They don’t give up. The 11,500 American screenwriters gathered under the powerful WGA (Writers Guild of America) are completing their first month of strike, in a movement on a scale not seen for nearly fifteen years. The series are suspended, forcing the networks, the groups of television channels, to fill their programs of the season with games and entertainment of all kinds. In cinema, some feature films are also affected, like the production of the latest Marvel, thunderbolts, paused. If the main claim of the screenwriters concerns the level of their remuneration in the era of the domination of the major streaming platforms (Netflix, Disney +, Prime…), the upheaval brought about by generative artificial intelligence (AI) worries them at least. as much.
Concretely, the WGA has three demands concerning AI: it must not be recognized as writing or rewriting “literary material” (synopsis, scripts, etc.). She should not be considered as the author of “source material”, this base, often novels, from which a screenplay is built. Finally, the union demands that the works of screenwriters not be used to train generative AIs. If this last request seems difficult to satisfy – as the major current text generation models are black boxes –, the first two could not be more feasible. “AIs have an immediate impact on the remuneration of professionals. If a producer succeeds tomorrow, with a good prompt [NDLR : une commande donnée à une IA]to generate a 10-page synopsis and hand it to a screenwriter, can we consider it as ‘source material’ which will cut his remuneration by 30 to 35%?” asks Mᵉ Denis Goulette, specialized lawyer in intellectual property. No one has yet decided. Ditto, continues the lawyer, as to the position in the credits that a screenwriter associated with an artificial intelligence will have tomorrow. “A precise legal corpus currently determines the remuneration of the professional in function of this position, itself correlated to the reality of what he actually wrote in the script.” Without the AI, therefore, for the moment.
If these statutory and salary complexities are not really transposable to France, French television and cinema professionals, like their American counterparts, are worried about the overall impact of AI on their profession. “It is difficult to deny that artificial intelligence is already among us. We must become the best experts”, reacts Marie Roussin, president of the French Guild of screenwriters, the main union in the sector, which has set up a working group and will devote its first meeting in September to this subject.
“AI has no childhood trauma”
Because time flies. ChatGPT is already able to build stories. An American director, Noam Kroll, for example, had fun on his blog to draw no less than 5 stories and 40 different twists featuring Lily, a 50-year-old widow whose fortune inherited from her husband is the object of covetousness. Enthusiastic, he nevertheless remains measured in his conclusions: “AI is excellent at thinking up the big picture, but poor at creating specificity and nuance,” he writes. An opinion shared by Marie Roussin: “Artificial intelligence has no childhood trauma. When you are an author, you write with your neuroses, your experience. This is what makes the vision of an author unique. “
Afterwards, all fictions are not necessarily endowed with subtleties. “If we give an AI 80 episodes of a detective series with well-identified plot loops – a duo of cops, three twists – then, yes, we will certainly be able to create the 81ᵉ scenario thanks to an AI”, recognizes the president of the French Guild of screenwriters. Same thing for the “daily” series in France, like tomorrow belongs to us (TF1) or such a big sun (France 2). Which is not really good news for the profession, because these very popular soap operas generally hire a lot of screenwriters. “Writing workshops with six to eight authors will perhaps only bring together four, associated with an AI, in a few years”, regrets Marie Roussin.
Some producers could thus be tempted to turn almost exclusively to this type of series for economic reasons. Same in the cinema, a sector addicted to repetition. “Each of the 10 highest-grossing films of 2022 was a sequel or a reboot [recommencement]. I saw John Wick: Chapter 4, the other day. At one point, Wick struggles for about twenty minutes to climb some stairs in Paris, and once he gets to the top, a bad guy knocks him down, and he has to fight his way back up again. That’s it, movies now: the same thing again, please,” laments novelist Stephen Marche in The Atlantic.
Writing within everyone’s reach?
Beyond TV channels and major studios, when it comes to AI, screenwriters fear streaming platforms above all else. First, they are not resistant to technology. On the contrary. The very recent Fran system, designed by Disney and boosted with AI, notably makes it possible to age or rejuvenate an actor or actress in just a few clicks. More broadly, their economic model lends itself to this. “The creation of series or fiction is industrialized. There are strong editorial constraints, precise specifications. Such and such a thing must happen during the first five minutes of the story”, unfolds Johanna Goldschmidt, of the Syndicate screenwriters, a collective created at the end of last year and of which Denis Goulette is also a member. “This mimicry, coupled with the massive data that these technology companies hold on the uses of users, their tastes, in fact gives them incredible power to generate stories themselves”, she adds. With an implication: they will not deprive themselves of it. “Platforms such as Netflix are present all over the world and adopt the practices they find most favorable.” Like a kind of dumping. With these majors have already settled the miniseries, with “minirooms” (small parts) of screenwriters. A concept from Spain, offering less stability, less income too, compared to a time when the seasons had about twenty episodes. Johanna Goldschmidt and Denis Goulette assure that adopting a firm position on AI is thus very useful today, including from France.
Another more optimistic view of AI, however, highlights the emergence of specialized tools for writing scenarios, better thought out than ChatGPT, generalist by nature. Google, through its subsidiary specializing in AI, DeepMind, developed software called Dramatron at the end of 2022. which is able, according to researchers, to “generate scripts and scenarios consistent with the title, the characters, the rhythms of the story, the descriptions of places and the dialogues”. In France, the Genario software, created by screenwriter David Defendi, who notably participated in the series Braquo, broadcast on Canal +, feeds on several AIs, including those of OpenAI (GPT) and many others, found on the hub of French origin Hugging Face. And would bring, therefore, more nuances and finesse. “The AI is useful at three stages of the story. At the very beginning, by typing the idea, it suggests leads, characters, triggers, antagonists. In the middle, to revive ideas, structure the story. Then, at the end, where she can correct the style and compare the result to other works with similar characters”, explains David Defendi, who claims several thousand users of his platform. According to him, artificial intelligence could above all have the merit of shaking up the norms and conventions of an overly elitist environment. Particularly in France. “Many screenwriters come from the same schools: from Fémis or CEEA [le Conservatoire européen d’écriture audiovisuelle] ; they live in the same place, in Paris, are inspired by the same structures of the scenarios, the same codes…” What to wonder: AI, enhancer of creativity? Or machine to standardize? The story seems far from being written.