From Hacks and Morning Wars to The Comeback, AI is the villain of the TV screen
Recently an Australian screenwriter received some “notes” (the industry term for constructive criticism) on a script he wrote. He immediately sensed something was wrong: The feedback was unusually general. He suspected that artificial intelligence was being used and confronted the person who gave him the notes.
Well-known local screenwriter and producer Jacquelin PerskeThe person with knowledge of this conversation says he freely agreed to run the script through an AI program to make his job “more efficient.” They explained to the surprised author: “I’m looking for the answer. [from AI] and ‘Oh yeah, that’s almost how I feel’.
Indeed, AI has already entered Australian TV writing rooms, replacing entry-level positions once held by aspiring writers: taking notes at meetings, for example, or summarizing book chapters for a screen adaptation. Some experienced writers fear it’s only a matter of time before big companies also try to “augment” or replace their labor with AI-generated content.
In the United States and Britain, writers are tackling TV dramas by addressing artificial intelligence and the many dilemmas it poses. Programs including hacks, Return, Abbott Elementary School, Cockerel, Morning Wars, Catch And Heaven all explored the potential bad consequences of this technology. Some are light-hearted comedies, some are political thrillers, but they all make AI the villain.
“Half the stuff I watch on Netflix feels like it was written by AI because it’s so samey.”
Screenwriter: Louise Fox
Inside Morning WarsThe character Stella Bak (Greta Lee) is a media conglomerate CEO who embraces artificial intelligence to stay ahead of her competitors, only to have her lookalike chatbot go rogue during a critical presentation and destroy her reputation. Inside hacksSuperstar comedian Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) is tempted by a lucrative offer from a tech bro who wants to use her material and voice to train his own AI program — until “she realizes there’s no need to optimize the creative process… it’s one of the things we understand; we’re good at it.” And the last season Return – The film, in which Lisa Kudrow plays actress Valerie Cherish in the first sitcom written by artificial intelligence, focuses on the existential threat this technology poses to large segments of Hollywood.
Australian screenwriter Louise Fox (Mistake, I Love My Way, Twist Round) believes that contemporary AI programs are good at scraping and imitating existing knowledge, but cannot innovate.
“Streaming services use algorithms [try to replicate hit shows] Fox continues: “Honestly, I can feel it; half the stuff I watch on Netflix feels like it was written by AI because it’s so samey. AI can’t give us anything.” the sopranos, Breaking Bad or DTF St Louis because these shows are innovative in many ways.”
Perske – credits include: Tattooist of Auschwitz, I Love My Way And Our Secret Life – he agrees. “AI seems to be the modern-day bogeyman in television because no one knows what it means for anyone,” he says, adding that some composers are already feeling the pinch.
“You can create music based on something that’s not copyrighted, you don’t have to pay anyone and you don’t have to blow up – you have your music,” says Perske, who doesn’t use AI to write but has experimented with some programs. “I asked [an AI platform] He gave me the Jacquelin Perske style treatment and understood what it meant. It was a pretty broad topic – it was about mature relationships and stuff – but my work obviously got stuck somewhere because everything is on the internet and I don’t know how I feel about it.”
Claire Pullen, chief executive of the Australian Writers’ Guild, spoke to this imprint from Geneva, where she discussed these issues at the copyright and intellectual property standing committee. At the heart of these debates is the fact that many AI companies feed books, newspaper articles, songs, and videos into “large language models,” so named because they are designed to generate “human-like text,” without permission or compensation from the people who created them. When I compare this to stealing a book from a bookstore, Pullen takes the analogy even further.
“This is like taking a book without paying for it and robbing the worker before firing him,” he says. “AI companies have this terrifying, unfair advantage because they are stealing from the very people they are trying to change.”
Pullen doesn’t buy the argument that AI taking over the creative industries is inevitable.
“To say this is happening and not bother to enforce Australian laws for the benefit of Australians is propaganda from big tech companies,” he says. “These companies can handle some jobs [used without authorisation] If they want.”
( hacks The character Ava, played by Hannah Einbinder, also opposes this sense of “forced inevitability” and tells the greedy tech bro: “People like you always say it will happen whether you want it or not, but You You are the ones who made this happen!” )
Perske worries that AI will provide emerging writers with the invaluable experience he gained early in his career. Even while silently taking notes in a meeting, he was learning “how the writers’ room is run, how politics works, how an idea is built and brought to life… you meet the writers and producers, and that’s how the human connection begins.”
Stuart Page (Full Control, smart man, Westworth), says AI has the potential to revolutionize all disciplines, from large-scale data analysis to medicine and engineering.
“But why are we talking about this to create art, to create culture that will tell us about ourselves?” he says. “The whole AI debate is incredibly frustrating because it feels like a method of control that allows a small number of people to make huge profits.”
Page paraphrases a now-viral quote often attributed to author Joanna Maciejewska: “I thought AI and machines would take over grueling repetitive tasks to free me to write poetry and paint,” she says, “but damn AI draws pictures and writes poetry, and I’m still doing my damn laundry.”
Meanwhile, Fox wonders whether viewers will grow tired of AI-generated content.
“Humans are monsters when it comes to innovation,” he says. “After a while we get bored of the form and look for something new; I don’t think AI can do that at this point.”
