The Writers’ New Hero—and A.I. Screenwriting Is Totally Overrated

The striking writers have a new hero and she is Lindsay Dougherty, the secretary-treasurer and chief negotiator of the local Teamsters. Here she is kicking ass at the WGA rally at the Shrine.

Separately, this is just forming my brain, but I think the hype of A.I. writing screenplays is totally overrated.

Will A.I. eventually take over our world and destroy us like Skynet? Of course!

But in the short term, will it replace a Hollywood screenwriter? No, because it stinks! Scriptshadow lays it all out. So does this instructor of college-admission-essay writing.

It reminds me of the craze of gaming maybe 25 years ago. “Interactive” was all the rage.

But George Lucas (as I recall) said that games were never going to replace storytelling, because human society has always had two things: storytelling, and games. They were distinct and different. Nobody wants to watch a movie, be totally invested, and then have the movie ask, “So what do you want to have happen next?”

Can A.I. be a useful tool? Of course. But here we are in 1983 again with people saying, great, we’ll never need orchestras, we have synthesizers!