WRITING

AI & Screenwriting: How Artificial Intelligence Is Revolutionizing the Creative Industry

The future is already here

With the advent of AI-powered creative tools like GPT-3, Midjourney or Scriptshaper, artificial intelligence has the potential to revolutionize the creative industry by enabling creators to produce high-quality content faster and easier.

As with any technological breakthrough, there are both pros and cons, so let’s have a look at how AI could impact the world of screenwriting in 2023 and what it could mean for the future of the creative industry.

AI & Research

AI has superhuman powers when it comes to pattern recognition. Not surprisingly, one of the biggest advantages of AI in the creative industry is its ability to quickly identify trends. This has already been widely used: AI algorithms can analyze large amounts of data to identify patterns of sentiment and potential trends. Until now, this application has been limited to large production houses with the financial resources to do so. However, with the recent development of open-source and publicly available AI models, this can also be of great help to screenwriters, as they can identify what is popular and could be positively received by producers and audiences. Also, large language models are great time savers when used for conversational search engines, e.g. chatGPT. This could also help screenwriters do their research more effectively.

Current shortcomings: AI models can only be as good as the material they are trained with. It has been shown that large language models such as GPT-3 have biases based on the training material and therefore may miss information that humans could pick up and have to be pre-programmed for their use cases or guided during conversational research.

Ideation and Structural Groundwork

Since AI is particularly good at pattern recognition, it seems obvious that it can help screenwriters come up with plot ideas and structures more efficiently. Since all storytelling can be reduced to simple formulas, screenwriters may find more time for creative experimentation and exploration, when the formal groundwork is outsourced to AI tools. Developing story arcs and plot points according to different genres and narrative schemes, e.g. Hero’s Journey or 3-act structure, and recognizing typical conflicts within these stylistic frameworks is something that large language models like GPT-3 are already very good at.

Current shortcomings: While they are surprisingly good at short texts, current AI tools are unable to mimic the nuances of human storytelling that are essential to creating compelling and original stories when it comes to long text outputs. The subtle and emotional connotations that texts written by humans can exhibit originate in the sociocultural reality of Homo Sapiens’ lives and are therefore beyond the reach of a computer program. Perhaps in the future, we will see language models that can replicate such nuanced texts, but until then, any long text needs a human collaborator to avoid being clichéd or repetitive.

Character Development

In developing characters using AI tools, we could see some interesting new approaches. Similar to the ideation and structural groundwork scenarios mentioned earlier, large language models like GPT-3 can create basic characters for any genre or format. In combination with other AI algorithms that access data like personality traits or psychological papers on human behavior, such combined AI systems can help screenwriters develop detailed and realistic character profiles.

Current shortcomings: AI’s lack of emotional intelligence (which, again, is related to our sociocultural upbringing) comes into play when dealing with portraying certain character types and developments. Until AI systems can mimic socio-cultural backgrounds, character development relies on human input/co-creation.

Optimizing Scripts

For years, artificial intelligence has been a loyal companion for writers when it comes to spell-checking and grammar. Newer AI tools could make proofreading scripts even easier and save editing time. They could examine stylistic categories as well as the adherence to a character’s voice or the achievement of specific emotional sentiment in dialogues.

Current shortcomings: Writing scripts and other long text outputs is still a difficult task for current AI models. In long texts, AI is prone to repetition, cliché, or hallucination, and sometimes fails to recognize context. Again, co-creation tools are the best choice here at the moment.

Summary

AI tools are already being used in the creative industry, and this trend will continue and speed up in 2023. There is no doubt that screenwriting will be optimized through the use of cognitive tools such as GPT-3 or even AI image generators that support the ideation and pitch process. On the writing side of things, the most promising screenwriting tools are those that allow for co-creation such as the highly anticipated Scriptshaper and Dramatron.

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