Will we even notice if AI replaces screenwriters?

We are edging into the third month of the strike by the Writers Guild of America, called because of shrivelling residual royalty payments from streaming movies and TV, as well as concern about AI such as ChatGPT being used to generate story ideas – and indeed to write scripts. Hollywood’s screenwriters have now been joined by the 150,000 members of the Screen Actors Guild, which was demonstrated very visibly by the cast of Oppenheimer walking out of its UK premiere last week. ‘We are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines,’ said union president Fran Drescher. Susan Sarandon has said of AI: ‘I would hope that in the future people understand the difference between real people making real choices and something that’s basically animation.’

But here’s an uncomfortable fact. When it comes to scripts, I’m not sure using AI instead of flesh and blood writers would make a whole lot of difference.

I’ve read tons of unsolicited or ‘spec’ scripts in my time, written by people trying to break into the screenwriting industry – either as favours to friends of friends or in a professional capacity. When I was a script editor on Emmerdale, I once read 50 ‘try-out’ scripts (from people with at least one produced TV credit) in a weekend. Luckily, I had built up a strong resistance. Fifty episodes of actual Emmerdale in 48 hours would kill a beginner, let alone 50 amateur episodes, every one of them based on the same storyline.

This is quite a soul-destroying activity, as you can imagine. It makes one feel alternately cruel, sad and bored. But something weird started happening about ten years ago. I noticed that the spec scripts I was reading were getting much more acceptably presented, easier to read, with all the correct technical terms and layout; superficially better – and yet strangely lifeless.