“The act of storytelling is uniquely human”

A journalist who specializes in tracking A.I. developments has some thoughts about the technology and its impact on film and TV.

As a screenwriter and educator, I’ve been tracking A.I. since ChatGPT launched in November 22, 2022. In fact, I wrote a five-part series here on the blog in July 2023 titled: ChatGPT is a Terrible Screenwriter. As a result of those articles, Santa Monica’s NPR station KCRW featured me on their radio series Press Play.

The emergence of LLMs (Large Language Models) is having a significant impact in Hollywood, but who knows where it’s going? Last week on the excellent podcast The Town hosted by former Hollywood Reporter editorial director Matt Beloni, the topic of the day was A.I.’s Independence Day Terror. Matt spoke with legal expert, Eriq Gardner and A.I. journalist, Ian Krietzberg. Here is an excerpt from the conversation directly related to the concerns of screenwriters and TV writers.

Matt: How long do you think until a fully A.I. film or TV series breaks through and finds an audience comparable to traditional movies or shows?

Ian: Frankly, I would be really surprised if something like this were to happen anywhere in the near or mid-term future. I actually can’t really imagine an environment where we’d see something like this occur, and the reason has less to do with A.I., and more to do with humans and storytelling.

There was a study conducted by psychologists at Duke in 2023 that aimed to address the open-ended possibility of machines replacing humans in the world of art-making. For the study, the researchers showed their subjects a series of A.I.-generated images, randomly assigning “human-created” or “A.I.-created” labels to the images. They found that “people tend to be negatively biased against A.I.-created artworks relative to purportedly human-created artwork,” due to perceptions around effort and narrative storytelling.

That validates my own personal feeling: that the act of storytelling is uniquely human, and requires a human community. A.I. lacks intention and emotion. When it generates art, the bot isn’t trying to communicate anything at all. It’s all statistics, not soul. ChatGPT today can generate a novel — thanks to all the books in its training data — and publish it on Amazon, but it won’t be any good, and likely no one’s going to read it. And so I find it hard to envision a world where large groups of people can fully separate humanity from the arts, no matter how realistic things might look. But maybe I’m just old-fashioned. [emphasis added]

This has been my contention all along: A.I. cannot replicate the breadth of human experience. It doesn’t have a soul. It can’t know the heights of joy and the depths of despair. It can never grasp the subtle nuances of human emotions.

We watch movies and TV to be entertained, but also to feel something … to vicariously experience human drama through the actions and choices of the characters on screen.

A.I., which exists on the thinnest surface of human experience can never provide what audiences expect when they give themselves over to a journey into and through a cinematic story.

As I’ve said all along, my concern when it comes to screenwriting is no that A.I. will replace writers. Rather, I’m leery of what the suits in the C-suites think A.I. is capable of. Even if they follow each other like lemmings off cliff in pursuit of cost effective A.I. storytelling, it’s bound to fail.

To tell a good story, we will always need human beings.

For the rest of the podcast conversation, go here.

Beloni, Gardner, and Krietzber are all part of the Puck news service. It’s excellent and I recommend it. For more information, go here.