If there’s one thing Hollywood screenwriters know how to deliver, it’s a snappy one-liner.
“Pay your writers, or we’ll spoil Succession,” read one of the placards paraded outside movie studios in Los Angeles this week, as thousands of film and television writers went on strike. “Pencils down, middle fingers up,” said another. Closer to the bone, however, was a placard reading: “Wrote ChatGPT This.” For the plot twist is that this strike isn’t just over money. The Writers Guild of America also wants to establish some ground rules preventing studios from using artificial intelligence to generate scripts in ways that cut humans out of their own creative process.
The union has been understandably spooked by the rapid progress of ChatGPT-4, the chatbot capable of generating uncannily convincing knock-offs of any written genre, from rap lyrics to Jane Austen.
Buggy whip makers standing astride the march of technology shouting stop.
Either ChatGPT will work, in which case it will be used. Or it won’t and it won’t. Union protestations will do fuck all to change that.