Did you apply to Imagine Impact this year? (The Ron Howard/ Brian Grazer search for screenwriters).
If you did, your fate was in the hands of the robots. It's probably only a matter of time before the big screenwriting contests start using a similar AI.
https://www.wired.com/story/imagine-impact-hollywood-diversity-wired25/?...
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Whilst the idea of tech predicting quality is a concern, I can see why Imagine Impact feel they need to use it. They offer numerous intakes throughout the year and push a speedy content turnover. Imagine how many staff it takes to read 11000 screenplays in two months. That's their time frame I believe, between opening the intake and the beginning their selection. I'm sure screenplays are getting read when they narrow the field, but it would be interesting to know what this tech was looking for when it was spitting out it's choices.
Regardless many who have applied and gotten into the program have seen sales and success in furthering their potential. That can only be a good thing.
Online streaming services often produce sub par material. Dialogue for instance is becoming dreadful in some cases. So the need for content grows and the question is, is there enough talented writers coming through to fill the need. The answer to that at this moment is no. It's a golden time for writers if of course they are talented enough and fit the bill that grows ever expansive.
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I have done a bit of work with AI and text processing. It is pretty bad at doing granular assessment of an individual text. But it can give you an assessment of sentiment over time.
We don’t need to panic yet.
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Pro sports use AI, algorithm stats. New age Scouts/Bean counters loved "Moneyball" theory used by the Oakland A's baseball team. It saved the A's Owners lots of $, but Moneyball didn't produce any championships for the A's.
Imagine Impact, I think, is a private business. Writers don't have to work for them. Just say no/boycott Ron Howard & Brian Grazer. They have their own brand of movies & tv shows. There are hundreds of fellowships all over the world to apply. Not just in Hollywood.
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"Moneyball" theory actually works quite well for the A's. They make the playoffs almost every year. The problem is when management trades away those young players who begin to thrive (and, therefore, will command bigger contracts) when, instead, they should let them develop fully in their system.
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You're right, Dash. The A's have decided to make money out of their system doing just that instead of building their own superior team. It seems counterintuitive, but that's where the bigger money is at.
As for Imagine Impact's AI approach - I can only assume they tested it on a few sample collections of scripts, then personally read those script to see how closely their own opinion matched the AI. At least I hope they did that.
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I have to comment on the Moneyball idea. There are hard and fast stats in baseball, strikes, swings etc. This made that much easier.
I developed an AI with trainable machine learning that could assess a customer complaint and classify it (Insurance-refund).
AI could be used to identify and assess features in writing. Such as sentence structures, the reading age of the writing, Complexity and Word use. All this would
not tell you the quality of the writing (story). But it would give you the writer’s skills with english. You could use that to cull the 1,000,000 scripts down to 50,000, which would be more manageable.
After all the chances of someone developing their skills in story telling without improve their skills in english is low. So low it is worth the risk. After all, we don’t need to find all the great scripts. Just enough great scripts to fill the production schedule and make money.