WGA Would Allow Artificial Intelligence in Scriptwriting

https://variety.com/2023/biz/news/writers-guild-artificial-intelligence-proposal-1235560927/

by isaacfrond • 3 years ago

45 35 3 years ago

variety.com

Lazare• 3 years ago

Seems like not only the obviously correct answer, but probably the only workable one.

tempodox• 3 years ago

Came here to say the same. Nobody is putting the genie back into the bottle, and treating it as a tool makes sense.

ReptileMan• 3 years ago

From the audience point of view - couldn't possibly be worse than Velma or the new Witchers, so why not ...

anonylizard3• 3 years ago

Most writing sucks. Speaking as an intense hobby writer. Bad writing is tolerated at a level that is not in any other consumer good.

We don't accept worms in our meals, we don't accept meals that are missing half the portions. Yet we expect plot holes, we expect stories that don't complete, or get hastily completed.

Most written stories suck, because it is incredibly time consuming to craft an interesting AND airtight story. Most writers resort to cliches, because cliches are 10 times faster to write. Writers resort to 'plot beats', because they are 10x easier to execute than letting character motivations and world events naturally play out. Just look at Game of Thrones, the book is original and natural, so it takes decades for 1 book. The show decided to make it fast, and we get an atrocious ending.

AI will change this. Writers will be come directors, directing the AI-simulated characters in their stories, guiding the world states. Writing becomes outlining the general plot, background setup, and themes of the story, and then the characters come alive via AI, and the story begins! With 10x faster iteration and experimentation, the quality of the stories will start spiking dramatically up.

This is the biggest change to fiction writing since the printing press. Novels will merge with comics (given images are cheap now), video games will have genuinely massive story branches (given stories can be iterated quickly), they may even have NPCs that are simulated via AI.

Fans will be able to write a proper conclusion to the Song of Ice and Fire, with AI-assisted writing. Even niche fantasy novels can get LOTR level adaptations etc.

hannes02• 3 years ago

I must say, this post was very well written.

I currently try to learn to communicate more clearly. Are there any books you can recommend? (I just ordered “on writing well”)

Mountain_Skies• 3 years ago

Read in a book a decade or two ago about an early attempt by Disney to speed up animation by creating a rudimentary AI for characters generated by CGI. Instead of creating each frame, they'd instruct the character to move from point A to point B on its own. The problem came in when they wanted the character to something unusual. Mickey Mouse would refuse to step off the edge of a cliff because it had been trained too deeply that when walking from A to B, you don't step off the path. Other odd personality quirks would pop up out of nowhere, such as Donald Duck randomly brutalizing his nephews for seemingly no reason. There was a reason somewhere in the nest of rules Donald Duck had been given, but no one could figure out how to make it stop.

All of that makes me wonder if writers directing the creation of an AI assisted story could run into something similar, where the AI refuses to have a character engage in a certain activity because the AI believes it's too out of character. Alerting you to behavior that would be out of character is one thing, but if the AI simply refuses to write or acknowledge edits that it deems inconsistent with the character, you've recreated the conflict between human writers with differing ideas. Being able to convince the AI of the reasons why the character would behave in such an uncharacteristic manner will become a new skill for writers.

notahacker2• 3 years ago

Struggling to reconcile the first part of your post with the second

AI is extremely good at the sort of writing that sucks, because it writes tight prose, substitutes character x and related tropes into story archetype y fairly well and it can handle cliches and beats and it can reasonably be assumed will start to get a better handle on overarching structure as the number of tokens it handles gets bigger. Yes, this will allow people that can't write for toffee to attempt fanfic too, and other models will let writers who can't draw illustrate and maybe even animate their stories.

But its model of character motivations is limited at best, especially with fresh, original characters, it resorts to cliches by design since its output is literally derived from overlaps with similar concepts and training approval of those overlaps, it doesn't know what a plot hole is, and it can't tell a brilliant, original ending from an atrocious ending. It can absolutely tweak paragraphs a writer doesn't like very much and do absolutely everything for content creators that don't like writing very much and are happy with "good enough", but I don't think the bottleneck to someone like GRR Martin's creative output is that he can't think of lots of permutations himself or type out scenes fast enough.

smrtinsert• 3 years ago

I would love fiction with less plot holes. It definitely kills the immersion for me. An AI would also (eventually) have no issues with continuity which would be stellar.

The best years are ahead for fiction I think.

YeGoblynQueenne3• 3 years ago

> AI will change this.

How? When "AI" is trained on the output of human writers, the majority of which has all the problems you flag above? How is "AI" going to produce something so radically different than the material it was trained on?

voxadam2• 3 years ago

Is AI generated content even copyrightable. It wasn't that long ago that US courts found that a photo taken by a non-human primate wasn't subject to copyright.[0] How different is this?

How would Hollywood navigate a world without copyright (see: Disney)?

Please note: I'm not an expert on copyright law or any other legal field. I'm genuinely curious about the legal ramifications of AI generated content.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

pabs3• 3 years ago

The copyright office says no:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35191206

psychphysic• 3 years ago

Is AI generated content even copyrightable.

Its simple did you have substantial/significant creative input? If so you probably have copyright.

AI content is not meaningfully different from procedurally generated content.

Take a Minecraft world. If you generate a random one do you have copyright? No of course not.

If you take a generated world and review and edit it substantially. Do you have copyright over the result? Probably.

There is a grey area where ever you don't start from scratch. Copyright is over the creative aspects of a project.

If I make a large printout of the letter A in Arial typeface just filling an A4 page on word, do I have copyright? No. What if I spend hours editing it in Photoshop? Yes probably if that involved substantial changes.

What if I generate thousands of samples and pick one? You probably do have copyright.

What I'd the prompt was empty? Probably don't.

This not to say that copyright itself is simple, just that AI generated works are not much more complex than the already subjective world of copyright.

voxadam2• 3 years ago

While I agree with you in principle, but I think the courts have give themselves a lot of wiggle room with concepts like "substantial/significant creative input".

I'm not taking a position at the moment. Hell, I'm barely qualified to take a position. It just feels to me that the courts have given themselves so much wiggle room to change their minds in a second that we're back in the wild west.

As an aside, the first version of the GPL was released more than thirty years ago and it's hardly had a chance to "stand trial" in most courts. How long is it going to take something substantially more complex than a "simple" matter of contract law to make its way through that convoluted system?

crop_rotation2• 3 years ago

GPT4 actually does write readable Seinfeld scripts. It is no Larry David but it might reduce the tons of writers TV shows have to have.

YawningAngel• 3 years ago

Yeah but you need the tons of writers to come up with the archetype of a "Seinfeld script" for it to copy

crop_rotation2• 3 years ago

I have no clue about the writing profession, so all this is just a speculation. But I feel like it would allow a head sitcom writer to flesh out concepts quickly and iterate quickly. I don't see it replace the writers coming up with high level concepts and themes or even the final script. But it should make iteration faster I guess.

notahacker2• 3 years ago

They have the tons of writers because writing isn't expensive in the grand scheme of things and small details and incremental improvements really matter. The tons of writers are actually a case there isn't a good use case for AI, because if it was all about saving money, a single writer would suffice...

MagicMoonlight• 3 years ago

You’re thinking too small there. With AI you could have it write it, then computer generate the video itself.

You could have a TV channel which is just infinite seinfeld customised to the user. Don’t like a character? Tell the TV and it kills them off in the script. You get your own custom show for as long as you want it and no actors or writers or anyone has to be involved.

It will be the death of humanity but it will be glorious. “TV, write me a different ending to game of thrones and start playing”

mezentius• 3 years ago

This is, at best, a wildly misleading headline, as the WGA would in most cases NOT allow it. This was the official WGA statement on AI-generated writing:

“The WGA’s proposal to regulate use of material produced using artificial intelligence or similar technologies ensures the Companies can’t use AI to undermine writers’ working standards including compensation, residuals, separated rights and credits. AI can’t be used as source material, to create MBA-covered writing or rewrite MBA-covered work, and AI-generated text cannot be considered in determining writing credits.

“Our proposal is that writers may not be assigned AI-generated material to adapt, nor may AI software generate covered literary material. In the same way that a studio may point to a Wikipedia article, or other research material, and ask the writer to refer to it, they can make the writer aware of AI-generated content. But, like all research material, it has no role in guild-covered work, nor in the chain of title in the intellectual property.

“It is important to note that AI software does not create anything. It generates a regurgitation of what it's fed. If it's been fed both copyright-protected and public domain content, it cannot distinguish between the two. Its output is not eligible for copyright protection, nor can an AI software program sign a certificate of authorship. To the contrary, plagiarism is a feature of the AI process.”

YeGoblynQueenne3• 3 years ago

It seems they are trying to avoid ChatGPT doing to their union members what machine translation has already done to professional (human) translators. As far as I understand it, it's common practice for translation companies to automatically generate "alignments" (a sort of pre-translation of sentences between text in two languages) and then ask the translator to make a full translation based on the alignments- and only pay them for the time the company decides is needed for that task, which is of course less than the time to do a full translation from scratch.

Which sucks badly because the automatically generated pre-translations are often prtty bad and the translator must, in practice, do the full work anyway, and only get paid for less than that.

My source is a bunch of friends and acquaintances who are professional translators; somehow I happen to know at least three distinct groups of them. Also, they're all Greek so the situation may be different for translators between language pairs where automatic translation works better than, e.g. English and Greek.

cs7023• 3 years ago

Ironically, the use of LLMs would likely make most Hollywood scripts less formulaic.

Almost every script out of Hollywood these days is a mediocre regurgitation of old material.

LLMs likely would do a better job at combining old material in fresh ways.

I'm all for that.

23B15• 3 years ago

I'm a working screenwriter, and LLMs have been great for finding interesting research directions and saving me time!

Rest assured that the reason H'wood is hell-bent on regurgitating old material has nothing to do with screenwriters, and everything to do with the risk-mitigation imperative of everyone between me, the creator, and you, the viewer; producer, director, actor, studio exec, marketer, distributor – all of those have a veto – directly or indirectly – on every word I put on paper.

cs7023• 3 years ago

Think:

  prompt = f"Write a script similar to {old_material}
             but in {new_setting}, making sure that
             it meets {studio_criteria}, maximizing
             the probability of box-office success."

  first_draft = LLM(prompt)

andrewfromx• 3 years ago

dup from 5 days ago? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35257151

23B15• 3 years ago

I'm a working/repped screenwriter. The real deal here is that the union wants to prevent AI from enabling studios to undermine the IP chain to pay screenwriters less.

This is a big topic to unpack with lots of historical, political, and business context, but generally speaking the value-to-pay ratio for screenwriters is unfairly inverted and studios/producers will do anything they can to avoid paying you for creating the very intellectual property upon which their business depends.

Edit: HN has been invaluable in its discussion of IP and AI so thanks to y'all who are arguing furiously about this topic, and those that are building these new tools.

WGA Would Allow Artificial Intelligence in Scriptwriting

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