This is cool, and slightly scary:

And how, exactly, is that going to make screenwriters obsolete?

Yeah, domo arigato, mr. roboto, but i don't think so.

Well,  the stuntman has been almost complete erased by the bluescreen, and it's not completely inconceievable that scriptwriters will be replaced by a computer that spits out stories from a unlimited permutations of basic narrative formulas.

Hey! I smell a screenplay idea! Ah what's the point!

I am going to give up writing and enroll in Devry!

Computers are already writing most generic romantic comedies under assumed names. Rumor has it Nancy Meyers and Akiva Goldsman are replicants.

Which is good news, considering the built in deathclock in the Nexus 6 series.


Seriously, I think we're many, many years from AI being close to matching the imagination of human beings. Say, 75-100 years maybe.

The only way scriptwriters will be deemed obsolete by a machine such as this, is if the industry wishes to reduce itself to full length versions of those movies people make on The Sims.

Quoted from Harry_Tuttle Well,  the stuntman has been almost complete erased by the bluescreen, and it's not completely inconceievable that scriptwriters will be replaced by a computer that spits out stories from a unlimited permutations of basic narrative formulas.

Since AI is still science fiction more or less, then a human would have to program the computer with ideas so I don't really see how screenwriters will be obsolete.

And if...IF...AI ever becomes a reality, I don't see screenwriting being the first on the to-do list.

Quoted from sniper Since AI is still science fiction more or less, then a human would have to program the computer with ideas so I don't really see how screenwriters will be obsolete.

Once you have reduced an artform to a formula you don't need a human to keep feeding it ideas. It simply creates new ones from the formula. There is a program called DRAMATICA that scratches the surface of these concepts. It is nowhere near the Ray Bradbury stage, but It is reductive in the way it treats drama and that is a scary notion.

And it says right on the website "Software for Writers", not "Software to Replace Writers".

Welcome to Dramatica.com! Dramatica is both a series of software products for writers and a relatively unique perspective of how stories work. This site is the home of hundreds of pages of materials and tools for anyone interested in creating, critiquing, analyzing, writing, or otherwise working with stories.

But is it really that far fetched that a computer in 20 years time can fill out the blanks of one of Blake Snyder's patented and infallable beat-sheets?

I'm not talking about dialogue, but the story, what happens when and how?

Probably not considering some of the logline generators out there, but I still don't see how something will be able to produce a full script, unless it has a bunch of previously written scripts uploaded to it, and even then the outcome would probably be something that I wouldn't care to watch.

Imagine a line of code where every single screenplay MUST include the line "Let's get out of here."

Oh, the horror.

Quoted from Shelton Probably not considering some of the logline generators out there, but I still don't see how something will be able to produce a full script, unless it has a bunch of previously written scripts uploaded to it, and even then the outcome would probably be something that I wouldn't care to watch. Imagine a line of code where every single screenplay MUST include the line "Let's get out of here." Oh, the horror.

The real question though is, couldn't much of what comes out of Hollywood just as well have been written by droids? If the mark of human imagination is creativity then what does that say about Cheaper by the Dozen 2, Daddy Day Camp or Are we Done Yet?

That's ARTIFICIAL Intelligence for ya.

DOGBERT: I once read that given infinite time, a thousand monkeys with typewriters would eventually write the complete works of Shakespeare.

DILBERT: But what about my poem?

DOGBERT: Three monkeys, ten minutes.

This is reminding me of that great scene in The Player where that smarmy producer Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher) suggests cutting the screenwriter out of the film making process and demonstrates how easily he can pick a story out of the newspaper.

Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) responds with, "I was just thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process. If we could just get rid of these actors and directors, maybe we've got something here. "

Robert Altman was amazingly prescient and would certainly be disgusted by much of what makes it to the screen lately.