<\/p>\n
Since its launch in November 2022, hundreds of millions of people have used ChatGPT to write wedding toasts, college essays, apology texts, bad jokes and even worse poetry. Billy Ray \u2014 Oscar-nominated screenwriter and unapologetic human being \u2014 is not one of them.<\/p>\n
Ray, whose writing credits include \u201cShattered Glass,\u201d<\/a> \u201cCaptain Phillips\u201d and \u201cThe Hunger Games\u201d (that now-iconic Nicole Kidman AMC ad with \u201cSomehow heartbreak feels good in a place like this\u201d is also his), has never even opened the ChatGPT site. Not to fix a clunky line. Not to win a bar trivia argument. Not to figure out what to do with the leftovers in his fridge.<\/p>\n A series on how the AI revolution is reshaping the creative foundations of Hollywood \u2014 from storytelling and performance to production, labor and power.<\/p>\n To Ray, generative AI \u2014 already creeping into every corner of Hollywood, from script development and previsualization to casting and marketing \u2014 isn\u2019t just another tool for creatives, like Final Draft or a Steadicam. It\u2019s an existential threat, \u201ca cancer masquerading as a profit center,\u201d he says, eroding not just storytelling but the storyteller.<\/p>\n \u201cMy level of impostor syndrome, neuroticism and guilt is high enough while I\u2019m working my ass off,\u201d Ray says by phone, his voice equal parts weariness and outrage. \u201cThere\u2019s no way I\u2019d make myself feel worse by letting a machine do my writing for me. Zero interest.\u201d<\/p>\n When AI hype and fear first swept through the entertainment industry, screenwriters quickly found themselves on the front lines \u2014 and the picket lines. During the 2023 strike, the Writers Guild won precedent-setting contract language<\/a>: Studios can\u2019t require writers to use AI, and anything generated by it can\u2019t be considered \u201cliterary\u201d or \u201csource\u201d material. Writers are free to use AI if they choose \u2014 but only with the studio\u2019s approval, and under rules that protect credit, authorship and intellectual property.<\/p>\n The agreement was hailed as a landmark: the first real attempt to set limits on a fast-moving, poorly understood technology. But for Ray, those protections don\u2019t go far enough. The tools are getting exponentially more powerful, he says, and adoption is already happening quietly, behind closed doors. \u201cWhat I\u2019m hearing anecdotally is that studios and streamers are putting more and more time and energy into exploring what AI can do for them,\u201d he says. \u201cThe result will inevitably be chaos, bad movies, bad TV shows and a lot of people out of work.\u201d<\/p>\n A longtime WGA member and former co-chair of the guild\u2019s negotiating committee, Ray says his level of alarm is greater now than it was during the strike. That alarm is shared by many in a business where thousands of writers already hustle from project to project and where the prospect of studios using AI to shrink writers\u2019 rooms, eliminate junior positions or even generate first drafts has added new urgency to the debate. The anxiety is not theoretical: According to the Writers Guild\u2019s 2024 financial report, the number of members reporting earnings fell by nearly 10% from the prior year \u2014 and by more than 24% compared with 2022.<\/p>\n Signs decrying AI were ubiquitous on the picket lines when the Writers Guild of America went on strike in 2023.<\/p>\n (Jay L. Clendenin \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n With AI technology leaping ahead at algorithmic speed, Ray is urging the union to move faster. \u201cWe need to put firewalls in place before the next round of negotiations,\u201d he says. \u201cThat\u2019s going to be necessary.\u201d Though he still refuses to touch AI himself, he isn\u2019t trying to police his peers. \u201cI\u2019m not telling writers they can\u2019t use it,\u201d he says. \u201cBut the public has a right to know when they\u2019re watching something written by a human being. And I think they want to know.\u201d<\/p>\n As he speaks about the potentially apocalyptic implications \u2014 for Hollywood and for humanity at large \u2014 Ray sounds both incredulous and downright scared. \u201cWe as a species have a limited window to get control of AI and put guardrails around it, but we as writers have an even more limited window,\u201d he says, his frustration rising. \u201cIt makes no sense. If all Hollywood has to offer is a bunch of warmed-over AI bulls\u2014, why would someone turn away from TikTok or YouTube?\u201d<\/p>\n Across the film industry, AI has begun to permeate nearly every stage of the production pipeline: helping directors visualize scenes before they\u2019re shot, cloning actors\u2019 voices for foreign dubs and assisting editors in assembling early rough cuts. But of all the creative roles AI is taking on, writing may be the most controversial \u2014 and at risk. Actors can fight to protect their likeness. Directors still need a crew to execute their vision. Writers often work in solitude, in front of a blinking cursor, the very place AI is now starting to intrude.<\/p>\n Unlike a human writer, a \u201clarge language model\u201d \u2014 the technical term for AI systems like ChatGPT that are trained on massive amounts of text \u2014 doesn\u2019t grasp plot, motivation or theme in any true sense. It can stitch together scenes that feel plausible on the surface \u2014 a couple arguing in the rain, a soldier saying goodbye before heading off to war \u2014 and can sometimes even surprise you with a turn of phrase or an unexpected twist. What it can\u2019t do is understand what those moments mean or shape them to make an audience feel something lasting.<\/p>\n To be fair, that might also describe more than a few human-written screenplays. And Hollywood has long flirted with the idea of turning writing into a system. In the 1970s and \u201980s, a cottage industry blossomed around screenwriting formulas \u2014 from Syd Field\u2019s three-act paradigm to Robert McKee\u2019s guru lectures and the ever-resilient \u201cSave the Cat\u201d beat sheet. Storytelling became something you could learn, teach and sell, often quite successfully. (See: \u201cAdaptation,\u201d<\/a> which turned the whole idea into a punch line.)<\/p>\n The difference now is that the machine isn\u2019t just applying the formula \u2014 it\u2019s trying to do the writing itself.<\/p>\n The late critic Roger Ebert famously called cinema a \u201cmachine that generates empathy.\u201d But as generative AI takes on more of the creative process, a deeper question emerges: What does it mean when stories are shaped by a system that, for now at least, can\u2019t feel \u2014 and whose users may not need it to?<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m scared of it,\u201d says writer-director Todd Haynes, whose films, including \u201cSafe,\u201d \u201cFar From Heaven\u201d and \u201cMay December\u201d<\/a> (scripted by Samy Burch and Oscar-nominated for its screenplay), explore all-too-human themes of identity, sexuality and social constraint. \u201cCreativity is born out of mistakes, obfuscation, fumblings, desire \u2014 things that computer technology can never replace.\u201d<\/p>\n Who\u2019s holding the pen now?<\/p>\n In the fall of 2023, two weeks after the writers\u2019 strike ended \u2014 and with the actors still on the picket lines \u2014 Hollywood\u2019s first \u201cAI on the Lot\u201d conference opened its doors downtown, a bold show of tech optimism in the midst of labor upheaval. <\/p>\n \u201cWe thought we were going to have picketers out front,\u201d says organizer Todd Terrazas, who founded the nonprofit AI LA and co-founded FBRC.ai, an AI-driven venture studio launched in 2023 to bridge creativity and technology. \u201cBut sure enough, there was none of that. Six hundred people showed up and really leaned into how this technology could expand the industry and support everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n Todd Terrazas, founder of AI LA and FBRC.ai., photographed outside his office in Venice, CA. <\/p>\n (Carlin Stiehl \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n Two years later, by this spring\u2019s edition, the event had expanded and moved to the Culver Theater, drawing nearly twice the crowd with 1,100 attendees, a mix of indie filmmakers, startup founders and tech execs from Google, Amazon, Nvidia and OpenAI. The vibe was more techno-optimism than hand-wringing. But the stage was still missing something: writers.<\/p>\n \u201cAI is a very touchy subject, especially for writers, because it\u2019s so personal,\u201d says Terrazas, who has emerged as a key connector between Hollywood creatives and the fast-expanding AI tech world. \u201cEven though they\u2019re experimenting with large language models to help organize thoughts or explore new characters or ideas, at the end of the day they want to be known as the one who actually wrote everything, like, \u2018This was 95% me.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n In a legal gray zone where authorship is murky and copyright law hasn\u2019t caught up with technology, what\u2019s at stake isn\u2019t just credit or ego but ownership. \u201cWriters are walking a tight line,\u201d Terrazas adds. \u201cThey want to be very careful that they\u2019re showing their work, documenting their process, so they can obtain copyright and stay in bounds with the studios and the guilds.\u201d<\/p>\n While many writers worry about AI encroaching on authorship, a wave of startups sees opportunity \u2014 not to replace writers, they say, but to streamline the clutter around them. Amit Gupta, who co-founded the AI writing tool Sudowrite in 2020, began development by interviewing screenwriters about what they actually needed. The complaints he heard were often surprisingly mundane. \u201cThey\u2019d say they dreaded writing the logline, the one-page treatment, the three-page treatment, once the screenplay was done,\u201d he says. These were exactly the kind of mundane tasks his AI platform could automate.<\/p>\n Some studio executives may already be imagining a future with fewer writers, a field that\u2019s historically one of the most developmentally expensive and unpredictable parts of making a movie. Since the spec script boom of the 1990s, when writers like Shane Black (\u201cLethal Weapon\u201d) commanded multimillion-dollar paydays<\/a>, screenwriting has carried a uniquely speculative price structure for work that\u2019s often unproven. Robert Altman\u2019s 1992 film \u201cThe Player\u201d famously centered on a murder of a screenwriter, satirizing the industry\u2019s long love-hate relationship with the written word.<\/p>\n But Gupta pushes back on that vision. He says AI is far from being able to write a good movie on its own \u2014 at least not yet. \u201cYou could watch it,\u201d he says. \u201cBut you\u2019re not going to like watching it.\u201d What excites him more is the potential for co-creation, humans still driving the process with machines supporting rather than replacing them.<\/p>\n \u201cI think that\u2019s where the skill of the writer really comes in,\u201d Gupta says. \u201cIf I go to ChatGPT and say, \u2018Write me a short story about someone in L.A., reading an article on the film industry and hanging out with their dog,\u2019 it will give me something generic, because that\u2019s what the model is. But the prompt actually matters a lot. The people who are really good with this stuff are kind of mind-blowing.\u201d<\/p>\n What exactly qualifies as a mind-blowing prompt is not entirely clear, but Gupta believes developing that kind of conjuring ability will become as essential as programming or writing itself. \u201cOnce you get adept at handling it with precision, it feels like a tool \u2014 not something doing the work for you. That\u2019s going to be a very real skill set in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n A fault line in the craft<\/p>\n If Gupta sees AI as a tireless, ego-free assistant for the grunt work of writing, others have leaned in further, treating it more like a virtual writers\u2019 room \u2014 riffing on scenes, dialogue and structure \u2014 or even an uncredited auteur behind the curtain.<\/p>\n In January, Paul Schrader, the writer of \u201cTaxi Driver\u201d and his Oscar-nominated \u201cFirst Reformed,\u201d<\/a> known for his psychologically intense, deeply human portraits of guilt and faith, caused a stir by praising ChatGPT online as a kind of creative oracle. After asking the AI chatbot to generate movie ideas in the style of various auteurs \u2014 Paul Thomas Anderson, Ingmar Bergman, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch \u2014 he was floored. <\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019M STUNNED,\u201d Schrader wrote on Facebook. \u201cEvery idea ChatGPT came up with (in a few seconds) was good. And original. And fleshed out. Why should writers sit around for months searching for a good idea when AI can provide one in seconds?\u201d<\/p>\n Writer-director Paul Schrader, photographed by The Times in 2018. <\/p>\n (Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n In another post, Schrader said the model instantly gave feedback on an old script he had written years earlier \u201cas good or better than I\u2019ve ever received from a film executive.\u201d The experience, he said, left him certain that AI was the superior writer: \u201cThis is an existential moment, akin to what Kasparov felt in 1997 when he realized Deep Blue was going to beat him at chess.\u201d<\/p>\n The backlash came fast. \u201cPaul, is everything OK?\u201d one commenter wrote. Ever the provocateur, Schrader showed no sign of backing down, gleefully sharing AI-generated images, including one in which he is seen conjuring characters with a magic pen<\/a>. <\/p>\n Asked about Schrader\u2019s AI enthusiasm, Billy Ray offered a pointed retort: \u201cI have enormous regard for his career and for the work he\u2019s done \u2014 he wrote \u2018Taxi Driver,\u2019 for God\u2019s sake. But I don\u2019t see how that\u2019s helpful.\u201d<\/p>\n Filmmaker Bong Joon Ho takes a more humanist tack. The writer and director of genre-scrambling films like \u201cSnowpiercer,\u201d \u201cParasite\u201d and \u201cMickey 17\u201d \u2014 a mix of original stories and literary adaptations \u2014 acknowledges AI\u2019s value as a subject for sci-fi but doubts its capacity to tell stories with real depth or irony. <\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve seen from films like \u2018The Terminator\u2019 that AI can be a great source of drama, and we can create a lot of stories around it,\u201d he told The Times<\/a> earlier this year. \u201cBut I honestly don\u2019t think AI programs will write a fun story about themselves. I feel like I am a better writer for those stories.\u201d <\/p>\n Others worry that as AI becomes embedded in Hollywood, even human-written work will start to sound like the data it was trained on: smoother, safer, harder to tell apart. Roma Murphy, a young writer and story artist who serves as co-chair of the Animation Guild\u2019s AI Committee \u2014 one of several new working groups formed in the wake of the 2023 strikes \u2014 describes herself as \u201ca bit of a purist.\u201d Like many, she is concerned about the exploitation of unlicensed material \u2014 the countless film and TV scripts that may have been scraped to train AI now being pitched back to the industry.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m certainly not going to type my own ideas into the platform and just give them to it to train with,\u201d Murphy says.<\/p>\n \u201cLook, it\u2019s much better than it was in 2022 \u2014 it can at least generate a document,\u201d she says. \u201cBut I have yet to meet someone who was still thinking about their AI screenplay more than 12 hours later. People engage with art because they want to see some truth about humanity reflected back to them, and AI is never going to reflect a new truth. Nothing I\u2019ve seen generated feels like anything more than a cheap party trick.\u201d<\/p>\n Striking Writers Guild of America workers picket outside the Sunset Bronson Studios on Tuesday, May 2, 2023. <\/p>\n (Luis Sinco \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n At film schools, where many future screenwriters get their start, the question of when and how to introduce AI has become its own point of debate. USC\u2019s School of Cinematic Arts, one of the nation\u2019s most influential film programs and alma mater to filmmakers like George Lucas and Ryan Coogler, now offers courses like \u201cArt in Post-Reality: Critical and Creative Approaches to AI\u201d and \u201cAI Magic: Revolutionizing Media and Workplace Creativity.\u201d <\/p>\n According to Holly Willis, chair of the Media Arts and Practice Division and co-director of USC\u2019s new AI for Media & Storytelling initiative, student attitudes toward the technology vary widely. <\/p>\n Willis points to the first AI-focused class USC offered in 2023, launched during the height of the strikes. \u201cThe students came in very wary,\u201d she recalls. \u201cThey weren\u2019t even telling their friends they were in the class \u2014 out of fear of reprisal. Some were saying, \u2018Why am I paying for this education when you could just prompt and make a film?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n But even as the school has integrated AI across a range of filmmaking disciplines, one area remains off-limits: screenwriting. \u201cWe\u2019ve been very intentional about protecting that early phase when students are still figuring out who they are as writers,\u201d Willis says. \u201cThey need space to develop their own voice and stories before turning to tools like this. Understanding how the technology works is important, but so is safeguarding that vulnerable creative moment.\u201d<\/p>\n Writing in the gray zone<\/p>\n Oscar Sharp arrived in the future a little earlier than most in Hollywood. Nearly a decade ago, the British filmmaker set out to see what would happen if a computer tried to reverse engineer a science-fiction screenplay using nothing but genre tropes. \u201cMy writer friends joked with me, quite reasonably, \u2018You hate writing so much that you\u2019d build a machine to do it for you, even if it\u2019s really bad,\u2019 \u201d Sharp says dryly. \u201cThere\u2019s some truth to that.\u201d But his real aim, he says, was to what the genre\u2019s average story looked like when processed by an early AI model.<\/p>\n The result was 2016\u2019s \u201cSunspring,\u201d<\/a> a nine-minute short scripted by a custom-built neural net \u2014dubbed Benjamin \u2014 trained on dozens of sci-fi films, mostly from the \u201880s and \u201890s. Created with AI researcher Ross Goodwin, the film stitched together a surreal, dystopian mashup of familiar \u2014 if often nonsensical \u2014 beats, delivered by Thomas Middleditch and the cast with deadpan sincerity. A year later, Sharp followed with \u201cIt\u2019s No Game,\u201d<\/a> a short set during a fictional AI-inspired writers\u2019 strike, featuring David Hasselhoff performing AI-generated dialogue distilled from his past work in shows like \u201cKnight Rider\u201d and \u201cBaywatch.\u201d<\/p>\n Screenwriter Billy Ray calls AI a \u201ccancer masquerading as a profit center.\u201d<\/p>\n (Marcus Ubungen \/ For The Times)<\/p>\n In truth, Sharp\u2019s AI experimentation was less about replacing writing than exposing the underlying code of storytelling itself. \u201cIt\u2019s looking for statistical patterns \u2014 like, what similar things have happened before,\u201d Sharp, a discursive and reflective speaker, says on a video call. \u201cBut those patterns were themselves created by feedback loops. So if you train something on them, you\u2019re just deepening those same loops.\u201d<\/p>\n Today, Sharp is still experimenting with AI but only very occasionally and never to outsource the work. He\u2019s more cautious about how publicly he engages. \u201cI\u2019ve kept a pretty low profile about this sort of stuff,\u201d he says, aware of how charged the debate has become within the industry. He suspects he\u2019s not alone. \u201cFar more people are probably using it than are comfortable saying they are,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s widely available and extremely effective for those who employ it in particular ways. It would be very weird if that wasn\u2019t happening.\u201d<\/p>\n Sometimes he uses it not as a collaborator but as a kind of negative muse, a foil to push against. <\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve asked it to write a really bad scene \u2014 just let it go kind of mad,\u201d he says. \u201cThen I rewrite every damn word, often doing the opposite of what it gave me. It\u2019s actually pretty adaptive for a writing process. Writers have always looked for ways to get the ball rolling. Whether they\u2019re Hemingway and they get drunk to get the ball to roll is up to them. But in terms of a process, it\u2019s not that different.\u201d<\/p>\n What worries him more is what happens if, over time, that ball keeps rolling in the same direction. \u201cSet it to make money and AI will produce feedback loops, loops that make things less good,\u201d Sharp says. \u201cThat gets you McDonald\u2019s. But humans still want mother\u2019s home cooking too.\u201d<\/p>\n During the 2023 strike, Sharp marched with fellow writers, many holding signs aimed squarely at the moment\u2019s anxieties. Some read: \u201cAlexa will not replace us.\u201d Or \u201cAI came up with 10 suggestions for this sign: THEY ALL SUCKED.\u201d<\/p>\n One afternoon, as he marched in a circle in the summer heat, a delivery robot \u2014 one of dozens now trundling through L.A. neighborhoods \u2014 rolled past. <\/p>\n A dark, unmistakably human thought crossed Sharp\u2019s mind. \u201cThere I am, walking round and round with these folks,\u201d he says, \u201cand I remember thinking, \u2018They should send a fleet of those robots down here with AI protest signs on their backs to walk the circle for us.\u2019 Because it\u2019s really hot out here and nobody wants to be doing this.\u201d<\/p>\n For now, Sharp plans to keep experimenting quietly, pushing back against the technology he once treated as a curiosity \u2014 and wondering how long that will still feel like a choice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since its launch in November 2022, hundreds of millions of people have used ChatGPT to write wedding toasts,…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":69946,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[691,49254,1582,276,302,49258,49260,49257,14107,2961,224,5337,3067,3546,49255,24651,158,49253,49256,49259],"class_list":{"0":"post-69945","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-billy-ray","10":"tag-ca","11":"tag-california","12":"tag-chatgpt","13":"tag-cloning-actor","14":"tag-cottage-industry","15":"tag-film-industry","16":"tag-hollywood","17":"tag-la","18":"tag-los-angeles","19":"tag-losangeles","20":"tag-machine","21":"tag-people","22":"tag-screenwriter","23":"tag-studio","24":"tag-technology","25":"tag-writer","26":"tag-writers-guild","27":"tag-writing-credit"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114868727941265870","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69945\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} <\/p>\n
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