This comes as a reaction to a webinar I attended by Michael A. Jamin.
Jamin is a well-heeled TV writer who has worked on Just Shoot Me, King of the Hill, and Beavis & Butthead. (How does one write for Beavis & Butthead? 90% of it is laughing and “this sucks/rules”?) But lately he’s been promoting himself for teaching services. I keep abreast of him because I think he’s a good writer.
But now 90% of his content is always pointing back to his product–classes you can talk, instructional videos, and so on. One of those was a webinar about “Can AI write a King of the Hill spec script? And can AI give feedback on that script?” It was free, so I thought I’d sign up because I’m interested in AI and the future of creativity.
Jamin’s webinar started 8 minutes later. He spent 60% of the time going over the notes he made on the AI script, 15% on what the AI gave for feedback, and 25% pitching his next class where you can learn what it takes to write a feature-length screenplay for the low, low price of whatever dollars.
I felt like the whole thing was just one big commercial for his services. Like those time-share talks where you get a free gift or something if you attend this seminar with no obligation to buy. I can’t look at his content anymore because it all feels like grifts from a snake-oil salesman. Not that I believe it’s snake oil–I’m sure he’s giving great instruction–but that doesn’t mean you have to always make it so blatant, Mr. Harold Hill.
The answer, of course, was no to both. We were allowed to read the script AI provided. It had no jokes, a nonsensical plot, and made the characters unlikable. And when re-fed into the AI, it gave glowing reviews of the work. This was no surprise to me–it’s a well-known issue that AI will always blow smoke up the prompter’s ass. This has been true ever since the first interactive intelligence programs–it’s designed to hide when something is “broken” so that the user never feels at fault (see Defunctland’s Disney’s Living Characters: A Broken Promise). The trick is to pick out the ass-kissing for the constructive criticism, which you have to do anyway with humans–most reviewers are afraid to be mean.
This part was what I was most interested in because I’ve used AI for feedback on queries and synopses. I haven’t tried it on a manuscript yet because A) I don’t want my ideas added to AI’s ever-expanding katamari and B) I don’t think AI’s capable of giving that kind of feedback… yet. But agents aren’t interested in seeing my full manuscript. I can’t get past the initial query process with the letter and synopsis. I don’t want to use AI, but what is my alternative?
I don’t have a trusted friend group, a writing group, or anyone I know who takes writing seriously like me. I don’t know anyone who can give effective critique. I don’t know any professionals who can tell me what a publishable manuscript needs. So what are my options?
I can either resort to randos on the Internet, using sites like Scribophile or Critters. These are not professionals, don’t write at a professional level, and don’t seem to intend to do so.
You never know who you’re going to get. Maybe a retired nurse who thinks self-publishing is the same as being published. Maybe you’ll get someone who was “told to write by God”. Or you could get someone from another country with no grasp of the English language.
But I do know that in 80% of the critiques I get, there’s very little actionable feedback. My theory is they’re so afraid of offending someone or being negative or being mean. They got told, “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say nuthin’ at all.” The attendees of the webinar rated the AI script around 4 to 6 out of ten. Like, they were so afraid of displeasing a robot.
Or I have to pay hundreds of dollars, close to a thousand, for a developmental editor to read my manuscript. And that person might just blow smoke up my ass anyway. They don’t post sample critiques or concrete testimonials, so you never know what sort of feedback I’m going to get. I spent $800 on Your Beta Reader and got nothing useful. It was a whole lot of compliments and flattery and not much that would catapult it to publishability. Certainly not $800 worth.
At least AI takes me seriously. It’s got the sum of man’s knowledge; it may know a thing or two about story structure. Or what I’m getting wrong about the query letter. It’s been able to detect when I have a strong opener and closer, but problems with dropped character arcs and plot sprawl. It’s told me that my query letter needed a firmer antagonist spotlight. If you tell it to be mean and thorough, it can be mean and thorough.
AI is a tool. And the effectiveness of a tool depends on what you do with it. You can use a hammer to build a house or kill someone. Building a house helps more people, but it also takes longer and needs skill. But Jamin and his cronies treated it like any mere whisper of a positive use of AI was a sin. It removed chat messages from people who suggested using it in any way for screenwriting.
But I believe humans are fundamentally decent. They don’t believe AI-created art is good. But it can be entertaining. Good and entertaining are two very different things, and you’re making a mistake if you don’t see that. That’s why studios move forward with junk like Fifty Shades of Grey and Wonder Woman 1984 and Madame Web and The Emoji Movie and other things you can tell are trainwrecks right from the script. Tubi wouldn’t host/produce those hundred million “shot-on-shitteo” movies if it didn’t make them money somehow.
If you tell AI “write me a King of the Hill script”, you won’t get much back. But what would you get if you picked up any joe off the street and asked the same thing? Not much, I tell you whut.
You have to know how to use your tool. You can’t make it do anything creative–it doesn’t create; it only remixes. AI is like a forklift turned into a brain–it can do superhuman things, but it does not think–it operates. But if you’ve got an idea and have it fleshed out, then I think there are worse places to go for feedback than ChatGPT.
P.S. If anyone has other ideas for how to use AI as a writer, let me know. OR if you know better ways to get good feedback that’s not either cheap-as-free or an expense on your credit card statement you have to explain to your wife.
