London Premiere of Movie With AI-Generated Script Cancelled After Backlash (theguardian.com) 57
A cinema in London has cancelled the world premiere of a film with a script generated by AI after a backlash. From a report: The Prince Charles cinema, located in London's West End and which traditionally screens cult and art films, was due to host a showing of a new production called The Last Screenwriter on Sunday. However the cinema announced on social media that the screening would not go ahead. In its statement the Prince Charles said: "The feedback we received over the last 24hrs once we advertised the film has highlighted the strong concern held by many of our audience on the use of AI in place of a writer which speaks to a wider issue within the industry."
Directed by Peter Luisi and starring Nicholas Pople, The Last Screenwriter is a Swiss production that describes itself as the story of "a celebrated screenwriter" who "finds his world shaken when he encounters a cutting edge AI scriptwriting system ... he soon realises AI not only matches his skills but even surpasses him in empathy and understanding of human emotions." The screenplay is credited to "ChatGPT 4.0." OpenAI launched its latest model, GPT-4o, in May. Luisi told the Daily Beast that the cinema had cancelled the screening after it received 200 complaints, but that a private screening for cast and crew would still go ahead in London.
Directed by Peter Luisi and starring Nicholas Pople, The Last Screenwriter is a Swiss production that describes itself as the story of "a celebrated screenwriter" who "finds his world shaken when he encounters a cutting edge AI scriptwriting system ... he soon realises AI not only matches his skills but even surpasses him in empathy and understanding of human emotions." The screenplay is credited to "ChatGPT 4.0." OpenAI launched its latest model, GPT-4o, in May. Luisi told the Daily Beast that the cinema had cancelled the screening after it received 200 complaints, but that a private screening for cast and crew would still go ahead in London.
Luddites (Score:1)
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Fear the GAIvatari! (Score:2)
No more stupid than feeding vacuous trolls.
I predict we will soon be buried under GAIvatari. There must be a better label, but I'm using the portmanteau from Generative AI Avatar with a fake Latin plural. Examples wanted?
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It is, indeed.
But so are most script writers.
Have you been to a movie recently?
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Well, that pretty much sums it up, doesn't it?
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It is, indeed.
But so are most script writers.
Have you been to a movie recently?
"The Acolyte, directed by Harvey Weinstein's secretary Leslye Headland comes to mind.
Presumptively a Star Wars movie, based upon a Lesbian planet of all female witches who have redefined the force as "strings", it is pretty rock-bottom storytelling. Much of it doesn't even make sense. Has the standard tropes of men stupid and bad, women good. All that said, you might be able to make a decent and thought provoking movie if you had decent writers.
AI writing could not be worse.
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You QUITE obviously don't remember being in High School and having to write a paper. If you thought what your classmates wrote was bad 15+ years ago, you haven't had to read some of what the high schools kids have written in the last 10.
AI is leaps and bounds better than than that, and at least the hallucinations are internally coherent most of the time. There are a distressingly large amount of high school age kids that struggle to keep a SENTENCE coherent, much less a paragraph or paper.
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If you thought what your classmates wrote was bad 15+ years ago, you haven't had to read some of what the high schools kids have written in the last 10.
Sadly yes I have, for I too have seen Amazon's Rings of Power.
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You QUITE obviously don't remember being in High School and having to write a paper. If you thought what your classmates wrote was bad 15+ years ago, you haven't had to read some of what the high schools kids have written in the last 10.
AI is leaps and bounds better than than that, and at least the hallucinations are internally coherent most of the time.
This reads like you are disagreeing with me, and then it reads like you are agreeing with me.
And yes, not only is the present day Disney scriptwriting bad, but it doesn't tell good stories. That's pretty distressing, because an illiterate can tell a good story if they have the talent. And a screenplay writer can flesh it out.
An occasional movie can flop, but Disney managing to lose a billion dollars over a short period of time is concerning to say the least.
A strange dynamic has developed. A group o
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AI generated "Human" art is stupid.
If that's your opinion, then don't watch it.
Banning others from watching it is not appropriate.
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AI generated "Human" art is stupid.
If that's your opinion, then don't watch it.
Banning others from watching it is not appropriate.
Storytelling isn't rote, but it does have rules. So inputting some basic background information to an AI generative system loaded up with the rules will almost certainly provide a better story line than the abysmal writing coming out of Hollywood.
I won't go so far as to say it will be great, but it almost certainly will be an improvement.
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Sometimes people don't want meaningful content, they just want some noise in the background. (People with ADHD are particularly inclined to want this, especially in situations where other people want quiet, e.g., while studying or while falling asleep.) Generative AI has *absolutely* gotten to the point where it can generate content that's good enough to meet this demand. There are other use cases as well.
This does not in
Think of the Children (Score:3)
No, really. Smash them. AI generated "Human" art is stupid.
A lot of things are "stupid" at first. The first handheld phones were the size and mass of a brick, the first plane could barely get off the ground let alone fly any appreciable distance, the first light bulbs lasted just over 14 hours. Nevertheless all of these were regarded as technical marvels because of the promise they offered for the future as everyone expected the devices to improve.
If you don't find things like this incredible for the future they promise then by all means, stay at home in your c
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And many things that are stupid remain stupid. Unlike utility prdoucts, where the money saved or made is all that counts, the constant of consuming art, to say nothing of paying for it, is the consumers essentially want to see a brilliance created by people who SUFFERED to make it -- the proverbial blood, sweat and tears. Had Van Gogh been a chill dude enjoying his wealthy parents' inheritance in a nice remote house with a servant and occassionally shiting out a painting or two, no one would have cared, nor
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For that reason, a banana taped on the wall is still pretty fucking stupid.
While I would agree with your argument that a lot of art is stupid I would still be interested to see whether an AI algorithm can reproduce the same stupid humans can come up with. As for having to suffer to make the art worthwhile (something I have always found particularly stupid since it only seems to work when someone is told that the artist suffered so it is clearly nothing to do with the art) with AI we can test the theory: does the algorithm produce better art when run under Windows Vista? or on a m
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I'm not a Luddite, and it is not incredible. AI has a place, as a tool, a machine, but currently they are just stupid machines. The ones we are aware of are a long way from being sentient, and when that does happen, I think it will consume a lot of fossil fuels to power all the CPUs needed to support it. I think that will be the limiting factor, unless the AI's can develop an energy efficient mechanism to support themselves
So...what are they afraid of...? (Score:2)
Not sure why they decided to change minds and not show the premier....?
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"The Prince Charles cinema, located in London's West End and which traditionally screens cult and art films"
I think they're afraid of losing that reputation. LLMs don't exactly scream "cult" or "art".
Re:So...what are they afraid of...? (Score:5, Funny)
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Since they deal with independent producers, and not agents of a big studio, and are one theater, they're afraid that if they screen an AI generated movie, that's all they'll have, when all the independent producers realize there are other art house theaters out there. They may well be right, too.
(Protestors outside the theater aren't a good look, either.)
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(Protestors outside the theater aren't a good look, either.)
In showbiz, any publicity is good publicity.
If not for the protests, I would've never heard of this film.
Now I want to watch it just to see what all the fuss is about.
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In showbiz, any publicity is good publicity.
The old adage is "the only bad publicity is your obituary," but I suspect that Harvey Weinstein would disagree.
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Since they deal with independent producers, and not agents of a big studio, and are one theater, they're afraid that if they screen an AI generated movie, that's all they'll have, when all the independent producers realize there are other art house theaters out there. They may well be right, too.
(Protestors outside the theater aren't a good look, either.)
But scriptwriters can protest all they want. They can go on strike or demand a boycott. But they won't stop the inevitable.
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I do not disagree. But the question was why the theater would cancel the showing. And even if it's inevitable, that doesn't mean bystanders (like the theater) won't be driven out of business before we get there.
Re:So...what are they afraid of...? (Score:4, Insightful)
Could have been good history (Score:1)
They should have showed it anyhow.
Nothing makes better history reading than X new technology came out and outraged audiences threw something or tore something down at some semi-historical exhibition.
Oh dear who left all these harmless nerf products in the restrooms?
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They are afraid that the film will show how flat and uninspired AI written stuff is at this point, and that doesn't promote AI at the thing that will replace EVERYONE.
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And the industry is afraid that, flat and uninspired as it is (and I'm sure it is), the audience won't be able to tell the difference.
Luddite's win this one (Score:2)
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Probably just so.
I actually posted recently about hiring a super-ghost writer. Actually someone with skills at generating the stories I want by feeding the right prompts to ChatGPT or its smarter friends. (Most of my experiments have been with the free version, which doesn't do books...)
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They might be a bunch of people with NVIDIA stock, and once people realize that AI still has a long way to go, NVIDIA stock might go down.
Re:Luddite's win this one (Score:5, Informative)
There's an old Hollywood joke that goes like this: How do you tell the stupidest actress on set? She's the one sleeping with the screenwriter.
In theater playwrights are like gods; their words are sacrosanct. In movies it is the director that is considered the author of the story. The screenwriter is just another humble tradesman, like the carpenters and set dressers. The screenwriter's job is to furnish the director with narrative lumber from which to select or reject while fashioning his artistic vision. Far from being sacrosanct, pretty much everyone gets to mess with the screenplay; even *actors*.
I think the reason scriptwriters have such low status is that there is a vast global glut of screenplays. I can almost guarantee someone you know has at least secretly written one. Very few screenplays ever get sold, and very few of the sold screenplays ever get made. I think we can take it for granted that given the vast quantity of screenplays in existance, the quality of those screenplays must be distributed on a normal curve (or rather log-normal). Given that long right tail, it should be ludicrously easy for producers to find great scripts; if maybe a little time consuming. But producers are not necessarily looking for great scripts. Unless they're working on a prestige project, they're looking for ones that can be turned into projects with a reasonable return relative to risk. A mediocre script that can safely be made into a modest box office success is an economic winner. AI screenwriting is unlikely to affect the quality of Michael Bay movies.
But even if a producer picks the best script, it doesn't mean the script determines what we see on the screen. There is no guarantee that any of the script actually gets shot as written. The screenwriter isn't in control of important narrative parameters like pacing. And even the director has limited control over these things unless he's got final cut privilege in his contract. Anyone who's sat through all the end-credits of a modern movie know that these things are vast collective works, and sometimes the process just spins out of control. We've all sat through movies where you wonder whether anyone involved in makign the thing has ever seen a movie. That's the collective creation process crashing and burning, and it's never the screenwriter's fault. If they reshot the *Casablanca* script today it wouldn't look anyting like the 1942 movie.
So here's what I think: if producers start producing some AI-generated scripts, it won't affect most of what we see on the screen for good *or* ill. The half-baked, derivative money grabs will still be half-baked derivative money grabs. Producers of oscar bait movies will still hire human writers with industry recognition. And most screenwriters will never see a film made from a screenplay they sell.
Re: Luddite's win this one (Score:2)
They are afraid that this will catch on, even temporarily and for novelty's sake, and it will harm their livelihoods.
Gas light sci-fi plot (Score:3)
"he soon realises AI not only matches his skills but even surpasses him in empathy and understanding of human emotions'
I almost spat my drink out when I read that.
That's as likely as Skynet building an army of killer robots after it nukes the planet.
Post-postmodernism? (Score:2)
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One imagines J. L. Borges standing far off to the side in XKCD 435 [xkcd.com], right next to the mathematician, snickering. "Told you bitches."
World War AI (Score:2)
Oh Yeah ! (Score:2)
The Moviemakers & Production Staff: Sure didn't see that coming !
Uh-Huh
Still obvious, for now (Score:2)
Yeah this sounds like exactly the sort of crap ChatGPT generates when you prompt it to be creative. It has a very distinctive, bullshitty, florid style where every single plot turn is the laziest, most obvious thing possible. Sweeping emotional scenes driven by zero motivating factors, or the most cliche simplistic ones.
At least ChatGPT still apologizes for its own shortcomings whenever I criticize its writing and ask why it couldn't do a better job.
Re: Still obvious, for now (Score:1)
"a very distinctive, bullshitty, florid style where every single plot turn is the laziest, most obvious thing possible. Sweeping emotional scenes driven by zero motivating factors, or the most cliche simplistic ones."
So every Hollywood production of the last 25 years?
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And virtually every Hollywood production before that, from the beginning of cinema.
Re: Still obvious, for now (Score:1)
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The occasional exception does sneak through.
But what has Shyamalan does since then? Answer: The same thing. Over and over and over and over.
Just like everyone else in Hollywood.
Temporary backlash (Score:3)
These AI plots will first be used successfully in low-budget movies, you know, like Hallmark or the stuff you see on FreeVee. Nobody will complain about that because the plots are already so bad. Then AI will creep up the chain towards higher-budget movies, and by the time it gets there, it will be too late to stop the train.
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These AI plots will first be used successfully in low-budget movies, you know, like Hallmark or the stuff you see on FreeVee. Nobody will complain about that because the plots are already so bad. Then AI will creep up the chain towards higher-budget movies, and by the time it gets there, it will be too late to stop the train.
You think the producers of a $200m blockbuster will give a damn about the salary of the screenwriters?
This "AI script" thing is just a marketing stunt. AI will be used, and probably already is being used, by screenwriters the same way it's used by software developers, to enhance productivity on certain tasks and to explore different ideas.
"Hey, ChatGPT, I'm thinking about flipping the protagonist's gender and switching the B-plot from a romantic relationship with the co-lead to their relationship with their
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If you are a screenwriter with such bad skill that you can be replaced by ChatGPT, then you *should* be replaced by ChatGPT.
And yes, the producers in this story DID blink and pull their film.
Headline Correction (Score:2)
Is there ... (Score:2)
Of course they did (Score:2)
Luisi told the Daily Beast that the cinema had cancelled the screening after it received 200 complaints, but that a private screening for cast and crew would still go ahead in London.
Canceled something potentially interesting because some people complained. Sigh.
Looking forward to when the theater is run by an AI too then.
So what? (Score:2)
How is this any different from any other controversial element to a film that's happened in the history of film? (Hint: it's not)
I'm guessing that the writers are worried that AI will create a far better script and one that isn't dripping with ideological bullshit.
Stop overreacting (Score:2)
What is 200 complaints compared to the entire population? Nothing. Atop overreacting to small but vocal minorities.