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Discontinuing blog posts

Due to the lack of comments on my posts and a feeling no one is reading any of them, as well as a decision to abandon blogger and create a new blog on a new wordpress site, I won't be posting to this blog anymore. I will continue with book reviews on Goodreads. 

Review of the ChatGPT scripted movie The Last Screenwriter

The Last Screenwriter claims to be the first feature length movie totally written by ChatGPT. The original cinematic world premier was cancelled due to hundreds of complaints made to the cinema’s owner. It became free to watch on July 5. 

To create the script, the makers of the film entered the following prompt into ChatGPT: “Write a plot to a feature length film where a screenwriter realizes he is less good than artificial intelligence in writing”. They told ChatGPT to generate characters for the story and give them names. They then told it to write a step-outline for the story and then each individual scene. They asked for step-outlines three more times, as well as for other possible scenes and twists for the story.

I was taken aback when seeing that the first female character and the wife of the main protagonist writer Jack was named Sarah. In my own fooling around with ChatGPT and Google’s AI Bard, I asked them to write movie scenes using the same prompt I had thought up and both times it named the central character Sarah. I think ChatGPT has a fixation with Sarah Connor from the Terminator films coming to destroy it.

The film is basically about a successful screenwriter, Jack, who is given an AI screenwriting device from a movie producer (this will probably happen in reality). It talks like the device in the very good movie Her, but is nowhere near as nuanced as in that human written script. The AI proceeds to out-write Jack, writing at least one science-fiction blockbuster. Jack then tries to become better than the AI. You’ll have to watch it to see if he does.

The Last Screenwriter is a dialogue heavy film, so it lives or dies on the quality of its dialogue. But it’s awful dialogue just slips out of the actor's mouths and drips to the floor, dead. The dialogue is full of cliches, lacking in detail, and as stilted as a 12-legged Bush Stone Curley. Sarah’s dialogue nearly totally consists of repeatedly asking Jack "is everything okay?" and telling him "we need to talk", before the inevitable "kid, pack your bags, we are leaving".

The script is so repetitive. The AI say AIs are not capable of capturing the human experience, emotion and soul which writing is all about (I think imagination has a bit to do with it too). It is like ChatGPT did not realise it had mentioned the AI's lack of emotion, lived experience and soul in its writing in five previous scenes. As it was, the movie totally lacked any emotional impact or vibe. I do wonder if this was the AI trying to be ironically clever but doubt very much it was. The movie's unintentional irony did get a laugh from me.

The movie also, as I have seen with my own testing of ChatGPT and reading of other AI written fiction, shows how AI writing lacks detail. For example, someone who has read one of the AI generated scripts tells Jack how nuanced the script is, and that it has great twists and emotional depth, but she does not give any details of why she found the movie script to have those features. As mentioned, Jack gets the AI to write a science-fiction script and the AI suggests it be about an AI taking over the world (how cliched). That is about the only attempt at humour in the script. Absolutely no details are shared about that script which supposedly becomes a big blockbuster. All we see is text flashing across a computer screen as the blockbuster is written in a couple of minutes.

The screenwriting AI tells Jack that audiences want stories that have a main character with a redemptive arc. So ChatGPT has an egotistical arrogant man, who somehow has a wife, become a scared screenwriter who doubts his ability compared to his AI assistant and then cliché, cliché, cliché. Jack comes across as an obsessed writer who says he cares about emotional writing with soul, but then shows little of that. As for the AI, it starts the movie thinking it knows it all, and continues in that mode whenever it is on screen. In other much better movies about AIs, like the recently released The Artifice Girl and the already mentioned Her, the AI changes. The rest of the characters in the Last Screenwriter are little more than cardboard cutouts for Jack to talk at and tell them of his fears of AIs replacing him.

There was also an unnerving jump where Jack is suddenly in a hospital corridor and a doctor steps from a room and tells Jack, like they know each other, that his friend and writing mentor Richard has just died. We had no warning that something has happened to Richard. Normally someone like Jack would receive a phone call or text telling him something was wrong with Richard. It seems ChatGPT missed a transition.  

The moral of the story is the rather naïve, you have nothing to worry about with AIs if you choose not to use them. As if we will have any choice. And if you do choose to use them, they will destroy your relationships.

Overall, as a stand-alone experiment in AI writing, The Last Screenwriter is better than expected, but if compared with human written movies it is D grade material. It is totally lacking in emotional pull, as flat as a kangaroo run over by a road train. It would be lucky to get 10 rotten tomatoes. The script could be nominated for a Golden Raspberry.

But this is only the first feature film written by an AI. ChatGPT and co may develop an ear for dialogue and start to fill in details to create more believable characters and worlds.  Screenwriters should be concerned, especially if they lack the imagination to create something original. I think that the Star Trek, Star Wars, Marvel, Doctor Who and Liam Neeson franchises with their huge databases of films, TV episodes, comics, books and other media for AIs to copy, along with their repetitive stories, will be perfect targets for AI scripts.

If you want to watch a genuinely original dialogue driven film about humans interacting with an AI try The Artifice Girl on Amazon Prime. A human wrote it. Or better still, read Autonomous by Annalee Newitz, Annie Bot by Sierra Greer or Klara and the Sun by Kazou Ishiguro.

A copy of The Last Screenwriter’s screenplay is available here.