story DEEPSTORY

[Unknown Screenwriter]

So I've been playing around with this AI called DEEPSTORY. I don't know why I like playing around with this kind of stuff because I personally do not believe AI can currently come up with a story good enough to keep our attention. Will it happen in the future? Most definitely. I think the writing's on the wall as far as that's concerned.

I think once somebody comes up with an AI strong enough to understand story and structure? It'll just be a matter of time. I do think it's going to take some brilliant programmers to pull it off however... Programmers that know story inside and out and trust me... Some do exist.

I cannot imagine a studio or production company that would NOT want IN-HOUSE AI that could come up with a concept and write it out more or less. Hell, at that point? They could even bring in a screenwriter to clean it up until of course at some point, the AI doesn't need it.

But trust me... IT'S COMING whether we screenwriters LIKE it or NOT. You can believe that AI will never replace US but I believe it eventually WILL but there will always be screenwriters employed to tweak and polish thereby saving a studio/prodco one hell of a lot of money.

But that's a subject for another post unless any of you want to add your opinions below.

I've been sitting here with the DEEP STORY AI just playing around with it. The way it sits right now? No way can it come up with an all-inclusive, self-contained story but I doubt that's what it was created for anyway. I did throw in some story elements just to see what IT would come up with and after several tries, I realized while it certainly cannot finish or continue a story for you? It could certainly point you in a different direction.

Would you LIKE the direction? Who knows. I think if one plays with it ENOUGH? It could point you in the direction of a new scene that you might not have considered otherwise. No, you would NOT use what it creates AS IS, but you might pick up a possible nugget that you could spin and work into your current story.

Kind of like writing prompts... I've never really like them but I can see how reading one could get a writer started writing if everything else is failing. This is pretty much the same I think. No, it won't write your scene for you. No it won't create an entire story. But after having played with it for an hour? There were several action and dialogue excerpts that I could have easily used to keep going... After they were rewritten of course.

A little scary. No... It's not ready yet. Could be another decade or two until AI like this works but trust me... IT'S COMING.

I'd be interested in your take. Might make for an interesting discussion.

I knew I'd heard about a short film created from an AI script... Here it is:

Turns out they even made another one... LOL. Enjoy.

 

[indietalk]

Snakes on a Plane, a perfect example of high concept. I would totally believe that was written by AI!

 

[Unknown Screenwriter]

You're right... Those are the kinds of high concepts OpenAI would most likely come up with... DERIVATIVE mashups of other high concept movies because it has NO imagination.

That's where a human being can beat it out if they put in the work to create a concept we haven't seen before. I know, I know... I keep reading everyone here say, "It's all been done before."

It HASN'T all been done before. If you think that way? You're probably gonna fail at coming up with a truly high concept idea for a story, book, or movie.

Sure... There are themes that have been done before and will continue to be done to death... WHY? Because they work. They have that mass appeal human beings all over the world identify with.

But there are plenty of untapped subjects out there that have YET to be developed into a high concept for a movie. I doubt AI could ever figure that out on its own. A programmer with imagination might be able to create a high concept with enough information and data that would allow the AI to take the ball and run with it...

Someday. But that? I definitely don't see THAT happening anytime soon.

 

[indietalk]

I get you. GOOD high concept. Although I do think high concept in general would be easier for the AI bot than low concept.

People need to appreciate AI as a tool. Why not? Maybe I have writer's block. Maybe I feed my script in and it spits out a scene I use. I continue writing without AI. Excellent!

Breaking News: Movies are already FAKE! Actors are playing a part. Stunts. CGI. Dialogue replacement... AI!

 

[Unknown Screenwriter]

I get you. GOOD high concept. Although I do think high concept in general would be easier for the AI bot than low concept.

People need to appreciate AI as a tool. Why not? Maybe I have writer's block. Maybe I feed my script in and it spits out a scene I use. I continue writing without AI. Excellent!

Breaking News: Movies are already FAKE! Actors are playing a part. Stunts. CGI. Dialogue replacement... AI!

Agreed! I see absolutely no problem with it as a tool. I was given an invitation to try it out (AI) on Chapterly recently and while I can see the use for it if you're stuck? At this point? It can take quite a few sessions to get something out of their AI worth using. But having said that? It's still pretty interesting and with OpenAI now being available? I see all kinds of tools like this developing FAST.

 

[Nate North]

I use AI all the time, I have a dozen tensorflow applications installed right now, and I have about 14,000 cuda cores (specialist cores used by AI, think "AI horsepower") I built an AI from the ground up, and once built a company on top of that AI. Here's what I think about these articles.

I'll just reply to these magazine writers one at a time

Stargate: Cast Reunite To Read a Google AI Written Script

You mean the original stargate sg1 series wasn't written by an AI? It was so painfully dumb I just assumed all 10 seasons were created by a commodore 64 that had been dropped into a bathtub by accident.

Can a computer write a script? Machine learning goes Hollywood

No, it can't, at least not a good one, but then neither can Terrance Mallick, so maybe this is a matter of opinion.

Is Artificial Intelligence Any Good at Writing Screenplays?

Not really. There has never been a good one once in the history of the world, and all the buzz isn't changing that.

AI-Generated Film: The Next Phase in Movie Making

It's not the next phase in filmmaking. It might be the next FAD in filmmaking, like when Mumford and Sons became the next "Phase" in music. Here's something real for contrast. 1080p is the next phase after 720p, 4k is the next phase after 1080p. Each phase is quantifiably better than the last. The best AI script example isn't as good as the Fritz Lang script for "Metropolis" People just keep saying this garbage because the headlines get clicks.

How We Made a Movie by an AI Script Writer

How I made a sentence with a computer keyboard. Equally impressive. I used a tool to do thing with no inherent value. A lateral move. Just because you can do something doesn't make it worthwhile. I can make a film out of the text on the side of a soup can. It would make a catchy headline on twitter, or frakker, or slank, or chird, or whatever the hell random garbage morons come up with next week. "Are soup cans the future of Hollywood?" Click here to find out.

A.I. Writes Hysterical ‘Star Wars: Episode X’ Script

It's funny because it's terrible, you are not at risk of loosing a job to this toy robot.

Can AI Direct Movies? This One Just Did

Directing is a creative artform, Parrots are not creative directors, but they can yell action, and there is real money to be made by TELLING people that a parrot is directing your movie, and you can get a lot of hits by shopping around an instagram post of a bird in a directors chair yelling action each time the trainer prods it.

A.I. Can Make Music, Screenplays, and Poetry. What About a Movie?

AI's can't make any of these things well. And a movie is all these things combined, if you're doing it right.

Artificial Intelligence Is Automating Hollywood. Now, Art Can Thrive.

This article actually makes sense. This is exactly what I use AI for. Automating work intensive, mundane, and repetitive tasks. It's good at that.

Imagine Impact is an AI-based incubator for entertainment storytellers

This sounds like a good thing, but it's probably a bad thing. An AI can't identify fresh creativity. It can only understand how well a writer conforms to what's been effective before. This actually could be the beginning of the end for creativity, if enough clueless executives start evangelizing each other with these articles.

OpenAI’s GPT-3 Wrote This Short Film—Even the Twist at the End

Sigh, more of the same, people failing horribly at something, then handing each other money and being excited about how great they are. It's the indie film festival circuit all over again.

A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human? GPT-3

No, I'm not scared yet. I'm far more scared of people getting dumber than I am of Ai getting smarter. At this point every person that wins a music award is someone who can't play any music. It's not some ultra evolved super musician using next gen AI to clear unimaginable creative hurdles. It's a guy in a 3000 dollar jacket standing on Mozart's grave and yelling "yeah" over and over while 3 of their friends try to figure out how to operate a drum machine.

You seem very worried about super intelligent robots taking your job. That's not who is going to take your job. It's going to be a guy with an IQ of 70, from a rich family, born in Burbank, who doesn't know how to type, producing a 150 million dollar feature film about a 10 second video he saw on tik tok while he was drunk. AJ Soprano, that's your real enemy. When one of the Sackler kids writes a screenplay, it will get greenlit, by their uncle.

This is a person who lives in Hollywood, has lucrative contracts I seriously doubt he can read, and is now on a panel of judges, telling other creative people whether or not they deserve a shot.

 

[Unknown Screenwriter]

I use AI all the time, I have a dozen tensorflow applications installed right now, and I have about 14,000 cuda cores (specialist cores used by AI, think "AI horsepower") I built an AI from the ground up, and once built a company on top of that AI. Here's what I think about these articles.

I'll just reply to these magazine writers one at a time


You mean the original stargate sg1 series wasn't written by an AI? It was so painfully dumb I just assumed all 10 seasons were created by a commodore 64 that had been dropped into a bathtub by accident.

No, it can't, at least not a good one, but then neither can Terrance Mallick, so maybe this is a matter of opinion.

Not really. There has never been a good one once in the history of the world, and all the buzz isn't changing that.

It's not the next phase in filmmaking. It might be the next FAD in filmmaking, like when Mumford and Sons became the next "Phase" in music. Here's something real for contrast. 1080p is the next phase after 720p, 4k is the next phase after 1080p. Each phase is quantifiably better than the last. The best AI script example isn't as good as the Fritz Lang script for "Metropolis" People just keep saying this garbage because the headlines get clicks.

How I made a sentence with a computer keyboard. Equally impressive. I used a tool to do thing with no inherent value. A lateral move. Just because you can do something doesn't make it worthwhile. I can make a film out of the text on the side of a soup can. It would make a catchy headline on twitter, or frakker, or slank, or chird, or whatever the hell random garbage morons come up with next week. "Are soup cans the future of Hollywood?" Click here to find out.

It's funny because it's terrible, you are not at risk of loosing a job to this toy robot.

Directing is a creative artform, Parrots are not creative directors, but they can yell action, and there is real money to be made by TELLING people that a parrot is directing your movie, and you can get a lot of hits by shopping around an instagram post of a bird in a directors chair yelling action each time the trainer prods it.

AI's can't make any of these things well. And a movie is all these things combined, if you're doing it right.

This article actually makes sense. This is exactly what I use AI for. Automating work intensive, mundane, and repetitive tasks. It's good at that.

This sounds like a good thing, but it's probably a bad thing. An AI can't identify fresh creativity. It can only understand how well a writer conforms to what's been effective before. This actually could be the beginning of the end for creativity, if enough clueless executives start evangelizing each other with these articles.

Sigh, more of the same, people failing horribly at something, then handing each other money and being excited about how great they are. It's the indie film festival circuit all over again.

No, I'm not scared yet. I'm far more scared of people getting dumber than I am of Ai getting smarter. At this point every person that wins a music award is someone who can't play any music. It's not some ultra evolved super musician using next gen AI to clear unimaginable creative hurdles. It's a guy in a 3000 dollar jacket standing on Mozart's grave and yelling "yeah" over and over while 3 of their friends try to figure out how to operate a drum machine.

You seem very worried about super intelligent robots taking your job. That's not who is going to take your job. It's going to be a guy with an IQ of 70, from a rich family, born in Burbank, who doesn't know how to type, producing a 150 million dollar feature film about a 10 second video he saw on tik tok while he was drunk. AJ Soprano, that's your real enemy. When one of the Sackler kids writes a screenplay, it will get greenlit, by their uncle.

This is a person who lives in Hollywood, has lucrative contracts I seriously doubt he can read, and is now on a panel of judges, telling other creative people whether or not they deserve a shot.

I provided those links after just a very brief search on Google... There's a lot more out there too. All I'm simply saying is that people are AT WORK right now trying to develop this. That's all. Am I worried? LOLOL. Not at all. I'll put my writing up against anyone's. Nothing to be worried about if you know what you're doing in this industry but having said that? Trust me when I tell you that there's a lot of money being sunk into this technology and one of the many hopes is that eventually? This shit can replace a writer. All I'm saying. Nobody's WORRIED. LOLOL. I just think it's SAD that the industry has such a low confidence level and is so worried about pissing somebody off somewhere that we are heading in a direction where content will eventually be dumbed down so much that it won't even be worth watching.

That's just ME. My opinion. However, I'm also open-minded enough to acknowledge that those growing up into this developing and evolving environment today may very likely embrace the kind of content that I personally can't even stand to watch. Nothing wrong with that. It is what it is... It's just NOT for me.

 

[Nate North]

I provided those links after just a very brief search on Google... There's a lot more out there too. All I'm simply saying is that people are AT WORK right now trying to develop this. That's all. Am I worried? LOLOL. Not at all. I'll put my writing up against anyone's. Nothing to be worried about if you know what you're doing in this industry but having said that? Trust me when I tell you that there's a lot of money being sunk into this technology and one of the many hopes is that eventually? This shit can replace a writer. All I'm saying. Nobody's WORRIED. LOLOL. I just think it's SAD that the industry has such a low confidence level and is so worried about pissing somebody off somewhere that we are heading in a direction where content will eventually be dumbed down so much that it won't even be worth watching.

That's just ME. My opinion. However, I'm also open-minded enough to acknowledge that those growing up into this developing and evolving environment today may very likely embrace the kind of content that I personally can't even stand to watch. Nothing wrong with that. It is what it is... It's just NOT for me.

I'm ok with it as long as it's OUR world meaning everyone, rather than THEIR world exclusively. There are some signs that things will turn out ok though. I was actually a bit spooked by the rise of reality TV in the 2000s. I thought that perhaps soon there would be nothing left for people on the north side of 100 IQ to watch, but eventually, the pendulum swung back, and we now have a hundred different fairly intelligent serial TV shows. More than there ever were before "Survivor" crashed the vitals monitor of tv writing.

I can't agree with them that carefully balancing every creative writing decision against a representation chart is a good idea. I think that the idea of an audience being able to predetermine every aspect of every show is terrible. That's not creative writing, that's procedural writing, and it's not any good. Thought policing everyone all the time with machines sounds terrible.

I was called in to direct a Star Trek fan film in NYC once a few years back. There were literally fans, not crew, but would be fans of a show we were filming the pilot for, that were getting into loud angry arguments on the set, during filming, about whether every decision any of us made was "cannon" not cannon Star Trek, but cannon for an unaired series that hadn't shot a pilot yet. People with no work hours in, with no financial stake, with no experience, were DEMANDING that the pilot be made exactly how they wanted, and a lot of those demands conflicted with each other. It's not a healthy situation. Make shows, air them, the good ones will last, the bad ones will fade. It's a good organic way to filter quality, and how well an entertainment product serves it's public. I think we are entering a culture of severe over entitlement, where every person in America is a backseat driver. Bullying and threatening production companies until they make every show according to the whims of whoever posts the most on social media is a stupid idea, and I wish people had enough backbone to resist it. I don't have the right to tell you how to write your book, and vice versa.

Even using the conventional way is beginning to fail under the strain of bad character. I had to buy a computer the other day. I wanted to be careful about spending my very limited resources, so I read all the reviews. It had about 20% 1 star reviews, so I was concerned, and read them all. It turned out that there was only one single defective computer out of all these reviews. Less actually than the standard manufacturer defects from the GPU alone. One person wrote a scathing one star review, trashing the product and calling it defective junk because...... it was supposed to be 220% faster than his current computer, but was in actuality only 219% faster. He called them out and insulted them repeatedly for mounting a 3090 card on a PCI e x3 slot, which performed effectively 0.5% slower than it's PCI E x4 counterpart. This guy had literally read about something that just came out a week ago, and then began viscously attacking a company for depriving him of something totally inconsequential that literally no company even offered yet. The problem was that the single most graphics intensive video game would only run at 150 fps. 60 fps is considered excellent, rock solid performance. My point is, the public is becoming psychotically unreasonable about it's demands, and I think it's bad for all of us. Another 1 star review was from a guy who wanted to rip out the motherboard and replace it, and became hostile and started attacking the company for saying that it would void the warranty if he replaced the central components and rebuilt the machine himself.

Sorry for the rant. I feel kind of strongly that our society is heading in the wrong direction, with people saying they want a world where people show each other greater respect, and simultaneously demonstrating the opposite at every turn.

Anyway, since everyone gets to tell everyone else what to do and say, here's my demand. Write whatever the hell you like, and don't even worry about what I think.

 

[geckopelli]

It'll be more powerful than that but even IF it's NOT? What makes you think that wouldn't be good enough for a studio? LOL. Throw enough advertising at it as part of the formula and they'll be lining up to buy tickets.

You're reaching.
I'm a Studio System Trained guy. I don't "think", I know, because I ask.
JGR laughed at the idea.
Look around-- Even Cameron, the man who wants to get rid of Actors, is a rewriter.

 

[geckopelli]

Yes... With a computer. LOL. Look it up, they're damn near doing that NOW already i.e., feeding human-written scripts into software to see if they're worth developing into a production. It's already being done.

Not for the reason you purport.
ALL screenplays are put through thier paces to see if they are a feasible production. This is a financial thing, not a creative one. They used to use paper and pen, now we use computers. This is one of the jobs I do. Again, it has NOTHING to do with creativity.
Business first, and the fringe world of Film is not about the Business of Film Production, it's about the Business of Advertising sales.

 

[geckopelli]

pattern recognition teaches it to recognize a good script. computers are exceptionally good at pattern recognition if you use a neural network based AI.

So you're saying it is incapable of originality. It can only regurgitate.
That's exactly my point.

 

[Unknown Screenwriter]

You're reaching.
I'm a Studio System Trained guy. I don't "think", I know, because I ask.
JGR laughed at the idea.
Look around-- Even Cameron, the man who wants to get rid of Actors, is a rewriter.

Yeah... I CAN TELL you're a studio-trained guy. LOL.

 

[Unknown Screenwriter]

Not for the reason you purport.
ALL screenplays are put through thier paces to see if they are a feasible production. This is a financial thing, not a creative one. They used to use paper and pen, now we use computers. This is one of the jobs I do. Again, it has NOTHING to do with creativity.
Business first, and the fringe world of Film is not about the Business of Film Production, it's about the Business of Advertising sales.

Had you bothered to actually read the thread and understand what I'm saying? You wouldn't have simply JUMPED to your conclusion LIKE YOU ALWAYS DO. But that's how you are... YOUR way or the HIGHWAY. LOLOLOL.

I was simply pointing out that the studios are headed in this direction and have been for quite awhile. I know that they use AI to see if a production is feasible. I not only found the article... I read it too. But your beloved studios are also sinking money into developing AI to come up with Story. If they forgot to tell you that?

Don't know what to tell ya.

But don't worry Dude... They'll always need someone to transcribe what we write into a shooting script.

 

[Unknown Screenwriter]

So you're saying it is incapable of originality. It can only regurgitate.
That's exactly my point.

And HOLLYWOOD is OH SO ORIGINAL... LOLOLOL.

 

[Nate North]

I'll tell you what you should really be worried about, what an AI really would be capable of. You could absolutely program an AI to do this.

You could take script submissions, feed them into an AI designed to change them just enough to skirt plagiarism legalities, and then simply steal any script from it's writer with no consequence, other than keeping all the money and credit.

An AI will likely never write Sling Blade, but figuring out how many names and locations had to be changed, it could do that now. I like to think that Hollywood would choose to avoid black hat tactics like that, but there is evidence to the contrary.

M Night Shamylan stole every good movie plot he ever made. You can really tell the difference when you watch the scripts he didn't steal.

The Sixth sense, plagiarized

The Village, plagiarized

Lady in the Water, that's an original

He lost each lawsuit if I remember correctly, but he's still wealthy and famous, despite being caught multiple times stealing.

And then there's the case of Jingle All the Way. Where a guy just like one of us ended up accidentally taking his family to a christmas movie he wrote. Imagine producing world famous film scripts in poverty, receiving a never-ending chain of emails about how you "just weren't good enough to deserve to be part of the 1% club" explaining to your wife year after year that you were actually good at your job, and they just didn't get it, and knowing that she never really believed you.