Screenwriting : AI generated scripts suck too much by Robert Franklin Godwin III

Truth!

As with any other tech, AI is a tool. I do not agree with most people that AI is useless as a tool to help screenwriters. If it's able to help everyone else in their own field, medicine, automation, faith, space, you name it, why is it bad for screenwriters? Now responsible usage of anything, including AI tech is a different discussion and that's where we need to talk more. How can we use it to help us do and be better writers? That's definitely where we need to be, in my humble opinion

Robert Franklin Godwin III I actually agree with you more than it might sound at first glance. I strongly dislike AI-generated scripts and anything that replaces human instinct or originality.

I personally use ChatGPT strictly as a structuring tool — to organize ideas that already exist, clarify format, or help untangle something that’s become too dense on the page. I’m very explicit about not wanting it to generate dialogue, rewrite voice, or make creative decisions.

For me, it’s a springboard, not a substitute. The imagination, emotional intent, and execution still have to be human-driven — otherwise it shows immediately.

Hollywood's Scariest Boogeyman: The AI Script. It's all hot air. Me personally, I have tried to see what it's capable of in dialogue and got some samples that I thought were interesting, but didn't work for me. I'm better off in a plain text editor using my own HumanLLM.

BUDGET - The one thing I keep seeing on this platform and others is that we're supposed to all know what the "budget" is we need to write to. An illusory guessing game. Ask AI? Well that depends. If you have real numbers to work with then it will do a fantastic job but from what I have seen, suggested low budget numbers from bloggers on this platform and others seems bullshit also. In this area - until AI has real numbers to work with we won't get any better public accuracy there yet than the existing "hunch system".

SOFTWARE CODING - AI for software building - until you have seen this first hand, everything else with AI is farther behind except for coding and story. Claude is excellent with story, but must be managed. Chad and Gemini are ok, but more stoic with story.

All of the AIs are utterly jaw dropping with code. And the ideas about "AI is fake" - you haven't seen it code. It does currently have issues with long coding sessions, and shit falls apart if you do not know how to keep it focused on the specifics you want done. it can be exhausting, and yet we are seeing results - even with the current state of it that are mind blowing. And all of that is now evolving up into a better coding experience.

Go into ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude on a free tier, and ask it do build you any kind of app. Make up something, and hit enter. Tell it you want a recipe manager. Tell it you want menus for a five star Michelin restaurant with vegan choices and sustainable etc.

What you will see next is still unexplainable in empiracle terms. All of the top AI companies have come to a conclusion that AI is doing something they dont fully FULLY understand during "thinking" - the "transformer" processes.

And then, when it's done copy the code to a webserver and watch the app work. And if you need instructions on how to do that, AI will show you.

There are sites ike Lovable, Dev, and dozens of others that will vibe code your app and deploy it to a server - within minutes, not days, not weeks, not months. Accomplishing working code. So

I built an entire content management system that I use now on about 30 sites I manage after the amount of wordpress bombardments of bots and hacks - I built an awesome AI content management system. Claude built me a great stats program, a podcast server, youtube and facebook integration. No more popups and plugins blowing things up. No more trying to figure out what the children who run Facebook and other platforms are trying to do, we have AI now to fix the crap we have to deal with from the big platforms.

TRENDS

This is why guys like me get excited. We've seen tech revolutions and massive game changers for decades, and we know what we see. We see the inevitable trend.

It can do the screenplay document layout wonderfully like "Final Draft" or other products do and have done for decades.

In this respect, I can take MY dialogue and scenery and utilize AI to properly code it in screenplay jargon, as a translator.

In this manner also, it enables me to focus on the product and not the document layout.

Not minimizing either part of the process, and actually getting both the layout and me out of the way, and I can edit to suit and learn the code OJT. (I actually bought a copy of Sid Field's VHS tapes back in 2000 from a friend of mine, none of that helped - the key is to just write.)

AI is indeed an undeniable ability anhancement. I have the words, my words from my own HumanLLM, now I have a way to get those words down for sale to a market that wants them a specific way. Path enabled, proceed.

Obfuscation and scarcity, removed.

TOM SCHAEFER Interesting, Tom. Can you post an example of your writing from the TOM-LLM and the result transformed through the AI engine? Two pages ought to do it. Eager to see your results!

I will probably sound chicken on this but I hate to post it - it's not my vision - it's what Claude pulled out of what I have written - but he doesn't follow my own internal dialogue as I see the characters. He's leaviung out details I see as important. His dialogue does not confront with the same voice I hear in my head from the characters - so I am really reticent to post it. As to being a document formatter - Claude does a nice job, but I'd rather not post it publicly. If this platform was a safe place to do so I would.

!00% Couldn't agree more. AI cannot express human childhood trauma quite like a screenwriter can...

TOM SCHAEFER Interestingly enough, I had almost the opposite experience.

When I gave AI very strict, specific instructions about sentence structure, formatting, and narrative flow, the results actually broke down. One attempt returned a blank PDF with only the series title on the cover. Another condensed a 2,500+ word saga (nine chapters at the time) into roughly 500 words, stripping out the nuance and intent entirely.

For me, that reinforced that AI can be useful for structure, brainstorming, or certain technical applications — but when it comes to long-form storytelling, voice and pacing still require a human hand.

The same applied visually. I found it easier to rough-sketch my ideas myself — despite having no formal art background — than to wrestle AI image generation into something that actually matched what I was seeing in my head.

That said, I completely agree on the coding side. AI-assisted development is genuinely impressive when used correctly, especially with clear constraints and focused prompts. Like any tool, its effectiveness depends on where and how it’s applied.

Yeah it's a mixed bag. Miracles and grief all at the same time.

i see this sooo often here when users post fragments of their scripts which make me want to tear my eyes out. No way any buyer with even more finely-tuned AI BS radar than me would ever read past the first page. as an experiment i ran a short story of mine through AI with clear instructions just to turn it into a screenplay without changing anything. GPT couldn’t help itself. huge chick’ chunks gouged out, leaving only its nauseating staccato lines trying but failing to channel Hemingway—awful, just dreck… and the screenplay formatting wasn’t even correct or consistent (you had one fvckin job, Chat)

JAMES - Earnest Hemmingway, the drunken aggressive misogynistic journalist America so wanted to be its best author. As opposed to John Steinbeck who was Americas greatest author and they hated him because he didn't support the American Dream.

hahaha ok chill david let’s keep this on topic

the app’s acting up again—posted the first para i just wrote but not the second para—i gotta stop using it, just rely on the web version from now on—anyone else having probs with the app?

James LO yes actually!! I posted in the introduce yourself lounge and for absolutely no reason, half my post was removed. Haha. Now that you mention it, it was while I was using the app, not the browser version. Might send an email informing them of the issue

Yeah the app has issues … it doesn’t have a very good built in editor. There seems to be no one home on the platform who cares about its issues - no one from the platform ever visits these forums. They’re not allowed to engage. Have you ever seen anyone except Maurice respond to anything so I doubt they even know.

Matthew and Tom thanks for weighing in and reassuring me that I’m not losing my mind hahaha

ok now let’s get back on topic and talk about the problems of letting AI do more than research and organisation (which it’s really fast at), and becoming seduced by its writing (which initially looks good, but becomes nauseating really quickly—IMO)

what’s been your experience?

EVERYTHING WE DO IN FILM IS A CONTRIVANCE. It's lighted artificially most of the time, the angle of capture is not random, the sound pickup is not random, the foley art is not random and "totally authentic", the painted murals for backgrounds, LED screens.

Somehow using new creative tools with the art of screenwriting is being implied that it makes our work less authentic. Bullshit. My photography equipment evolved over time, to the collective shrieks of pixel peeping fanatics who cared more about technicals than about the art, and now they are using the very tech they decried when it first arrived. It's a balance of adapting to new changes and new tools.

But Hollywood and the film business is not a totally academic environment, it's obviously inextricably tied to investment capital to get it all done.

Seems to me if I can analyze my work and find ways to mitigate risk for the people who write the checks - that SHOULD be a huge gold star for the way I am approaching the entire scenario.

Forget about all the academics, can my shit sell?

Before I fully understood and had my jaw dropping code moment, I was equally as willfully ignorant and fearful about AI as many of you still are - until last August 2024. I had heard the collective shriek from LA. "You'll never work in this town agin if'n we catch you ridge runners usin' that dang AI".

I had heard all of the "contamination" talk. That somehow analyzing my work with AI would somehow taint its authenticity.

Really, you can easily shred me with academics, "he's too new to the game", etc.

But what if that misses the point - that now we - all players - can seriously game the business to the success of everyone involved. Unknowns like me become a huge new pool of available projects and material not based upon reputation alone but supported with great analytical tools. we can all win.

Isn't that what I keep hearing from "the streamers' - they need shows? "Yeah but - " becomes "Well now let's just see here what we got ..."

Correct me if I am wrong please.

The saying in the AI world is that it's not AI that will replace people's jobs, it's someone who knows AI. As a screenwriter and AI consultant for ethical integration, I'd refine that to: "It's the experienced artist who uses AI." But experienced means skilled in both prompting and the craft itself.

One challenge is that many prompts are too simple to produce useful results. I agree AI isn't the best storyteller, but there's a world of difference between a few-sentence prompt and a detailed one. There's also a big difference between AIs. ChatGPT and Gemini are solid, but Claude remains the favorite among writers I've worked with. The results I've demonstrated in class are night and day.

To be clear, I don't use AI to write stories. I use it as a first-round reviewer and error-catcher. More of a writing assistant. But if you haven't tried Claude, it's worth exploring.

Here's an example of the difference prompting makes:

Too simple: Act as a screenwriter with 30 years experience. Write a story about a man who came back from war and is trying to be a detective. He's been given a big case but has to fight the demons of his past while solving it. Give me a three-act story.

More effective: Act as a screenwriter and story editor for drama features with a budget up to $3M. Follow the Save the Cat structure. The story is about a man returning from Afghanistan, suffering from PTSD he tries to hide while building his detective agency. He takes on a major case. Give me five case options that are compelling and subtly mirror his emotional journey. He should end broken but changed. This case is his rebirth. Don't give me the full story; give me three options for each beat so I can choose and develop further.

Even worse that following Save the Cat, is telling your AI to follow the Save the Cat structure!

Joshua Young - Re: first-round reviewer and error-catcher. More of a writing assistant." That's my take.

Re: writing a full story from one prompt - I've never even tried the "Act as a screenwriter" context.

But I did goto Claude with a brain fart one afternoon and told him an idea called DRACONIS and we built it out. Had a great back and forth. However, before I got too far with it - I did the same thing I did with that PRAETOR idea, I ran the numbers as best one can to see where its potential in monetization was.While PRAETOR failed DRACONIS is amazing. It's far from complete, but it is a great story that once it's filled out with nuance and dialogue it has some great potentiality. The best part was not just scribbling down an idea, but taking it right to execution and building out the foundations and stage for the marionettes to dance and speak for the story. So the dialog will be all human built.

As to dialogue - Still not comfortable with the current results, and so all I've done with Claude was to build out a scene based upon the story writ large. Wasn't satisfied, close but not "me".

I did "Please produce some dialogue samples" and he did, but they were "meh". So I have refrained from having AI doing dialogue. Once I do my own dialogue - then I can "Final draft" it and convert it to HSWC.

as i've said, i don't use AI to write scenes or dialog for me--that's an absolute line i won't cross--not just for ethical reasons but because they're so transparently robotic and often hallucinatory. but i will ask AI for pros and cons in moving a scene from act 2 to act 3 in terms of story scaffolding, for example.

i'm gonna be specific now: i'm working on GUNPOWDER, which features two parallel narratives that take place in the same world--on the same day--but don't intersect, until 50 years later, when they briefly touch. spoiler alert one of my main themes is humanity vs post-humanity. when i ran my structural framework past GPT for comments, it responded:

Homo continuus co-exist with Homo sapiens the way we did with Neanderthals:

- briefly

- asymmetrically

- without understanding what was happening

understand: this is the story i was telling, 100%, but i had never framed the effect of my long interlude in those terms--not explicitly in the script, nor even to myself while laying out the plot. in 2.5 seconds, GPT read my underlying intent and wrapped it in a neat package--for me to dive deeper, or use in pitch/ explanatory materials. "to be honest?" i couldn't have put it better myself.

James LO "GPT read my underlying intent and wrapped it in a neat package". This is basic feedback and has value as it identified what you are doing. What you do with that insight is governed by your ability to tell a story. ChatGPT or other AI LLMs shouldn't be relied upon to tell you what to do or how it should be written. Otherwise. what is your contribution that makes it unique to you? The revelation your prompt provided is interesting, but I wonder why you didn't have some cognizance of what inspired in the first place.

Robert Franklin Godwin III you said you wondered why i didn’t have some cognisance of what inspired “it” in the first place. I’m afraid there’s some miscommunication — i wrote the parallel stories (of a human, and a robot which spoilers achieves post-humanity of sorts). these parallel stories don’t intersect except briefly in an epilogue set in the future. my writing was not based on AI suggestions and has not been changed by the AI comment which i quoted in my previous message.

all i was trying to say was that AI, after reading what i had written, explicitly compared my telling of the brief intersection of homo sapiens (us) and homo continuus (our post-human successors) to that of the historically real and likewise brief coexistence of neanderthals and homo sapiens. i hadn’t made that comparison in my script, and i was quite impressed when AI did. i was cognisant of what i myself had written, but i just hadn’t thought of the neanderthals comparison.

i hope this elaboration clarified my earlier statement.

James LO it does.