Forum on Artificial Intelligence

in this forum of short essays, Craig Erpelding, Jack Beck, J. D. Swerzenski, and Thomas Brecheisen explore the transformative role of artificial intelligence (AI) in screen-writing, postproduction, and teaching. AI language models and tools have emerged as valuable assets to assist in script development because they offer ideas and provide informative feedback. Beyond scriptwriting, AI creates new opportunities for characterizations, and AI tools have useful applications in video editing and film education. The four essays examine the capabilities of AI language models as a development and scriptwriting tool, the impact of AI on characterizations in film using a Chionian perspective of voice–body duality, Adobe’s AI-powered Text-Based Editing tools, and the integration of AI tools in film education, highlighting the potential benefits of enhanced student engagement and immersive learning experiences while also addressing the challenges of maintaining ethical standards and human creativity in the face of technological advancements.

—Forum editor Thomas Brecheisen

Craig Erpelding: ChatGPT as a Development and Scriptwriting Tool

The advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) language models, such as ChatGPT, has impacted the creative industries, including movie development and screenplays. This discussion considers the capabilities of ChatGPT as a tool for scriptwriting, looking not only at its ability to write scripts but also at its potential to assist in script evaluation and feedback. It explores research on AI’s capacity to generate outlines based on concepts, loglines, synopses, and character descriptions, while also looking at its ability to conform to various film and television structures. It considers how users might optimize the performance of ChatGPT in their writing process. At the time of this article’s inception, Hollywood unions were embroiled in heated negotiations between writers, actors, and studios, some of them involving the impact of AI on the industry. This author feels that as of 2023, current AI engines do not have the ability to replace human creatives in screenwriting. However, based on advances in AI in music, songwriting, animation, and other creative realms, AI could have a significant impact on the future of filmmaking.

First, what is ChatGPT? ChatGPT is a conversational assistant application that operates on an advanced generative AI engine—specifically, at the time of writing in July 2023, the GPT-3.5 architecture. It is pre-trained on a massive dataset containing diverse text sources to develop a deep understanding of human language patterns and contextual meaning. When a user inputs a prompt or a question, ChatGPT processes it and generates responses by predicting the most probable continuation based on its pre-training, creating coherent and contextually appropriate responses. The interface allows for multiple conversation lines and has a progressive memory of information within a conversation line. As of July 2023, the extensive GPT-3.5 architecture pre-training of the engine seemed to be based on broad Internet searches, social media, and global hot topics, as will be described here.

ChatGPT’s understanding of the movie and screenwriting context allows it to respond accurately to prompts such as “Write a dialogue between two detectives investigating a murder case” or “write a scene for a movie using the following characters . . .” When a prompt is typed into ChatGPT, such as “write a feature screenplay,” the content of the screenplay generated by ChatGPT is configured based on the knowledge and patterns it has learned from the vast amount of text data on which it was pre-trained with GPT3.5, which has a historical limit to 2021.

Scripts generated may include elements, themes, and plot points commonly found in typical, contemporary feature screenplays. Thus, scripts from ChatGPT result in what one might call “cliché” characters, dialogue, conflicts, settings, and story arcs. In the author’s research, typing “write a feature screenplay” into ChatGPT in July 2023 resulted in a movie outline called The Enigma Equation, which focused on underground societies pulling the strings of government to affect human culture while exploiting the influence of mass media. This is very similar to hot topics and sentiments found across the Internet and social media at the time of the engine’s most...