AI and the Screenplay

AI is indeed capable today of writing a screenplay that holds together as a constructed narrative, provided it is properly supervised. I have read AI-generated "screenplays" that did not resemble one in the slightest, and dialogue that was utterly cringeworthy. But even supervised, is what it produces really a screenplay? A screenplay as an original, unique, human point of view?

No.

The deep desire to write a screenplay, to make a film, to write a novel or paint a picture, comes from a wish to explore sensations, feelings, ideas, questions, and to build a bridge to share that experience.

And AI has no experience of sensations, feelings, ideas, intention or meaning, because it has no consciousness, and, more importantly still, no experience of the physical world.

A film is not merely a narrative construction. It is a bridge between living, sentient people. A vibration between the one who tells and the one who receives.

We can break that vibration down, explain it, name it, point of view, stakes, subtext, but the explanation is never the thing itself. One can dissect a heartbeat without ever producing one. That bridge is not built with recipes. It is built with authenticity and rightness, that fragile thing, impossible to algorithmise, which makes a scene land exactly where it should, at precisely the right moment, in a way that is fine, subtle, and profoundly human in all its uncertainty and empathy.

The rhythm of a screenplay that has real value is a living breath. It belongs to the one who writes it, and it speaks to the one who watches, because something human passes between them, something recognised.

And AI is structurally a step behind the present, behind what it is to live in this world, right now, with everything that entails. It returns a form that has already worked elsewhere, on someone else, at another time, never a form born of something it has just lived, since it lives nothing at all. And in any case, even if that time lag were erased, it still wouldn't have lived it any more than before.

A screenplay that resonates speaks to what it is to be alive, alongside other living beings. Not to some blend of stories already told. AI tends to smooth away the rough edge, the angle, the gaze that unsettles. And when AI does produce originality, it remains a recombination, it does not come from a particular way of seeing. Unless the human is the existential source of the story - and here I don't mean the idea of the story, what it's about, but its execution, the details that change everything - then what results is little more than an interchangeable story.

This is why writing cannot be delegated. Nor can script consulting, for that matter, and for the same reasons.

Because it isn't analysis where this happens, but feeling. That is to say, one doesn't start by analysing in order to then ask what the audience will feel, it's the other way round entirely. You read as a first professional audience member, meaning someone capable of feeling exactly as an ordinary viewer would, and only then do you analyse the why, in order to work out, through dialogue and exchange with the writer, which threads need pulling or cutting to sharpen and strengthen the work, searching for that moment of grace where, through trial and error, free association, that "almost, but not quite," the veil suddenly lifts and you know the scene fully works. Because the magic is that when it's right, you feel the very same emotion the reader or viewer will feel, even though you "made" it.

A screenplay, a story, a novel speaks to a human reader. To bring it to completion, it seems only logical to turn to a human. Even if, admittedly, that takes more courage.

AI is an incredible tool - don't put words in my mouth I haven't said - and when it comes to creative work, it can assist you. But if it writes in your place, then you become the assistant. Don't hesitate to use it, but use it aware of its limits, and your own.

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Déborah Braun / 90pages

Script doctor & consultante en scénario

MY SCRIPT CONSULTANT SERVICES

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