Auxiliary tool: how the US plans to use artificial intelligence in scripting

The American Writers Guild (WGA) proposed to allow artificial intelligence to participate in writing scripts, provided that this does not affect the earnings of real authors and legal status.

According to the rules of the trade union, if the script was based on the source material, then the new text is no longer considered original. For example, a novel adapted for a film gives the screenwriter only 75% of the copyright, while the original material gives 100%.

In February 2023, the guild announced that it intends to regulate the use of artificial intelligence in writing materials, but this information was perceived by writers as a threat: they were afraid to lose their jobs. However, union members do not plan to completely ban the use of the neural network in work on scripts.

According to Variety, the WGA plans to officially approve a status in which text written using artificial intelligence will not be considered source (as works on which scripts are often based: novels, plays, articles) or literary (original text) material.

The guild will encourage authors to use ChatGPT to help prepare scripts. At the same time, writers will not have to refer to technology manufacturers or share copyrights.

In other words, according to the idea of WGA, the neural network will be perceived as an auxiliary tool - a pen or keyboard - and not as the author of the material. Thus, members of the guild want to provide screenwriters with the opportunity to use technology without becoming a participant in litigation with software developers.

At the same time, this agreement will not be valid if the text was completely created by artificial intelligence and a person did not edit it.

An attempt to create a film using artificial intelligence was made in 2016. Then director Oscar Sharp and his fellow technologist Ross Goodwin took hundreds of science fiction television and film scripts, including "Jurassic Park" and "Frankenstein", and uploaded them to the Benjamin neural network.

To get started, Sharp and Goodwin provided the program with some details, such as the title of the film Sunspring ("Sunny Spring"), the main plot twist, the opening scene. Based on all the information, the neural network wrote a script, according to which an incoherent and ridiculous short film was subsequently shot. The tape was created in order to show the possibilities and limitations of artificial intelligence as a story writer.

In 2022, 28 Squared Studios and Moon Ventures released a short film called The Safe Zone, created with ChatGPT. This is the world's first serious project written and filmed by artificial intelligence.

The action of the tape takes place in a dystopian future, where AI has taken over the world. The main characters must decide which of them will go to the "safe zone" created by the government, and who will live in a world under the control of technology.

It is known that the team of the picture did not give clues to the neural network, but programmed it to come up with an idea on its own. However, already at the time of the script, the members of the group noticed that ChatGPT often departs from the topic and begins to write about something completely different – they had to control the process and remind neural networks of the importance of plot development.

Russian filmmakers also recently began to use the latest technologies in their work. The domestic film market is already developing a series, the script for which was written by artificial intelligence.

In the summer of 2022, the media learned that the script of the tape of the STS Sidorov TV channel was created using the TV Script Generator neural network, developed by Skillbox platform students Vladimir Larkin and Vadim Povolotsky.

Before writing the script, the program was trained on comedy projects such as "Dyldy", "Voronins", "Eighties" and "The Oligarch's Wife". It is known that about 356 thousand words and 88 episodes of different tapes were loaded into TV Script Generator. This was necessary so that the AI could independently generate the place and time of action, dialogue, character names, remarks and many other plot details.

"It took 20 experiments with the parameters and the way the data is fed into the model to approach the best quality of the content produced by the network. Taking in a small text introduction, the neural network can generate an infinite number of different scenarios in hundredths of a second, "quotes one of the authors of the neural network Vladimir Larkin "Vokrug TV".

"Sidorovs" is a series about an ordinary Russian family that begins to notice strangeness and suspect that it is inside a comedy project. The characters constantly sit at home, get into comical situations contrary to common sense and hear voice-over laughter. This leads them to believe that they are hostages of a sitcom, from which they will try in every possible way to get out.

At the moment, the show is at the production stage: in early March, it became known about the start of filming. The roles are performed by Georgy Dronov ("Voronins"), Alina Alekseeva ("Christmas Trees-Needles"), Tatyana Orlova ("Daddy's Daughters"), Sergey Stepin ("The End of the World"), Maxim Sushko ("Container") and Alexander Novikov ("Pischeblok").

Georgy Dronov called the series a "bold experiment." According to the actor, he is happy to participate in the show, and he likes that many are interested in progress.