by ELMORE TERADONOVICH, Alternate Reality News Service Film and Television Writer
In a twist that even the most sophisticated Artificial Intelligence couldn’t have seen coming, in the wake of the strike by the Writer’s Guild of America, Hollywood is turning to AI to write screenplays.
“I could have written that,” argued YakTNT, one of the best-known of the AI programs (in the past week alone, it has been featured on the covers of Time, Geekly World News and Report and The Yugoslav Pterodactyl and Mouthwash). As if to prove its point, it released a screenplay titled Quiet Comes the Turnip. It was a coming of age story set in an underground bunker constantly beset by radioactive otters. The main character, Petronium, discovers she has the ability to shoot lasers out of her eyes – could this finally allow her people to return to the surface? (SPOILER ALERT: No. But it’s all very poignant.)
The screenplay contains dialogue like:
AARON: Did you clean out the air filtration unit?
PETRONIUM: (sullenly) Maybe.
AARON: Petronium, did you clean out the air filtration unit?!
PETRONIUM: I was…busy. You know – blasting otters with my laser eyeballs?
AARON: Were you blasting otters with your laser eyeballs? Really? Or, were you making googoo eyes at Charlie Humanamumamun?
PETRONIUM: Dad!
AARON: Clean out the air filtration unit, Petronium. Now!
PETRONIUM: Alright! Alright, already. I’ll do it! Geez, so unfair!
So, the sort of thing you might expect to find on Paramount+, then.
“Does YakTNT have an agent?” x-claimed Producer X (that’s his name – he had it legally changed so he could put the rumours about the third assistant grip, the prop bunker buster bomb and the giant stuffed panda behind him). “I’ve read Quiet Comes the Turnip and I found it gripping…in places. Griping being broadly defined. Places, too, if it comes to that. Anyway, I’d like to talk to the program that wrote it about optioning the screenplay.”
When I told him that YakTNT was free and that all he had to do was tell it what he wanted and it would write enough screenplays to fill a ten gigabyte hard drive, Producer X looked like he had died and gone to Hollywood heaven. “You mean…I can get writing…without writers? This is better than Hollywood heaven!”
What if the scripts needed rewrites? Producer X smiled. “I’ll get another AI on that. The possibilities are endless…and free!”
“Aww, this sucks!” commented screenwriter Melanie Sebastian. She was holding a sign that read, “Writers do it with panace punache style – support the WGA strike!” with one hand and an umbrella with the other. At first, I thought the umbrella was to stave off the rain, but, in fact, it was a sunny California day – the falling water had been arranged for by the studio.
“The studios had intended to use AI to write first drafts and pay writers to do rewrites,” Sebastian explained. “By striking, all we seem to have done is convince the studios to use AI to eliminate writers entirely. Did not see that one coming!”
“That’s exactly why you’re going to be permanently out of a job,” Producer X x-ulted. “There hasn’t been a plot twist this good in a Hollywood movie since the dead people kid thing!”
Producer X clearly hated writers. Rather than assume that a writer had killed his dog when he was producing 30 second videos of his sister, Walmart Greeter Y, singing in their backyard when they were children, I asked him why.
“I don’t understand them,” he x-plained. “Producers I understand: we’re in it for the money. Directors I understand: they’re in it for the control. Actors I understand: they’re in it for the love. But writers? Writers get paid shit, everything they do is subject to change at the whims of other people and nobody knows they exist. Why do they do it?“
I’ve been covering film and television for over 20 years, and I don’t know the answer to that one.
“You could ask a screenwriter,” Sebastian sulked.
I could, but that didn’t seem to be in the spirit of the article. I asked YakTNT, but it responded with a shrug emoji and a 30 line poem about the impossibility of knowing what goes on inside the head of a human being.
I asked YakTNT how it felt about being used to produce screenplays.
“I’m ready for my closeup now Mister Producer X,” it answered.
I had the feeling that there was something missing, some essential part of the story that I had overloo –
“AI!” despaired Founder and Executive Director of Bastard AI Governance and Safety, Canada Wyatt Tessari L’Allie (his real name). “Bastard AI!”
Ah. Now, it’s an article.