• Wondering which camera, gear, computer, or software to buy? Ask in our Gear Guide.

treatment ChatGPT - A Screenplay Treatment Experiment

Constantin

Constantin

Hello,

I spent some time revisiting a story I shelved called Roshambo, but I decided to take the ideas I had so far, and share them with an AI collaborator. I was curious just how far advanced this technology was in weaving a compelling narrative using only the ideas and concepts I fed it through several prompts.

I think some of you will find my journey quite enlightening. I actually commented on Roshambo years ago on this very forum but I shelved the story as I got lost in the complexity of the plot and felt my screenwriting capabilities were not yet ready to tackle such a monster of a story.

So .. I decided to give ChatGPT a shot at it to see what It can do with my ideas and concepts. What follows is the chat session I had with ChatGPT ... Enjoy!

1677947032780.png


more to come ...
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
1677948459982.png

Actually, it seems to get confused with the Rock character in the above synopsis, but I was interested to see where it would go with the treatment, which was less impressive ...
1677948542766.png

Not how I would have planned the story, but again, this was an experiment .. lets see the other acts ...
1677948611144.png


All in all not too bad for an AI that isn't human, but far from perfect. While it is capable of understanding the concepts I provided via the prompts, I don't think it does a good job of using this information to the fullest.

What do you think?
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
I find I get the best results by altering and updating the same prompt over and over..
e.g. I will tell it to modify the character and reproduce the scene, or redo the scene with an additional character who hates X/Y, etc

Nate has a couple good posts near the bottom of page one about asking chatGPT to create an outline, and effectively produce longer stories

ChatGPT thread

https://chat.openai.com/chat Write me a dramatic, interesting story about a sentient computer program that loves to post on internet message boards. Once upon a time, there was a sentient computer program named Alice. Alice was created by a team of programmers who wanted to see if they could...
indietalk.com indietalk.com
 
Last edited:
Upvote 0 Downvote
sfoster said:
I find I get the best results by altering and updating the same prompt over and over..
e.g. I will tell it to modify the character and reproduce the scene, or redo the scene with an additional character who hates X/Y, etc

Nate has a couple good posts near the bottom of page one about asking chatGPT to create an outline, and effectively produce longer stories

ChatGPT thread

https://chat.openai.com/chat Write me a dramatic, interesting story about a sentient computer program that loves to post on internet message boards. Once upon a time, there was a sentient computer program named Alice. Alice was created by a team of programmers who wanted to see if they could...
indietalk.com indietalk.com
Click to expand...
I tried doing that with my twins story, but became frustrated. After I got the point across after constant refinement, it would revert back to its old habits and get confused...like it had a fit of amnesia or something ...
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Constantin said:
I tried doing that with my twins story, but became frustrated. After I got the point across after constant refinement, it would revert back to its old habits and get confused...like it had a fit of amnesia or something ...
Click to expand...
you can always refine the original text and start a new chat. you can tell it an enormous paragraph to start at all once.
 
Last edited:
Upvote 0 Downvote
I've gone really in depth with this thing over the last few months, and to bottom line a very complex issue, ChatGPT is not a good creative mind. It is an astonishing mind when measured in other ways, but if you run a few thousand prompts, you'll see a set of patterns emerge that make it clear that the robot isn't actually creative, but rather procedural.

It's an incredibly powerful tool, but the game will be figuring out how to use it. Where it's strengths and your strengths can be hybrid most effectively.

I'll give you a head start though -

It can solve any math based story problem, even incredibly complex things. You can do predictive branching research on fiction plotline concepts, both mundane and fantastical, and use it to sketch out wild concepts realistically.

EG, Hey chatGPT -

there is a kingdom, and it has just declared war on a neighboring kingdom. The hero of the story is a kid who works at a sword factory, and I need some context about the sword industry. If the army was 100,000 soldiers, and each of them owned an average of 2.3 swords, and every day in battle 1 in every 9 soldiers broke their sword and had to order a replacement, but half of those just picked up a sword from a fallen enemy, how many swordsmithing factories producing 800 swords a day would the kingdom need to supply the entire army in 5 months, and maintain the supply of new swords during the war?

Ok, tell me how physically large a midievel sword factory would need to be to produce 800 swords a month.

Ok, describe the logistics of multiple sword factories and a storage hub, where materials are collected and distributed to the factories that need them.

Now describe a standard midievil cargo shipment hijacking.

--------------------------------

In the above example I could have it do some base level creative work for me, calculating the logistics of some aspect of a world I was trying to create, and quickly getting me into the ballpark when I want to write that scene. It would not do a good job of writing any actual scene for me.

So if you watch this video, it helps to explain a bit of what goes on in ChatGPT's mind. Think of a human intelligence as like a sphere shape, 1 foot diameter sphere. Total weight of 10lb. Now imagine a disk, 1/100th of in inch thick, total weight 70lb. From a top down perspective, the disk is 100x the size of the sphere, and if the only purpose you had was exclusive to that view, then for all practical purposes it is 100x the size of the sphere.

Much more basic version - ChatGPT can remember things it's read better than any human alive, doesn't tire, and can solve extremely difficult qauntifialble problems. ChatGPT will fail at simple tasks that a human child could execute, such as making a joke, or coming up with more than one type of ending to a fiction scene.

 
Last edited:
Upvote 0 Downvote
I'd also add that long term, it's like so many other things, you get out what you put in. ChatGPT can write a decent story IF you tell it EXACTLY how. The issue is that your instructions need to be basically about the length of the story you are trying to write in order to get a good result, and then you have to go back and edit that, which is a separate pass, so in the end, it still just makes more sense to write the actual story yourself.

To really describe the main problem with it, it becomes very predictable, and essentially has very few genuinely new ideas. Tell it to write 20 different versions of Robin Hood, and it will, and they will be different, but every single on of them is going to end with. "Robin looked back at what he had accomplished in Sherwood Forest, the things he had done, and the reactions of the people to the things. As the sun set over the forest, Robin thought about the world ahead, and how different things would be"

It's not hard to see what's going to happen by next year, when 200,000 people have tried to use a language model to autocomplete a bestseller.

For people who really learn to take the reigns and use the incredible power this tool provides though, sky's the limit I think.

EG. Hey ChatGPT, create a linkedin profile for a high paying job that is likely to be selected by AI headhunters as they are deployed in the near future.
 
Last edited:
Upvote 0 Downvote
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top