As Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools continue to advance, the fear of them replacing screenwriters has caused this year’s Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike. In order to understand their capabilities, Insider asked OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus to write the finale scene of HBO’s “Succession”.
The AI chatbot was fed with summaries of season four’s first six episodes, and it predicted that the Roy children would have control of the fictional media conglomerate Waystar Royco. With that being said, Insider asked ChatGPT to write a scene from the finale.
The AI-generated script provided a straightforward, happy ending with overly earnest dialogue – a total departure from the rest of the show. To see what experts thought, we sent the scene over to screenwriters and screenwriting professors, who were both dumbfounded and insulted by ChatGPT’s writing.
Neil Landau, a screenwriting professor at the University of Georgia and a WGA member, called the script “pure drivel”. He said it lacks humor, irony, clever word play as well as the show’s signature dysfunctional toxic, twisted transactional family power dynamics. Oliver Thornton, an Emmy-winning screenwriter and professor at the University of Michigan, said it was filled with mistakes and lacked complexity of the characters. Jim Burnstein, another professor and WGA member at the University of Michigan, said it was “really insulting” and “should be off the table right away.”
All three experts concluded that if this had been the show’s actual ending, there would’ve been massive backlash from the fans. Although AI technology has a lot of potential, the proof is in the pudding that it’s not ready for primetime just yet. AI technologies have their place, but screenwriters still reign supreme – AI tools will never be able to replace quality storytelling.
