AI+Hollywood: We can imagine it for you wholesale

Striking film and TV writers are afraid AI will take their jobs. They have a reason to be concerned.

Will the next blockbuster franchise be written entirely by AI? Source: Midjourney

In case you haven't heard, writers in Hollywood are now on strike.

The bad news: Your favorite streaming shows and movie sequels will begin to dry up over the next year.

The good news: We will all finally have time to catch up on the older shows we keep meaning to watch but haven't yet.

The worst news: Many of these folks could be replaced by AI. No joke.

Aside from wanting a larger slice of the streaming pie, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) also wants to limit the studios' use of robots to write scripts. Per David Arditi of The Conversation:

[The WGA] wants writers for streaming platforms to receive the same royalties that theatrical film writers get; and they want to end the practice of mini rooms, where small groups of writers hash out scripts but often receive less compensation for a series that may not even get ordered.

Another key demand is to limit the use of artificial intelligence in television production.

Writers fear that studios will use AI to hire workers, select which shows to produce and, in the worst-case scenario, replace writers altogether. Interestingly, limits on AI have been the one point of contention that studios have been unwilling to even discuss.

That's right. The credits for that next big summer blockbuster could contain the phrase "Original Screenplay by ChatGPT."

I wish I were kidding. But I'm not.

Get me AI rewrite — stat!

I asked ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Bing Chat to write a treatment for a film titled, “Ant Man Meets Wonder Woman in the Temple of Doom on the Impossible Mission to Alderaan.”

ChatGPT and Bard each dutifully churned out completely ordinary yet-not-entirely-terrible treatments for such a blockbuster. They're too long to include in this post, but here are the log lines:

BARD: Ant Man and Wonder Woman must team up to stop a mad scientist from using the power of the Force to destroy Alderaan.

CHATGPT: Ant Man and Wonder Woman team up on an impossible mission to save Alderaan from destruction, but first, they must face deadly challenges in the Temple of Doom.

Bing Chat politely ignored multiple requests, and instead offered instructions on how I could write such a treatment myself.

As another test, I asked each service to write a scene where the hero of the movie (Rick) tells the heroine (Ilsa) that he can't board the plane with her because he has something more important to do.

Both Bard and ChatGPT served up scenes that met these requirements in the most boring possible way. Here's a snippet:

ILSA (pleadingly) Please, Rick. Don't do this. We've been through so much together. We can face anything as long as we're together.

Rick looks at Ilsa with love in his eyes.

RICK (tenderly) I know, Ilsa. And believe me, nothing would make me happier than to be with you right now. But this is something I have to do. For myself. For us.

Not exactly "We'll always have Paris" or "Here's looking at you, kid."

Bing began by offering up the dialog from the actual script of Casablanca, before suddenly erasing the lines before it was quite finished. (I got the definite impression that some AI lawyer leapt in and wrested control of the machine.)

This is what the writers are worried about: Producers using AI to generate the shell of scripts, and then hiring writers for an hourly wage to clean up the dialog. The fact that the studios are refusing to negotiate about AI makes it pretty obvious that this is exactly what they have in mind.

Show me the money

A friend and former colleague of mine is one of the strikers. Jason O. Gilbert [1] works as a writer for The Daily Show. He recently wrote a post about why he's happy to be on strike. To wit:

Before I was a TV comedy writer, I was a technology reporter for the Huffington Post, and then Yahoo News, and then Fusion.

And throughout that decade, journalists like me saw the same story play out in newsroom after newsroom after newsroom: The owners of your publication got insanely rich while you and your colleagues attempted to scrape by on the meager paychecks you were forced to accept....

You were just supposed to be happy to be writing, and to be making any money at all.

Jason nailed it. The devaluing of writers is not limited to Hollywood, and it's certainly not new.

When I started in this racket, back when Molly Ringwald was America's sweetheart and Duran Duran was all over the airwaves, good pay for a magazine article was $1 a word. Really good pay (mostly limited to mega-million circulation publications based in New York ) was $2 a word. [2]

Forty years later, the big print magazines (the ones that are still standing, at least) continue to pay $2 a word. But most publications, especially those that are online only, pay a fraction of that.

If these wages had kept pace with inflation, that $2 a word should now be $6.12 a word. Nice work if you can get it, but you can't get it, no matter how hard you try. [3]

Part of this is due to inequality in supply and demand; there are still many people who care more about being "a writer" than being paid decently for that dubious honorific. Part of this is due to the Internet, which both obliterated the business model for print publications and the standards by which good writing is judged. (It's all about the clicks, baby; Google doesn't care how clever or articulate you are.)

In other words, technology makes everything cheaper except for the salaries of top executives. Strange, ain’t it?

Not that I'm complaining. [4] I've managed to make a better living at this profession than I ever expected to. My point is: Words matter, and so do the people who generate them. Machines may do it a lot more cheaply, but you're probably not going to like the results. Unless, of course, you're a robot.

Should writers get paid more? Like, lots more? Big freakin' bags full of Benjamins? Truckloads of gold ingots? Share your pecuniary insights below.

[1] A very funny guy, and yes he has his own substack: Jog Blog.

[2] Thank you, Tina Brown, for introducing that at Vanity Fair in 1984. It made headlines at the time.

[3] There are some notable historical exceptions. Back in 1931, William Randolph Hearst hired Benito Mussolini to write a monthly column in Cosmopolitan for $1 a word (roughly $18.50/word today) to offer the "fascist perspective on gender relations." These days Il Duce would probably have a popular podcast and be filling in for Tucker Carlson.

[4] OK, maybe I'm complaining a little.