Can AI Replace Hollywood Writers? 

Tbh I wasn't paying attention at the title I completely thought the title said "Could I Replace Hollywood Writers?" My answer was "Yeah probably..."

​@@Pepe_Le_Pew_Pewwdym probably he'd make the content way better he'd revive Hollywood

Can't wait to pay 45$ a month with ads for my streaming services in the future..

Those people need to smoke one and cheel

I was busy trying to open my bag of Cheetos and so was only half listening sorry :(

That’s the main point of contention in negotiations

Which their reluctance alone would indicate that most of them are not doing so well...

For further research, look up "Hollywood Accounting." Basically, they cook the every living FORK out of their books to screw over as many people as possible. For example, "Return of the Jedi" has officially made no profit. This includes the second theatrical run leading up to the prequels being released. This happens because studios often force actors, particularly lower-tier actors without major star power, into accepting a percentage of gross profit. That's not TOTAL profit, but the excess left over after accounting for marketing, production, etc. So the man who played Darth Vader, David Prowse, NEVER received a dime for his work on Return of the Jedi. Occasionally, someone will raise a stink about being shafted and sue the studio over it. Infamously, Stan Lee sued Marvel over cheating him out of residuals for that Spider Man movie in 2002. You know, the one that earned $800 MILLION? He sued and they promptly settled for $10 million. .Each time, the studios settle out of court, because going to trial would entail a lengthy "discovery" phase where they would have to put their cooked books on record. There is no way any studio wants to put their fraudulent accounting under legal scrutiny, so they settle. The latest chapter in this long running scam involves streaming numbers. However, in this case I don't believe they are bilking people on residuals so much as they are trying to fool investors and the Wall Street in general. Streaming has been horribly flooded with every major network throwing their hat in the ring, but few are truly profitable. Basically, millions of us consumers "cut our cables" because of corporate greed leading to shitty service (300 channels and nothing to watch!), and those same companies learned jack shit nothing and are in the process of trying to ruin streaming too. So being brutally honest with their viewing statistics means officially showing how much money they are losing or generally underperforming with platforms like Disney+. If that platform was such a success... why are they hemorraghing subscribers while cutting content? It's so bad that the CEO publically talks about how they are needing to pivot. He all but said they wasted too much money on junk content that wasn't driving subscriptions, and are now focusing on a smaller (less total funding) slate of 'quality' content. AKA there was too much shit before. And if that is what Bob Iger is PUBLICALLY admitting.... yeah it's in actuality much worse. The stock market runs off faith in a companies future growth, so admitting bad news always leads to a drop in stock prices. By fudging numbers and lying as much as the companies can, they can keep the illusion of success going for as long as possible. And with that, they keep investors mollified and stock prices higher. Hollywood really is just one giant swamp.

Part of it, too, is that they just want to give the gig economy treatment to writers and actors.

@DontReadMyProfilePicture.74I won’t fall for that one again.

Well said. Ai won't replace human writers because Ai doesn't have the spice needed to make it genuine. Plus, Ai will easily fall back on tropes that people will get inevitably bored of especially as they can't discern if what they are writing as heart or is just selling out to mass market appeals, which nobody enjoys.

i mean fundamentally, the masses do enjoy those products, which is why so many of them are made. People who are cynical and critical of film and entertainment are fundamentally a smaller marketing demographic than "the masses" who get the bulk of the sales

​@@tinajd187you say this because you have a narrow understanding of AI. Back in 2019 I wrote a simple generative AI that could wrote fantastic stories. It was stupidly simple. Just using TVtropes to figure out the "rules" of writing stories worthy of entertainment and introspection, and combining that with an algorithm similar to what's called wave collapse (I didn't know of its existence at the time) it could generate great stories and premises. One that stuck with me was this one about a magic coin. Each side gave 3 wishes. The "heads" side was a wishing well and your wish would be granted exceeding your dreams for it. The "tails" side was a monkeys paw and was the classic you get what you wish for but at a cost and only later do you realize you actually wish that you hadn't. Once the coin came into your possession you couldn't rid yourself of it, and with each successive flip landing of either side that side would fade. So each side's first wish was the most amplified of the positive or negative. And if your wish landed on the fully faded side you couldn't wish for that wish again, like it was a failed wish and so it would be denied and then locked. One of the wishing well wishes it came up with was also something that has stuck with me. One of the characters wished that someone they had just lost would always be remembered and future generations would really understand what a loss their passing was. And the way it granted the wish was the family and those close to that character's uncle came together to memorialize him. They all wrote biographies about him and how he impacted their life, they told all his flaws and wonders and quirks. They wrote how his ideal self would have been and what stopped him in life from becoming that ideal self, what demons tormented him and what monkeys were on his back. Then they commissioned a burial statue for him and broke it, everyone putting it back together in the same manner as kintsugi. That became their clans tradition for grieving and they created a hall for all those statues and that grieving material, so that for all time they will continue to guide the future generations. Now what I created didn't come out quite like that. It output as a hyperlinked wiki essentially. That was how I figured would be best with the various levels of resolution tropes exist within stories; moment to moment, overarching, rhyming motifs, etc. And it was just a scaffolding and not exactly readable, it just linked together a coherent, valid set of tropes with profound or interesting interplay. Plenty of it was garbage or at least I couldn't understand a way to see a story from navigating through the interconnected links of its output. So different ppl would find different stories and interpretations from the same output. I'm sure I could make a way to get it to interface with a modern LLM like gpt4 or llama2, but I'm not going to. I've ran through the likely future scenarios for me if I do and I'm fine not doing that. So while there are plenty like you that say AI will never be able to do this or that, I know has already been done. The examples known to the broad public aren't all that exist. And those are not well thought out in their architecture if you ask me. AI researchers are both too ignorant and too arrogant to be much more than incompetent. I believe it was Carmack who said the big AI teams aren't going to bring about real AI, but most likely a lone programmer or small indie team that stumbles across the right combination. That we have most of the pieces, and possibly all the pieces but don't realize that, and they're all quite simple to implement. It's just going to take putting them together. And even if you don't believe me, just look at Facebook's/Meta's CICERO and think about if that was modified to instead be a storyteller rather than a virtual geopolitical diplomat.

@@bwzarchive708 So what? Too bad for the 'masses'. They can watch slop while we can watch something worthwhile.

​@tinajd187 have you tried chatgpt 3.5? It can make scripts, even rewrite my outline scripts and give it the "spice" the story needs. That is just the fre version. Chatgpt 4 is much better and remembers your characters and what you wrote.

Or the executive producers could just reject bad screenplays outright. Hollywood rots from the head down.

@@ashsherod6321 that would require them to spend money or time doing the actual work of critically reviewing scripts

Was scrolling down to say the same thing

@@cartilagehead6326oh they absolutely do work and spend money... on reshoot, and sometimes editing the script for the worse too they just have different priority

The issue is also finding something can be "good" (and that's already a very hard metric) but also appealing. There's a lot of original and creative movies and shows recently that all lost money or did not get many views. And studios like Disney are so massive with so many franchises they don't need to bet on the daring scripts. Everyone seems to hate those bland live-action Disney remakes but they might as well be money printers.

The youtube algorithm is already proto-form of an AI entertainment executive, choosing which products get funded (monetized), marketed (promoted), and recommending ways videos should be produced.

​@roychen5235 jesus christ, I would hate to see a script made given how unhinged youtube algorithm can get

CEOs are absolutely more easily replaceable with current stochastic parrot AIs. It has already happened. Most CEOs don't actually follow best practices and humans are not capable of fully ingesting and processing all the company data to pull the right levers the right way. There have been a few companies whose boards have put an AI CEO in charge and they noticeably improve the health and revenue of the company. Even a simple LLM will suffice if you limit it to always check with the best practices literature commonly available. What takes more resources is the AI that interprets the trends internally in the company into recognizable terms for that CEO AI to then work with. That same idea works with lower levels of management as well. Tho typically they don't entirely get rid of the various middle managers, they give them an AI advisor essentially and that keeps a performance record in case that manager disregards the AIs advice at some point and that turns out wrong it can be traced back to that decision. Although for managers that may just free them up to directly observe and micromanage the employees they're over even more, as an unintended side effect of freeing up their time with AI assistance. We'll see. I have been saying from the beginning of the strike tho that most likely the writers are going to hurt themselves with this. And it would have been better if they went all Don Bluth and took the talent and used AI for their administrative tasks. But they're unlikely to do that because they've been blinded by self preservating rage against the entire concept of AI because they are under the illusion of a threat from AI. It would be easier for the creative talent to leverage AI against the studios than the studios to leverage generative AI against the creative talent. All in all, this doesn't end well, like the one in 2008 didn't end well.

@kameronjones7139 which is why I can't see AI replacing the roles of business executives. Not because I think the role is complex or challenging, but because we are still incredibly far from an AI thinking for itself and make executive decisions. Like what would they even train on? AI has no concept of responsibility, what business interests actually are, or any meaningful way to interact with its board and/or shareholders, unless we replace all boards with programmers.

@@roychen5235 they are past tense replacing executive and administrative positions. It has already happened. It literally is one of the simplest integrations for current AI. It's as simple as: [business environment and factors]. What is our best course of action for [goals]? Just doing that increased revenue because the LLMs have been trained on business literature and they pick the objective course of action. There is no ego, no games&politics, pure input and best matched output. Shareholders prefer that way. Also plenty of small businesses are unlikely to fall victim to themselves being incompetent at managing their small business and so the success rate of new businesses is likely to increase. Administration has been a solved problem for at least a century now, and likely longer. They just reinvent ways to say the same things so it seems like business fundamentals have changed, when really it's just been the "meta" of the business landscape that has.

I suppose it could be used as a springboard tool. Say you're a writer with writer's block and you feed the AI a prompt to give you a basic idea that you yourself flesh out. That seems like it would be the best way to go about using ChatGPT for writing purposes.

​@@DracoMagniusI've tried yhis and gotten absolute dogshit nonsense or the most predictable things ever, which I suppose is still technically on par with Hollywood writing.

It’s more about speed and scale. For a movie it doesn’t make sense but for stuff like background dialogue for video game npcs where quantity matters more than quality it makes perfect sense.

@@DracoMagnius It can be good for those purposes, essentially as a tool for brainstorming or solving the blank page problem. And that's neat! Chat GPT definitely isn't useless for writers, just limited.

@@nerdy_crawfish I guess? Like if you wanted to produce a bunch of variations on "Hello, how are you?" that'd probably be a good use. That kind of dialog works because it all has the same content, but needs to be repeated a ton. But most games don't have or need a ton of repeated dialogue of this kind. Even for low-impact side dialogue for NPCs, if the dialogue isn't repeated, doing the work to craft a good prompt is probably harder than just writing the line directly.

I don't think that ruling is strong enough to be a concern, the amount of human work required to make a work "derivative" and thereby copyright-able is unclear. The bar might be as low as "the human arrangement of AI content is sufficient". Also, there is no ruling that cannot be struck down. Considering this ruling restricts the property rights of corporations I don't have high hopes it could survive a full assault by armies of corporate lawyers

All those at the top are pros at finding loopholes, bet they will find a way to have an AI shit cheap content and copyright it

​@germanyballwork5301 agree. We're talking about the people that made copyright last virtually two lifetimes.

Welp, that settles that. I'm sure Mass Media will NEVER find a way to lobby for more favorable laws involving copyright!

But that is exactly what Hollywood _doesn't_ want - at all costs... Let's say that ruling sticks, and AI made stuff isn't copyrightable. Some Hollywood bigwig decrees his 'minions' to make a film by using AI - and _because it isn't copyrightable_ , anyone can make a derivative work from it, without consequences. Sure, Bigwig can try to tie that 'anyone' up in court for years, but in the end, he will lose the case, and anyone _can_ and _will_ make derivatives from any of those movies - and that movies are then burnt for all times: Hollywood can't ever make a sequel of it and earn money from it (what they like to do most, after all...) without anyone and their dog making their own new version, killing their revenue (what little there will be, with the quality that comes out of that process...). And for getting that ruling struck down: they can try - but that will take years and years in court, and I'd almost bet on one of the requirements of the court being that the movie in question can't be played or otherwise marketed while all those legal shenanigans aren't solved. Imagine making an expensive movie (because it still won't be anything _nearly_ approaching 'cheap'...), and then not getting any money out of it for a decade or more... TL;DR: Good luck with trying that - paying the people making your movies better will make you tons more money in the long run...

Homeless? No. Unemployed from writing jobs for putting out garbage? Absolutely.

I can't think of any group of people more deserving of AI than these fine folks.

Thanks to you both for your extremely helpful feedback

people acting like it’s the writers fault that everything being put out recently isn’t very good. they literally are not being paid and they have money driven business executives controlling and changing their work and switching out the writing rooms. those conditions do not foster good writing. if you blame the writers then you either know nothing about the industry or you’re just plan stupid

@@soapy6 I've read so many fantastic scripts from friends and colleagues - and when they finally get made, the studio has gutted everything that made it interesting and turned it into formulaic slop. Writers are only in control of the beginning of the project, why do people think we're responsible if the end product sucks? That's like blaming a farmer for shitty banana bread.

Let me put it this way: it's not a writer who gets to decide that Disney's gonna spend over half a billion dollars on Indiana Jones 5.

​@@NJdaniels96also keep in mind, Disney is infamous for delaying certain films like Indy 5 and Rogue One due to lengthy reshoots that ballooned their budgets because they were worried about it not testing well enough with test audiences

​@@KhanumXAnd then in like 10 or so years, the movie or TV show that everyone hated or said was forgettable will they come back and everybody will praise it like a masterpiece (eg Megamind.)

No, let’s replace the writers too. Execs are hiring crappy writers, and all this garbage isn’t making money anyway, so everyone’s losing.

I'd prefer we just have AI supplement the current marketing departments

That intern will still be paid like shit, need all the money for the stockholders

@@mrshmuga9 What you're really saying, replace Eiger with AIger.

​@@mrshmuga9By your logic, just replace the execs. They get paid millions a month and yet make terrible decisions like hiring idiots to write and spending huge amounts of money on failed projects.

Your teacher sounds dumb. A paint brush is dumb because it can't paint a masterpiece by itself, a guitar is dumb because it can't create music by itself. Just because something sounds profound doesn't mean it is.

You people aren't ever going to be philosophers who say absolute brainrot takes like what you posted.

Yes, everyone can use it. whos to say the company in charge of distributing the product won't just do it themselves.

@@MesiasMark What I was trying to say is that only writers and artists with real life experience will be able to extract the most of these AI Tools. Everyone can use ChatGPT, but will only get the most generic outputs. This will apply to Hollywood if they cut writers and artists to save money.

@@CanaldoZenny It still lowers their bargaining power in the workforce, because whos to say Someone in the higher ups can't do the same? All ai have to do is touch the basics again then its game over. most people said that Ai can never take over digital art because it needs creativity, surprise surprise it can, it only needs to touch the basics and I say this as an artist myself. I never understood why most of my peers believed that Ai can never take over the art world when it is the most vulnerable to it. Anything that has basic fundamentals can be learned by the Ai, and the creativity part will just come from the person asking the ai to do it.

Sort of sounds like the pilgrims leaving Europe because of religious oppression, then oppressing the Native Americans.

​@@Horatio787Certified protestant moment. Virgin puritans killing natives vs Chad Portuguese royalty going to Brazil, turning Brazil into kingdom and marriage between Portuguese and natives common. This is a come to Brazil message

Time to watch foreign films.

It’s probably all going to move to Canada.

sorta, AI itself cant be given ownership as a human must provide the guiding creativity for the creation. So a chatGPT prompt by itself would fail but one that is refined post output would probably pass.

Wrong. Copyright is determined by whomever can pay the politicians the most. No big companies have lobbied for AI scripts yet.

@@SangoProductions213 courts have already said AI generated content can't be copyrighted, scripts included

@@Artorias920 debatable. courts haven't really defined how much human contribution there actually needs to be for a work to be eligible for copyright, and it's such a messy issue that I doubt any studio will bother fighting lengthy court battles for scripts that were half written by a human when it would be easier to just pay someone to write the whole script or accept that other people will use your script.

@@AnimeKaiserWillyII Again, you misinterpret. They said "wholly AI-generated." Which is a simple case of "How many grains of sand is a pile?" And that, again, disregards that no large companies have overturned it - yet.

Honestly I don’t see how this would be different than the current situation lol

I for one welcome our new Bob A.I.ger overlord.

Well, a fanfic tier chat GPT script will, most likely, be free of 'murican political nonsense, so there' something

It can’t be any worse than what we’re currently getting

@@snowfox4277what movies did you actually watch this year?

@@tanostrelok2323Likely it will be included since the politics will be included in the training data

⁠@@sadham2668are you really gonna sit there and defend things like The Flash, Shehulk, Dial of destiny, blue beetle, etc?

I believe that this part was meant to be saracastic

@@manyseas1219 yeah i agree but the comments don’t seem to be 💀

@@soapy6 I wasnt sure whether he was sarcastic or not until I watched Husks conclusion at the end of the video.

@@Dave102693 The same people who blame the actors for their own problems with Hollywood probably didn't even consider the existence of writers before the strike. They have a barely functioning sense of object permanence if the only people they think are affected are A-listers. It's not worth arguing with them because they'll just parrot back the words of the executives responsible for the current state of media like especially stupid sock puppets.

He knows, he is just playing with the stupid argument some people who are against the strike have.

Aight you’re a bot. That’s a pre generated comment with little to do with the video

This could explain some of the stuff that came out in the shitpost era of KnowledgeHub. Because some of that felt like a bizarre fever dream of a script. So maybe that was early AI musings...

Is funny that a bot says this

People really watch one video essay on The Hero's Journey and start saying "Humans aren't special. Creativity is just a formula so computers can do it even better."

Anyone that says AI will surpass our intellect in 100 years doesn't pay attention to its capabilities and the rate of improvement. Some people will say this for ever and ever until all of a sudden it happened

@@Galaxia53 It's not some existing thing that needs to be "improved" upon, though. Artificial general intelligence fully does not exist. It needs to be invented in the first place before it can improve.

@@ohno5559 Artificial general intelligence is not a thing just yet indeed. It's something they are working towards by making large language models more capable and allowing it to utilize more than just language. If it did exist right now then it could self improve to infinity very quickly.

@@NJdaniels96that's because most people who say that don't watch/ play/ read anything beyond the basic plots let alone anything challenging.

TBH a lot of the artists complaining about AI are angry that people are asking them to do this. The use of copyrighted data in training sets is, IMHO, a side-show legal battle. What artists are *really* worried about is having the fun part of their job taken away and replaced with half-assed stochastic parrot nonsense.

​@@SuperSmashDollsAlso it being faster and requiring less people would mean massive layoffs.

AI is one of those tools for artists to use like how you used it. Like if I needed a bunch of names or some ideas to get through a creative block you can just whip up a bunch of random shit from AI

Then DO SOMETHING ELSE. Clearly, you're not a writer, or a thinker.

I often fear in the future companies might try and shutdown open AI or try to hide them behind a huge subscription fee, because of this reason.

And most televisions are huge, high definition screens now. Watching a movie at home isn't a 14" 480i screen playing a vhs tape anymore. And theaters aren't exactly using film projectors these days, either: I sat in the front row to see Logan in theaters and realized that I could make out the individual pixels on the screen.

Where are you going where you're consistently spending $60 to see ONE movie??

@@Arander92 I’m not rly speaking for myself but since I didn’t make it clear above I’ll say it like this. The main theater audience would be couples and families of about 4. With ticket prices rising and food rising with it in theaters, it’s becoming less affordable for these people (aka most theater goers)

The names you see in the credits are the writers who wrote the first draft. After the first draft, everyone else in the writer's room gives input, but their names aren't put on the episode. Since you mentioned St. Elsewhere, I looked up the first few seasons. Seasons 2 and 3 have 8-9 credited writers. So that's their writer's room *minimum*. They probably had a few more writers who just didn't get to write a first draft for those seasons. So 10 people in a room isn't a stretch. The reason the union is demanding minimums is because the studios have been shrinking writer's rooms, reducing staffed positions to rely more on freelance writers, and eventually want to turn writers into gig workers where they're hired day by day instead of for whole seasons at a time.

Imagine how thrilled actors are going to be, dramatizing the polished AI turds.

yet

Mere Text generation is exactly what it sounds like.

​@@qtar1984 Yeah you're right ChatGPT and the open source AIs I got on my computer do exclusive text generation. I had to think on this for a while but when it comes to for shadowing a human can imagine the future. We don't know the future but we can imagine one. Now I was thinking what if the text generator generates text ones and then builds upon that generation by generating and edited version of it so that the previously unforshadowed plot twist now becomes foreshadowed. Maybe it could even come to the conclusion that the plot twist was stupid in hindsight. They are text generators, but they're smart text generators. They need to be more than text generators to get closer to our level though. OpenFlamingo is a multi modal language model that can take in both text and pictures so that's a cool first step for open source multi modality.

We haven't been getting quality anyway, so nothing changes.

Fair point. @@Cybertech134

Making your own video games is surprisingly easy now and making your own tv show is basically what RU-vid was made for. People have been making books for free online just for the fun of it for decades now. It's already happening.

@@scienceface8884 Oh yeah, but what I mean is AGI will make the process a lot faster for the majority of people who aren’t familiar with game design. Once you can interface with your general purpose AI you’ll basically be able to create, tweak and play whatever your hearts content.

@@Dave102693 yeah a lot of pro-LLM (trying to avoid calling it AI as much as possible) have very anti-art and anti-artist motivations

"i dont get it. we made a 50 billion dollar movie. how come it didnt make 100 billion dollars?"

How many and where can I find this info!

That's the dumbest thing about this argument. In a few years those writers won't be striking, because ai will give those writers freedom that the studios would never give them. And then the billion dollar studios will be left as holding companies for ip's they buried into the ground.

Exactly, people consider it as the magical being that will replace everyone in no time but the truth is that it will simply be another tool in the toolbox of items to create supreme product.

@@Edge50199 there is a problem with that statement: humans aren't unique. Humans can be replaced and we're pretty damn close to the time when humans become the horse in the horse vs car argument.

@@jeansanchez2805 that is not the case, I'm afraid. Humans are replaceable, and AI will come to that point sooner than later.

@@jeansanchez2805 that is not the case, I'm afraid and stinks of an outdated mentality. AI and automation is evolving faster than anything previous, and the best case scenario is that we run out of jobs by 2050... the more plausible case is literally the end of the decade.

even then what would, change if the people at the top still keep approving bad sequels and reboots it won't mader who wrote them they'll still be bad