Take Your Screenwriting to the Next Level with AI-Powered Ideas
Using AI text completion tools like OpenAI’s GPT-3 for idea generation and plot/character inspiration
Goodbye Writer’s Block!
Thanks to AI generation of images and text, we’re always just one prompt away from a new list of ideas to help us find a creative solution to problems we may have been stuck on for days!
There are plenty of AI text-generation tools out there but none of them will just magically create stories for you. In addition, most of them are designed to create copy & marketing content, which always makes their fictional stories rather basic, repetitive, sometimes contradicting, and most importantly: they are lacking YOUR style!
When it comes to AI text generation, using @OpenAI’s GPT-3 as a tool for idea generation is much more effective. GPT-3 (Generative Pretrained Transformer) works by predicting the next word in a given sequence, allowing it to generate coherent texts. That way you can create
- loglines to inspire your writing
- basic story arcs and twists
- basic character types
- outlines of story structure & dramaturgy
- character ensembles
- dialogue
- scenes
- etc …
All you have to do is prompt the AI tool for completion and then take it from there, for example:
The above example may seem clichéd and simplistic, but you can take any element and expand on it with further investigation. For example, let’s take the “scuba diver discovering a legendary sunken treasure and having to protect it from modern-day pirates” (number 3 in the list above):
Ok, the logline is mediocre at best and the plot description is just a rough sketch, but the midpoint is pretty cool: hiding a treasure from pirates with a submarine! I like that. Sounds like something out of a Wes Anderson movie. The plot twist is also dramaturgically solid: in their search for the one treasure, they find an even bigger treasure, and their problems end up being big, too: they’ll probably face an all-or-nothing dilemma, at least that would be a direction to go.
By doing this back and forth with an AI tool, you can generate ideas pretty quickly and then work from there and come back later to play more ping-pong….
A Wild Ride Ahead
We need to realize how new this technology is and how revolutionary it will become. These tools will become more intuitive and easier to use so we can expect AI to likely revolutionize screenwriting in a similar way it’s currently enhancing visual expression by giving birth to a whole new genre: AI Art.
At the moment of writing, there are several projects that provide their GPT models with a large number of screenplays to learn from. Training models with dramaturgical data and narrative finesse means that we can expect the whole process of screenwriting to change dramatically in only a few years from now!
It’s already underway, most notably with a project called Dramatron that aims to enable writers to co-create screenplays with a language model from DeepMind (a model called Chinchilla that experts say is at least as powerful as GPT3).
The Dramatron team also just recently published an exciting paper in which industry experts evaluate the process of co-creating scripts with an AI. Check it out, it’s a pretty optimistic sentiment there (see picture 3, where they show the professional writers' opinions on working with their AI tool):
Dramatron’s Chinchilla aims for a co-creation process that seems pretty similar to the above except the questioning and going back and forth is bundled into a single tool. What an exciting time to be a writer, right?
Within all the AI hype, do not forget:
If you want to know how you could use AI image generators for your screenwriting process, check these:
Thanks for reading! Stay busy!
