Filmmakers may fear that the new wave of Generative AI tools have been secretly trained on their work and there’s evidence that this is indeed the case.
The first known feature-length script generated by ChatGPT to be filmed has a central character who is a failed writer. His name is Jack.
Coincidence? The director and co-producer of The Last Screenwriter thinks not.
“The central character is called Jack and he's a troubled writer. Maybe The Shining came in there somewhere,” says Swiss filmmaker Peter Luisi who shot and edited the drama conventionally albeit entirely from a screenplay credited to ChatGPT.
That screenplay was derived from the following prompt:
‘Write a plot to a film where a screenwriter realises he is less good than artificial intelligence’
“If you read the screenplay then everything is so generic but when you watch the film you are reminded of other films,” Luisi says. “I would say 2001: A Space Odyssey, Ex Machina and Her are things that come up
“So I think there's no doubt [ChatGPT] was trained by other films, and it's not okay - but it's impossible to prove it.”
Luisi’s film is experimental and intended to provoke debate about the nature of GenAI in cinema. Arguably if he had not done this it would be only a matter of time before another filmmaker did.
He says he is not afraid of any legal action not least because The Last Screenwriter was made not for profit by his production company Spotlight and is distributed online for free at www.lastscreenwriter.com where all the prompts and making-of documentation are displayed too.
Luisi is a successful filmmaker too, having been Oscar nominated three times including for co-writing Switzerland’s 2007 entry Vitus and is either director, writer or producer of eight features including Bon Schuur Ticino (2023).
“I want to stress I didn’t do this movie because I can’t write and that I could have used the money to make another film which we could have sold. I feel like we are giving something to the filmmaking community instead of taking from it, although I realise not everyone sees it that way.”
The Last Screenwriter was going to premiere at the Prince Charles Cinema in London the other week before an online backlash prompted Spotlight to withdraw it.
“I was surprised at the severity of the accusations,” he says. “In retrospective I should have known it would happen because people don’t inform themselves. And yes the tagline for the movie is ‘the first screenplay written by AI’. That’s what people get upset about. I would argue if they took the time to read why and how we made it then most people would not be so upset.”
ChatGPT developer OpenAI is a black box when it comes to any form of transparency about the data it has scraped from the internet. It is subject to several copyright infringement lawsuits in the United States which may unlock the truth. AI developers use the argument of ‘fair use’ which is to say, provided what their technology produces is not a direct copy then it’s a new work that has broken no law and owes no-one any residuals.
Luisi says he wouldn’t use ChatGPT to make the movies he loves.
“I think ChatGPT is a very, very mediocre writer at the moment. I do believe the screenplay for our film is fantastic - considering it was written by a computer.
“I really don't know how that's possible. That still blows my mind. I mean, you have dialogue that makes sense and characters with proper connections. It's just so difficult in my opinion to write a movie that I don't know how a computer can do it.”
If OpenAI has been feeding its machine with 120 years of movie history we have our answer.
Ironically, by using ChatGPT to produce the screenplay for The Last Screenwriter, Luisi has also trained it to become better.