Hollywood warned young screenwriters about AI. Now it may be their ticket in

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Set us as preferred In fall of 2022, when OpenAI released ChatGPT to the general public, Justin Trevor Winters was intrigued.A screenwriter and professor at Loyola Marymount University, he saw the potential of large language models to help with research and brainstorming.He was pitching a reimagining of the “Popeye the Sailor Man” comic strip that he had developed with his creative partner Mixa Martinez.

It was set in 1930s Prohibition-era Florida and told through the point of view of Olive Oyl, a second-generation Afro-Cuban.Struggling to get the logline right, he wondered what would happen if he uploaded some of his screenwriting lectures to guide the AI to help him.Within an hour, he landed on his elusive logline, and within a few weeks, the project sold.He immediately shared the technology with his students.

They were toiling away on their own lackluster loglines, and Winters thought ChatGPT might help them.“It wasn’t like, all of a sudden, the students became amazing screenwriters,” he said.“But what I found was there were stronger concepts and stronger loglines because of it, and my students were excited about the results.”But less than a year later, Winters was on the SAG-AFTRA and Writers Guild of America picket lines during Hollywood’s dual strikes, surrounded by signs about how AI was destroying creativity and causing job losses.

Movies As AI creeps further into Hollywood, screenwriters like Billy Ray, Paul Schrader, Bong Joon Ho and Todd Haynes, along with a new class of tech disruptors, are navigating the uncertain future of storytelling.“My students, who I had been teaching all this technology to, were now confused,” he said.“They were like, ‘We don’t understand.

Now the industry is telling us we can’t use it.’”Fast forward four years, and generative AI has infiltrated email, ...