God bless him and hopefully you get an opportunity to continue to work with individuals like him in the future
Good luck and we are praying for your continued success.
Any Screenwriters On The Board??
- Thread starter LeftyLuchini
- Start date
God bless him and hopefully you get an opportunity to continue to work with individuals like him in the future
Good luck and we are praying for your continued success.
Ok you know what?
I could see this being useful in an improv or sketch setting. Maybe even theatre workshop.
You throw that out and just freestyle for about 30 minutes.
It could be enough to make something real.
Can AI grasp the significance of sitting on your porch with several siblings/cousins; and all of you are shucking peas while your mother and auntie talk about how your Grandpa would always fix shit at Ms. Richard's house? And, how her son Junie looks just like their older brother Chuck.
AI is still too rigid.
AI is still too rigid.
^^^^
Bro I could feel the cool moist breeze, warm sun and smell the fresh cut grass.
Damn near had me taking my socks and shoes off up in here.
Well done
Bro, this is our experiences... we lived this shit. AI can't touch this.
Trust me bro I know
But I also believe in your screen name
And I think @godofwine has a point
The more we keep FEEDING this thing?
It's just gonna get smarter.
I see what you're saying... but it's still going to be "artificial" when it's all said and done. It's one thing to gather thousands of other people's stories together, then piecemeal some stories based upon those in the data banks.
Versus, one person pouring his heart unto a blank page... a page that will be dripping with the experiences of real love and real pain.
Hollywood is too one sided to me now. We know about the struggles of white folks for the most part. Now, it's time to tell and talk about the experinces of other peoples. Which can be much richer than they'd ever expect.
Movie Debate: Remember in Terminator 2, Miles Bennett Dyson is having a perfectly good night in his big ass mansion & Crazy Gun Karen bursts in?
Remember how, in Terminator 2, Miles Bennett Dyson is having a perfectly good night in his big ass mansion and Crazy Gun Karen bursts in, shoots him, raving “YOU CAN’T DO SCIENCE!” And then he shoulders the fate of humanity and dies full of holes an hour later? #Hero https://t.co/a1TN2E0BUW @4...
www.bgol.us
uh huh yeah ok
I feel bad for the actress here who got most of her scenes cut in the finished product. All most ppl know her for is angrily telling her kid to go to bed and howling in fear once Sarah Connor starts attacking Mile's Dyson.
There's a scene in the movie Pi (by Darren Aronofsky) when the guys computer becomes self aware. The computer actually burns itself out because it knows that it can't be self aware; but, it has become self aware... yet it can't become self aware...
But unfortunately, the public is dumb as hell.
For example, McDonald's is some of the nastiest shit you could ever eat if you are woke, but most folks would prefer not to be woke and they eat and they love McDonald's
But to a person with any sense McDonald's is the last place they'd eat.
I would take Jack in the Box or Culver's over anything McDonald's has any day.
People just want to be conned because it's easier than thinking.
I mean think about it, the Transformers movies were hella popular and spawned many sequels, but were any of them any good? Did any of them have even a semblance of substance? Yet the public flooded to them whenever they hit the theater
They want to see what they expect to see. As writers it's our job to change that and avoid the status quo because its the path of the least resistance or what people expect to see.
@playahaitian knows one I'm working on. You're right, the world is much richer than white people's experiences.
What about a story where a group of families make biannual pilgrimages to Nigeria and the Caribbean (and yes, I'm being vague on purpose).
I'm 20,000 words into this story, but the premise is solid. Right now I'm doing my best to avoid the common tropes that are popular in movies and books, but the story is sound and I must say very interesting.
It spawns from a 2016 short story I entered into a contest that came in fourth place. Every time I read it to someone they would always ask where the rest of it was, well the rest is coming
I will say this though, all of the characters names are an amalgamation of names from black history (no Martin, Malcolm or Rosa)
Bertha "Chippie" Hill (popular band leader); Hallie Quinn Brown (educator/activist); Maya Angelou (poet/activist); Althea Gibson (tennis legend); and Diana Ross' sister, Dr. Barbara Ross-Lee ( the first black dean of the US medical school)
At the end of the novel will be a glossary explaining who each person was and their contribution to black history
This seems like the best thread to leave this question. What do y'all make of Sophia Stewart's claim of being the true author of The Matrix?
So, which direction are you leaning on this?
Nope.
I will only say this I don't like misinformation, period.
Once a so called news site doesn't fact check and or make immediate corrections?
I disniss them strongly and usually permanently.
She didn't win the case.
That doesn't mean she was not wronged but it does make me question the validity of much of this story.
But is it possible? Hell yeah. Is it PROBABLE? Hell yeah.
Could it also be completed bullsh*t? Yes to that too.
I think that woman should have been given the support of a lot of these black media outlets to get her other work out there... at the same rate they pushing this case.
Inside The BIllion Dollar Matrix Lawsuit, One of the Internet's Most Pervasive Hoaxes
For 10 years, the story of Sophia Stewart winning a court case against the Wachowski brothers for basing "The Matrix" off of her copyrighted screen treatment has continuously cropped up on the web, but court documents show the story is little more than a longstanding viral hoax.
newsfeed.time.com
The Billion-Dollar Myth
The 'Matrix' movies portray a frightening alternate reality. When a writer sued the movies' creators for stealing her ideas, she inadvertently exposed another reality--a racial one--that's no less troubling. By Kemp Powers
www.latimes.com
Did a Woman Win a Billion-Dollar 'Matrix' Lawsuit Over Copyright Infringement?
Did Sophia Stewart win a large judgment in her copyright infringement suit regarding authorship of the film 'The Matrix'?
www.snopes.com
The myth of Sophia Stewart endures
<a href="/images/old/6a00d83451d69069e2012875ad228d970c-pi.jpg" style="float: right;"><img alt="Matrix_30" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d83451d69069e2012875ad228d970c selected " src="/images/old/6a00d83451d69069e2012875ad228d970c-pi.jpg" style="margin: 0px 0px 5px 5px; width...
www.hollywoodreporter.com
Inside The BIllion Dollar Matrix Lawsuit, One of the Internet's Most Pervasive Hoaxes
For 10 years, the story of Sophia Stewart winning a court case against the Wachowski brothers for basing "The Matrix" off of her copyrighted screen treatment has continuously cropped up on the web, but court documents show the story is little more than a longstanding viral hoax.
newsfeed.time.com
So, which direction are you leaning on this?
The MORE important lesson at least for US as writers is to learn to PROTECT our art.
Spark & Fire podcast
A podcast celebrating the hero’s journey behind every creative practice – including yours. As iconic filmmakers, writers, musicians tell their creation stories, they share with you the insights and takeaways that got them through. Hosted by June Cohen.
sparkandfire.com
A podcast that unlocks creativity and innovation. In each episode, a legendary creator shares the story behind an iconic work — with techniques and takeaways for your own work.
Very good read on getting "notes" on a script or film...
Last edited:
I've spent hours on that site.
No disrespect to writers as I am a writer as well. AI WILL change way we do Everything. The better prompt engineering gets, the better AI will get. Ai does not have to grasp anything the prompt engineer does. AI will do whatever you want it to do, you just have to find a way to ask for what you want. I am embracing this technology as it becomes available.
That leaves the question, how good of writers do engineers make? I could be a brilliant engineer, but that doesn't mean I can paint like Michelangelo or write like Dickens. If the engineer doesn't have the artistic talent an artist the AI is supposed to copy does, that means the AI will never make an adequate copy.
no it leaves the question! Do You, use the technology to enhance Your writing. Lets see what it can do! drop an Idea and I will see if it produces something you can work with.
Is this a rhetorical question? No, I don't use technology to enhance my writing personally. The only thing technology can do for me is make it slightly more convenient to write.
Short Film Competition....
Will a Chatbot Write the Next ‘Succession’?
When the union representing Hollywood writers laid out its list of objectives for contract negotiations with studios this spring, it included familiar language on compensation, which the writers say has either stagnated or dropped amid an explosion of new shows. But far down, the document added...
Will a Chatbot Write the Next ‘Succession’?
Noam Scheiber and John Koblin
Sat, April 29, 2023 at 10:06 AM EDT
When the union representing Hollywood writers laid out its list of objectives for contract negotiations with studios this spring, it included familiar language on compensation, which the writers say has either stagnated or dropped amid an explosion of new shows.
But far down, the document added a distinctly 2023 twist. Under a section titled “Professional Standards and Protection in the Employment of Writers,” the union wrote that it aimed to “regulate use of material produced using artificial intelligence or similar technologies.”
To the mix of computer programmers, marketing copywriters, travel advisers, lawyers and comic illustrators suddenly alarmed by the rising prowess of generative AI, one can now add screenwriters.
Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times
“It is not out of the realm of possibility that before 2026, which is the next time we will negotiate with these companies, they might just go, ‘you know what, we’re good,’” said Mike Schur, creator of “The Good Place” and co-creator of “Parks and Recreation.”
“We don’t need you,” he imagines hearing from the other side. “We have a bunch of AIs that are creating a bunch of entertainment that people are kind of OK with.”
In their attempts to push back, the writers have what a lot of other white-collar workers don’t: a labor union.
Schur, who serves on the bargaining committee of the Writers Guild of America as it seeks to avert a strike before its contract expires Monday, said the union hopes to “draw a line in the sand right now and say, ‘Writers are human beings.’”
But unions, historians say, have generally failed to rein in new technologies that enable automation or the replacement of skilled labor with less-skilled labor. “I’m at a loss to think of a union that managed to be plucky and make a go of it,” said Jason Resnikoff, an assistant professor of history at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, who studies labor and automation.
The fortunes of the writers, actors and directors negotiating new contracts this year may say a lot about whether the pattern will continue into the era of artificial intelligence.
In December, Apple introduced a service allowing book publishers to use human-sounding AI narrators, an innovation that could displace hundreds of voice actors who make a living performing audiobooks. The company’s website says the service will benefit independent authors and small publishers.
“I know someone always has to get there first, some company,” said Chris Ciulla, who estimates that he has made $100,000 to $130,000 annually over the past five years narrating books under union contracts. “But for individuals not to understand how that can affect the pail-carrying narrator out there eventually is disappointing.”
Other actors fear that studios will use AI to replicate their voices while cutting them out of the process. “We’ve seen this happening — there are websites that have popped up with databases of characters’ voices from video games and animation,” said Linsay Rousseau, an actress who makes her living doing voice work.
On-camera actors point out that studios already use motion capture or performance capture to replicate artists’ movements or facial expressions. The 2018 blockbuster “Black Panther” relied on this technology for scenes that depicted hundreds of tribespeople on cliffs, mimicking the movements of dancers hired to perform for the film.
Some actors worry that newer versions of the technology will allow studios to effectively steal their movements, “creating new performance in the style of a wushu master or karate master and using that person’s style without consent,” said Zeke Alton, a voice and screen actor who sits on the board of his union local, SAG-AFTRA, in Los Angeles.
And Hollywood writers have grown increasingly anxious as ChatGPT has become adept at mimicking the style of prolific authors.
“Early on in the conversations with the guild, we talked about what I call the Nora Ephron problem,” said John August, a Writers Guild board member. “Which is basically: What happens if you feed all of Nora Ephron’s scripts into a system and generate an AI that can create a Nora Ephron-sounding script?”
August, a screenwriter for movies such as “Charlie’s Angels” and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” said that while artificial intelligence had taken a back seat to compensation in the Writers Guild negotiation, the union was making two key demands on the subject of automation.
It wants to ensure that no literary material — scripts, treatments, outlines or even discrete scenes — can be written or rewritten by chatbots. “A terrible case of like, ‘Oh, I read through your scripts, I didn’t like the scene, so I had ChatGPT rewrite the scene’ — that’s the nightmare scenario,” August said.
The guild also wants to ensure that studios can’t 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.
SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, says more of its members are flagging contracts for individual jobs in which studios appear to claim the right to use their voices to generate new performances.
A recent Netflix contract sought to grant the company free use of a simulation of an actor’s voice “by all technologies and processes now known or hereafter developed, throughout the universe and in perpetuity.”
Netflix said the language had been in place for several years and allowed the company to make the voice of one actor sound more like the voice of another in case of a casting change between seasons of an animated production.
The union has said that its members are not bound by contract provisions that would allow a producer to simulate new performances without compensating actors, though it has sometimes intervened to strike them from contracts nonetheless.
Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA’s executive director, said such contracts posed a much bigger risk to nonunion actors, who can become unwitting accomplices in their own obsolescence. “It only takes one or a few instances of signing away your rights on a lifetime basis to really potentially have a negative impact on your career prospects,” Crabtree-Ireland said.
The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains with the various unions that represent writers, actors and directors on behalf of the major Hollywood studios, declined to comment.
When professionals have fended off obsolescence at the hands of technology, the outcome has often reflected their occupation’s status and prestige.
That appears to have been the case to some extent with airplane pilots, whose crew sizes had dropped to two on most domestic commercial flights by the late 1990s, but have largely been level since then, even as automated technology has become far more sophisticated and the industry has explored further reductions.
“The safety net you have when you’re high off the ground — the one that keeps you from hitting the ground — is two highly trained, experienced, rested pilots,” said Capt. Dennis Tajer, a spokesperson for the Allied Pilots Association, which represents pilots for American Airlines. To this day, flight times longer than nine hours require at least three pilots.
The replacement of certain doctors by artificial intelligence, which some experts predicted was imminent in fields such as radiology, has also failed to materialize. That’s partly because of the limits of the technology, and because of the stature of the doctors, who have inserted themselves into high-stakes conversations about the safety and deployment of AI. The American College of Radiology created a Data Science Institute partly for this purpose several years ago.
Whether screenwriters find similar success will depend at least in part on if there are inherent limits to the machines that purport to do their jobs. Some writers and actors speak of a so-called uncanny valley that algorithms may never entirely escape.
“Artists look at everything ever created and find a flash of newness,” said Javier Grillo-Marxuach, a writer and producer for “Lost” and “Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance.” “What the machine is doing is recombining.”
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?
The unions are pressing their case. August says that it falls to the Writers Guild and not the studio to determine who receives a writer’s credit on a project, and that the union will guard this rite jealously. “We want to make sure that an AI is never one of those writers in the chain of title for a project,” he said.
The unions also have legal cards to play, Crabtree-Ireland of SAG-AFTRA said, like the U.S. Copyright Office’s pronouncement in March that content created entirely by algorithm is not eligible for copyright protection. It is harder to monetize a production if there is no legal obstacle to copying it.
Perhaps more important, he said, is what you might call the Us Weekly factor — the tendency of audiences to be as interested in the human behind the role as in the performance. Fans want to hear Hollywood celebrities discuss their method in interviews. They want to gawk at actors’ fashion sensibilities and keep up with whom they’re dating.
“If you look at culture in general, the audience is generally interested in the real lives of our members,” Crabtree-Ireland said. “AI is not in a position to substitute for key elements of that.”
c.2023 The New York Times Company
Will a Chatbot Write the Next ‘Succession’?
When the union representing Hollywood writers laid out its list of objectives for contract negotiations with studios this spring, it included familiar language on compensation, which the writers say has either stagnated or dropped amid an explosion of new shows. But far down, the document added...news.yahoo.com
Will a Chatbot Write the Next ‘Succession’?
Noam Scheiber and John Koblin
Sat, April 29, 2023 at 10:06 AM EDT
When the union representing Hollywood writers laid out its list of objectives for contract negotiations with studios this spring, it included familiar language on compensation, which the writers say has either stagnated or dropped amid an explosion of new shows.
But far down, the document added a distinctly 2023 twist. Under a section titled “Professional Standards and Protection in the Employment of Writers,” the union wrote that it aimed to “regulate use of material produced using artificial intelligence or similar technologies.”
To the mix of computer programmers, marketing copywriters, travel advisers, lawyers and comic illustrators suddenly alarmed by the rising prowess of generative AI, one can now add screenwriters.
Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times
“It is not out of the realm of possibility that before 2026, which is the next time we will negotiate with these companies, they might just go, ‘you know what, we’re good,’” said Mike Schur, creator of “The Good Place” and co-creator of “Parks and Recreation.”
“We don’t need you,” he imagines hearing from the other side. “We have a bunch of AIs that are creating a bunch of entertainment that people are kind of OK with.”
In their attempts to push back, the writers have what a lot of other white-collar workers don’t: a labor union.
Schur, who serves on the bargaining committee of the Writers Guild of America as it seeks to avert a strike before its contract expires Monday, said the union hopes to “draw a line in the sand right now and say, ‘Writers are human beings.’”
But unions, historians say, have generally failed to rein in new technologies that enable automation or the replacement of skilled labor with less-skilled labor. “I’m at a loss to think of a union that managed to be plucky and make a go of it,” said Jason Resnikoff, an assistant professor of history at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, who studies labor and automation.
The fortunes of the writers, actors and directors negotiating new contracts this year may say a lot about whether the pattern will continue into the era of artificial intelligence.
In December, Apple introduced a service allowing book publishers to use human-sounding AI narrators, an innovation that could displace hundreds of voice actors who make a living performing audiobooks. The company’s website says the service will benefit independent authors and small publishers.
“I know someone always has to get there first, some company,” said Chris Ciulla, who estimates that he has made $100,000 to $130,000 annually over the past five years narrating books under union contracts. “But for individuals not to understand how that can affect the pail-carrying narrator out there eventually is disappointing.”
Other actors fear that studios will use AI to replicate their voices while cutting them out of the process. “We’ve seen this happening — there are websites that have popped up with databases of characters’ voices from video games and animation,” said Linsay Rousseau, an actress who makes her living doing voice work.
On-camera actors point out that studios already use motion capture or performance capture to replicate artists’ movements or facial expressions. The 2018 blockbuster “Black Panther” relied on this technology for scenes that depicted hundreds of tribespeople on cliffs, mimicking the movements of dancers hired to perform for the film.
Some actors worry that newer versions of the technology will allow studios to effectively steal their movements, “creating new performance in the style of a wushu master or karate master and using that person’s style without consent,” said Zeke Alton, a voice and screen actor who sits on the board of his union local, SAG-AFTRA, in Los Angeles.
And Hollywood writers have grown increasingly anxious as ChatGPT has become adept at mimicking the style of prolific authors.
“Early on in the conversations with the guild, we talked about what I call the Nora Ephron problem,” said John August, a Writers Guild board member. “Which is basically: What happens if you feed all of Nora Ephron’s scripts into a system and generate an AI that can create a Nora Ephron-sounding script?”
August, a screenwriter for movies such as “Charlie’s Angels” and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” said that while artificial intelligence had taken a back seat to compensation in the Writers Guild negotiation, the union was making two key demands on the subject of automation.
It wants to ensure that no literary material — scripts, treatments, outlines or even discrete scenes — can be written or rewritten by chatbots. “A terrible case of like, ‘Oh, I read through your scripts, I didn’t like the scene, so I had ChatGPT rewrite the scene’ — that’s the nightmare scenario,” August said.
The guild also wants to ensure that studios can’t 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.
SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, says more of its members are flagging contracts for individual jobs in which studios appear to claim the right to use their voices to generate new performances.
A recent Netflix contract sought to grant the company free use of a simulation of an actor’s voice “by all technologies and processes now known or hereafter developed, throughout the universe and in perpetuity.”
Netflix said the language had been in place for several years and allowed the company to make the voice of one actor sound more like the voice of another in case of a casting change between seasons of an animated production.
The union has said that its members are not bound by contract provisions that would allow a producer to simulate new performances without compensating actors, though it has sometimes intervened to strike them from contracts nonetheless.
Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA’s executive director, said such contracts posed a much bigger risk to nonunion actors, who can become unwitting accomplices in their own obsolescence. “It only takes one or a few instances of signing away your rights on a lifetime basis to really potentially have a negative impact on your career prospects,” Crabtree-Ireland said.
The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains with the various unions that represent writers, actors and directors on behalf of the major Hollywood studios, declined to comment.
When professionals have fended off obsolescence at the hands of technology, the outcome has often reflected their occupation’s status and prestige.
That appears to have been the case to some extent with airplane pilots, whose crew sizes had dropped to two on most domestic commercial flights by the late 1990s, but have largely been level since then, even as automated technology has become far more sophisticated and the industry has explored further reductions.
“The safety net you have when you’re high off the ground — the one that keeps you from hitting the ground — is two highly trained, experienced, rested pilots,” said Capt. Dennis Tajer, a spokesperson for the Allied Pilots Association, which represents pilots for American Airlines. To this day, flight times longer than nine hours require at least three pilots.
The replacement of certain doctors by artificial intelligence, which some experts predicted was imminent in fields such as radiology, has also failed to materialize. That’s partly because of the limits of the technology, and because of the stature of the doctors, who have inserted themselves into high-stakes conversations about the safety and deployment of AI. The American College of Radiology created a Data Science Institute partly for this purpose several years ago.
Whether screenwriters find similar success will depend at least in part on if there are inherent limits to the machines that purport to do their jobs. Some writers and actors speak of a so-called uncanny valley that algorithms may never entirely escape.
“Artists look at everything ever created and find a flash of newness,” said Javier Grillo-Marxuach, a writer and producer for “Lost” and “Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance.” “What the machine is doing is recombining.”
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?
The unions are pressing their case. August says that it falls to the Writers Guild and not the studio to determine who receives a writer’s credit on a project, and that the union will guard this rite jealously. “We want to make sure that an AI is never one of those writers in the chain of title for a project,” he said.
The unions also have legal cards to play, Crabtree-Ireland of SAG-AFTRA said, like the U.S. Copyright Office’s pronouncement in March that content created entirely by algorithm is not eligible for copyright protection. It is harder to monetize a production if there is no legal obstacle to copying it.
Perhaps more important, he said, is what you might call the Us Weekly factor — the tendency of audiences to be as interested in the human behind the role as in the performance. Fans want to hear Hollywood celebrities discuss their method in interviews. They want to gawk at actors’ fashion sensibilities and keep up with whom they’re dating.
“If you look at culture in general, the audience is generally interested in the real lives of our members,” Crabtree-Ireland said. “AI is not in a position to substitute for key elements of that.”
c.2023 The New York Times Company
Good lawd.