Chatbots don’t do Barbenheimer
What Hollywood’s recent track record tells us about the value of human screenwriters
Hollywood’s most unexpected alliance was on show at my latest cinema outing. Even as I (Junaid) made my way to the Oppenheimer showroom, I was drawn to the sea of pink cinema-goers thronging towards Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. I just about resisted the temptation to doll up and join them, but one thing is for sure: Barbenheimer fever has hit the UK.
The early success of Barbie and Oppenheimer is in stark contrast with the recent fortunes of high-budget franchise films, reboots and sequels. Five of the ten highest-grossing films in the first half of 2023 are set to be loss makers, which is to say nothing of outright flops such as the latest instalment of Indiana Jones. It is a far cry from the pre-covid era, where billion-dollar blockbusters were becoming the norm.
Audiences are apparently growing tired of cookie-cutter movies. Familiarity and ‘awareness’ may not be as predictive of success as originality, a realisation that does not bode well for AI-generated scripts predicated on repackagings of tales already told.
What writers want
The major Hollywood battle of 2023 is taking place off screen, as writers and actors take up arms against the looming threat of AI. The Writers Guild of America, which began its strike on May 2, has called on the industry to ‘regulate use of material produced using artificial intelligence or similar technologies’. It has two main demands. It wants to ensure that no literary material - scripts, treatments, outlines or even discrete scenes - can be written or rewritten by chatbots. The guild also wants to ensure that studios are unable to use chatbots to generate source material that is adapted to the screen by humans, the way they might adapt a novel or a magazine story. The AMPTP has so far made the tame offer of holding ’annual meetings to discuss advancements in technology’, wilfully oblivious to the inexorable rise of generative AI.
It is not only jobs and incomes at stake; writers argue that movie and TV scripts will become increasingly generic and shallow, suffering from lack of personal inspiration and reflection that often underpins human storytelling. ‘ChatGPT doesn’t have childhood trauma’, read one memorable picket. Black film and TV writers have noted that AI could be used by studios to generate ‘diverse’ content without actually having to work with a diversity of artists.
Chatbot creators, for their part, dismiss such concerns: for the executive of Pickaxe, AI ‘lacks the courage to try to write something truly human’ - particularly dialogue - but it can be used to generate a rough draft of a formulaic TV script for a writer to tinker with: something the WGA is opposed to. It sounds benign in principle, but any writer knows that ploughing through a first draft, as inefficient and painful as it may be, is the only sure path to capturing one’s most authentic and original ideas. Chatbots may have a role somewhere in the writing workflow, but there are always trade-offs to be reckoned with, not least in terms of how the writer’s own creative expression may be undermined.
What viewers expect
Recent years have seen the near-evisceration of indie films, the ‘mid-budget’ movie and adult-orientated movies with original scripts, such as Babylon and Amsterdam. It has become a chicken-and-egg scenario, where it is unclear if studios produce these movies because audiences want them, or if audiences go to these movies because there are limited alternative options.
In January 2020, Quentin Tarantino declared that original films are in a ‘war’ with superhero films. In the financially depleted post-covid landscape, with streaming cutting into theatre profits, it had seemed that the battle was well and truly won in favour of the capes. But on the evidence of this year, established franchise movies, with their inflated budgets, now seem like the roughest of bets as moviegoers demand something exceptional for their hard-earned cash.
While franchises, reboots and sequels are far from obsolete (Mario is still the big success story of the year), success increasingly depends on compelling premises and flawless execution. Audiences are signalling that they are no longer as motivated to go to cinemas for safe and predictable productions.
Oppenheimer and Barbie have benefited not only from frenzied memes in the build up to their release, but the promise of originality and quality from their auteur writer-directors, Christopher Nolan and Greta Gerwig. It takes the former to inspire general audiences into watching a three-hour biopic about a scientist. Only the latter can take a Barbie doll and turn it into a movie primarily for adult audiences that is by turns funny, sophisticated and touching.
A disembodied chatbot, riffing off super-sized banks of training data without context or emotion, cannot be expected to scale such heights. A New York Times piece titled ‘Will a chatbot write the next Succession?’ (a question close to our hearts as it was the last show to reduce us both to tears), puts the onus back on human artists:
However sophisticated the algorithms, the fate of writers and actors will also depend on how well they protect their status. How good are they at convincing audiences that they should care whether a human is involved?
If one thing is guaranteed, it is that Hollywood will likely learn the wrong lessons from all this; toy company Mattel is already raiding its toybox - from Uno to Hot Wheels - for potential movie inspiration, convinced that it has cracked the recipe for success with Barbie. But Barbenheimer’s departure from Hollywood’s more favoured formulas is evidence that exciting, high quality movie scripts - penned by the hands of human creators with a unique artistic vision - can still galvanise audiences to the cinemas. How chatbots reinforce our most authentic human expression, rather than undermine or supplant it, is a question no Hollywood executive yet has an answer to.