youhe rise of AI programs like ChatGPT has unleashed a tidal wave of ethical criticism, especially within the industries it threatens to destroy. After all, just because you can get a bot to instantly write code or write contracts or provide customer support for free, should you?
Well, the Writers Guild of America’s answer is a qualified yes. This week, the Writers Guild of America proposed that ChatGPT would be absolutely allowed to write scripts in the future, as long as the credit (and money) goes to the human writer who came up with the prompts in the first place.
The proposal paints a terrifying picture of the future; a future in which even the most humane arts are crushed under the wheels of thoughtless technology. Or if? Everyone knows that ChatGPT has its flaws. For example, I only asked him to write my biography, and the resulting errors included my birthday, my job, the number of social media followers I have, and the number of awards I won, furthermore, he claimed that I once wrote a book called The Watchbook of Idiots Abroad. So it’s still pretty useless. But could you make me a movie? Here are the results of my experiments.
Experiment one: make me rich
The first message I tried was “write me the outline of a movie that will generate billions of dollars in theaters.” This may sound like an act of greed, but note the use of the word “theatrically.” I don’t just want to get obscenely rich, I also want to preserve the traditional movie experience.
In return, ChatGPT instantly came up with a sci-fi action blockbuster called The Last Hope. The first paragraph of the schematic reads: “In the near future, Earth is facing a catastrophic event caused by a series of natural disasters that have devastated the planet. The governments of the world have been unable to find a solution to the crisis, and humanity’s survival is now in jeopardy. A team of scientists and engineers come together to develop one last effort to save the planet. They build a spaceship, the Last Hope, which will travel through a wormhole to a distant planet that has been identified as potentially habitable.”
So it’s Interstellar, basically. But better hopefully since that movie only grossed $600 million globally and I want to make billions. And this is where ChatGPT really comes in handy. The schematic he provided read: “As they get closer to their destination, the team discovers a dark secret that threatens not only their mission but the fate of humanity itself.” But that’s too vague, so I asked a follow-up question, wanting you to explain this dark secret. And he did:
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