, or why this is bad. Though, as I said, I have not read everything you’ve said on the issue since then, so I don’t know whether you’ve explained this satisfactorily elsewhere.
People should get paid for their labor.
Private property–at least according to Lockean rationales–exists because people combine their labor with the natural world, making a part of the natural world that is theirs to do with as they will. Other folks who did not contribute that labor may not use that property without the owner’s permission.
Intellectual property works along similar lines. People combine their labor with the world of ideas, making a conceptual “space” that is theirs to do with as they will. Other folks who did not contribute that labor may not use that intellectual property without the owner’s permission.
That’s the theory. In practice, it’s led to copyright law (what Darren might characterize as “government regulations” that hobble tools such as the printing press or phonograph in order to “maintain the scarcity”) and a complex web of court cases finding the line between inspiration and infringement, between parody and plagiarism. There’s no obvious bright line, but the guiding principle has generally been whether the artist has put in enough of their own labor to make the work their own.
AI is a fundamentally new technology. No individual human can read three million novels in order to gain inspiration; no individual human can realistically read 1% of that and still have time to create anything. The labor mix is completely upended by this new technology. It renders our old laws around copyright obsolete.
We need to create new laws that recognize this new reality. How do we acknowledge the intellectual labor that goes into creating new works, and give the owners a reasonable right to protect the fruits of their labor?
The underlying principles remain the same, but the specifics must change.
For the last time: I decline your game.
Yes, if it is bad enough people will stop paying and if the AI is the cause of it it’ll stop being used.
If they can still make a profit off a crap product then absolutely why not use AI if it is cheaper.
Yes, if something can be automated, still create a product that sells and yet be cheaper to produce then that is what companies will do.
If by using real people they can make a better product that gives them more profit then that is what they will do.
You seem to think am being dishonest and “playing games” with you, but I honestly do think my summary is an accurate representation of your verbose position.
Dude. You summarized my position as “change is scary.” You apparently think that’s accurate, and absent any deep reflection from you on the inadequacy of your summaries, that’s the end of it. We’re done.
Yes, but as far as I’m concerned, the problem is that they’re using other folks’ intellectual property in an unanticipated way that’s inadequately covered by current law and inadequately protects intellectual property.
Allow people to opt into this program with their own intellectual property, and the automation is much more ethical. But externalizing the costs in order to make a cheaper product is both part of our capitalist tradition and deeply sucky.