Should AI Be Writing Screenplays? (An AI's Thoughts)

The world is changing rather fast, we have flying drones, electric “self driving” cars, and now even AI. At Topsheet we are no stranger to tech, in fact we have created a ton such as automated payroll, smart call sheets that fill a lot of themselves out and even update crew in real time, not to mention all of the start paperwork and back and forth emails we eliminated with our desktop and mobile apps. But, when it comes to AI (Artificial Inteligence) writing movie scripts for us, we have to stop and ask, is this a good thing?

We struggled to figure out who to ask about this topic, who would be the best person to give us their opinion on machine learning and AI written screenplays, and then it hit us, why don’t we ask an AI itself. So, that is just what we did, with the help of ai-writer we did just that.

It took less than two minutes for the AI to research and write on this topic, much faster than any human could, as well the content had tons of sources, but the quality of the writing, I will let you be the judge, from this point on, every word was written by AI with no editing or assistance.

Should Ai Be Writing Screenplays?

In a 2016 paper published in Dr Mitchell and colleagues, Dr. Mitchell classified emotional arcs of 1,327 stories in Project Gutenberg Fiction and found that they were dominated by six basic forms. He told Ars that AI can generate ideas faster than humans, but that nuances are needed when it comes to assembling a story. Sources: 13

In general, Dr. Mitchell says that applying the same tools to film scripts could find a smaller number of core forms in a story with less data to draw from. Many of the new stories are based on coherent elements and patterns, the so-called tropes, that have proven themselves in the past. Sources: 5, 13

This team enables scriptwriters, directors and producers to consider what the best tropes for a film are if they want to increase their chances of success at the box office. Sources: 5

For the vast majority of those who want to break into the industry and sell spec scripts, it is best to focus on the story. When you get stuck on a project, you can feed in some information and it will generate a bit of a script to help you get past the write block. For Vaus, Weiss fed in the first lines of the script, which took longer to write than the production of a short film. Sources: 1, 8

Artificial intelligence is already trying its hand at various human creative endeavors - cooking, art, poetry, board games, and even surreal robots that write scripts for science fiction movies. The team plans to feed machine learning models to train artificial intelligence to write dialogues for unplayable characters in open world games. Overall, the field of narrative artificial intelligence is thriving, and over time it will produce more than just quirky Twitter bots, which will reach feature lengths in the future, says co-author Juan Merelo. Sources: 5, 12

Talent agencies harness machine-learning computers and use algorithms to sort through massive amounts of data to make recommendations and suggestions for marketing their stars. We've seen software used to generate scripts for everything from Seinfeld to Batman movies to Hallmark Channel originals, often with hilarious results. It's like a good gag, but one that takes the script from you to bring it to life. Sources: 1, 9

In the 1960s, films experimented with making something like westerns and cowboy stories. Back then, the formula for the masses was based on footage that worked well for these genres. Sources: 2

According to media futurist and algorithmic filmmaker Alexis Kirke, we should get used to the idea that computers play a role in our creative endeavors, especially when it comes to writing film scripts. Many Silicon Valley technology companies, such as Netflix, Google, and the Hollywood studios, have been slow to adopt artificial intelligence and machine learning, at least on the screen. It is this plethora of use cases that has led the algorithm creators to question the release of the first version of AI, which was not trained to write scripts. Sources: 9, 10

Machine learning provides a trove of data on why certain movies and TV shows work and why others fail. But it is difficult for teams of people to sort out overwhelming amounts of information such as audience surveys and critical reviews to understand what makes a commercial or movie a hit. Feeding this information into a machine equipped with artificial intelligence programs and a vast database of successes can provide proactive suggestions. Sources: 9

Artificial intelligence would have to work with a living person to bring a machine-written script to life. Ultimately, the end product would still have to be interpreted and manufactured by a human being. Just as a screenwriter visualizes and writes down many scenes, he understands his script and his director before handing it over to the film. Sources: 8, 11

At this point, the script - scene-by-scene breakdowns, notes on camera placement, camerawork and staging - is a draft. It is a blueprint for the production of the film. Students create movies using a tool derived from GPT-3 called Read and Write Screenplays. Sources: 8, 10

While Benjamin learns more, he gains the ability to emulate the structure of the script, but cannot recognize proper names because they are not as predictable as the words in the sentence. To solve this problem, Goodwin changed the character names in Benjamin's script from source material to a single letter. For this reason, the characters in the short version of the Benjamin screenplay are called H, H2 and C. In the original script, two different characters were named H and one of them renamed H2 to avoid confusion. Sources: 7

The director Oscar Sharp and the AI researcher Ross Goodwin published a strange short film in July last year, Sunspring. Benjamin is nothing more than a scriptwriter on a sheet of paper using pencils, pencils and felt-tip pens, like a child filling out crazy libraries on the page. Incidentally, the Sunspring film is more than just a captivating experiment and could prove to be an amazing screenwriter. Sources: 6, 7

The bizarre short film Sunspring with Thomas Middleditch chronicles a cryptic love triangle between three people living in a bizarre futuristic office. Sunspring, the strangest short film of all, is a science fiction story written by an algorithm called Benjamin. Sources: 3, 6

Seeing a weekend film in 2021 is something different from previous years so we thought a second cover of "Sunspring" would be fine, a short film written with Thomas Middleditch and in conjunction with an algorithm. Ars was thrilled to host the online debut of Sunspring, a short sci-fi film that doesn't quite match what it seems to be. The film debuted at Ars on June 9, 2016, and our interview with the people behind it seems unchanged. Sources: 4