The Writers’ New Hero—and A.I. Screenwriting Is Totally Overrated
- Lukas Kendall
- May 5, 2023
- 1 min read
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!
I don't think A.I. is the 1983 equivalent of synths. It is bigger than that as an industry transforming tool. Think of how ethe emergence of synths in the 1970's and 80's resulted in the new genre of EDM which is today the third most popular genre of music. It wouldn't even exist without synths and electronics. So rather than thinking A.I. could replace traditional writers, instead think of the new genres yet to be born that could only exist because of this tool...some of which might become the dominate genre in time.
I think of A.I. more like the printing press. You still need writers, but having a printing press exploded the possibilities in ways no one even imagine…