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How ChatGPT resets the levels

December 22, 2022 Follow Up, Geek Alert, Hive Mind, Meta

On a recent Scriptnotes, I showed off ChatGPT to Craig and Scriptnotes guest Rian Johnson. We asked it to write up a plot summary for a future Knives Out movie set in space.

We got an answer similar to this query I just ran:1

In the far-flung future, wealthy space entrepreneur Harrison Thorne is found dead in his luxurious space station, the victim of an apparent suicide. However, Detective Benoit Blanc, a renowned investigator known for solving even the most complex cases, has a hunch that foul play is at work. As he begins to investigate, he finds that every member of Thorne’s eccentric and contentious family has a motive for murder.

As the detective delves deeper into the mystery, he must navigate the tangled web of lies and deceit spun by the suspects, all while trying to stay one step ahead of the cunning killer. With the help of Thorne’s loyal assistant Marta, Blanc must unravel the truth before the killer strikes again.

As the body count rises and the tension mounts, it becomes clear that no one is above suspicion in this high-stakes game of space-age crime and deception. Will Detective Blanc be able to solve the case before it’s too late, or will the killer get away with murder in the cold vacuum of space?

None of us were blown away by the plotting. It felt like it was copy-pasting ideas from the first movie, with a lot of generic pitch filler. Still, we all agreed that the sentence-by-sentence writing was surprisingly good. It didn’t feel like it was written by a bot.

When we asked it to write a scene, it was functional but weightless. Here’s one based on the summary above:2

INT. SPACE STATION – DAY

Detective BENOIT BLANC, a middle-aged man with a southern drawl, walks through the sterile corridors of the space station, his face etched with determination. He approaches a door labeled “Harrison Thorne – CEO.”

BLANC

(to himself)

Time to get to work.

He opens the door and enters the office, which is spacious and well-appointed. A young woman, MARTA, sits at a desk, typing away on a computer. She looks up as Blanc enters.

MARTA

(stands up)

Can I help you?

BLANC

(flashes badge)

Detective Benoit Blanc, ma’am. I’m here to investigate Mr. Thorne’s death.

MARTA

(nods)

I see. Well, Mr. Thorne was a good man. I can’t believe he’s gone.

BLANC

(nods sympathetically)

I understand. Is there anything you can tell me about his final days, or any unusual circumstances leading up to his death?

MARTA

(hesitates)

I’m not sure. I mean, he was under a lot of stress with the business, but he always seemed to handle it well.

BLANC

(nods)

I see. Well, thank you for your time. I may have more questions for you later.

MARTA

(nods)

Of course. I’ll do whatever I can to help.

BLANC

(smiles)

Thank you, ma’am. I’ll be in touch.

Blanc exits the office, deep in thought. The investigation has only just begun, and he has a feeling that it won’t be an easy one.

To be generous, it’s not nonsense. Unlike earlier attempts at algorithmically-generated screenplays, you can follow what happens, and characters do feel like they’re talking to each other. But there’s no nuance or character motivation despite the endless parentheticals.

It’s not a scene, but a simulacrum of one.

Listener JR, who makes his living using tools like these, wrote in with an interesting perspective:

Language models are built on “training data,” which is the text you feed into a learning process to produce the output. For very sophisticated models, the training data is vast: for something like ChatGPT, it includes something like all the text you can scrape off of the last twenty years of the Internet, or so.

But this means ChatGPT is about as smart as the average writer on the Internet has been over the past twenty years — and indeed, the models that comprise GPT drag the results toward the average, not the extraordinary, because the average has much nicer statistical properties than the extraordinary for companies that seek to produce a marketable, scalable product from their models, which requires the ability to tweak, diagnose, and defend what you’re selling.

ChatGPT isn’t optimized for breathtaking originality because that’s not its goal. It’s meant to be conversational and approachable, not wild and daring. It’s giving you hamburgers rather than Japanese wagyu sando with white truffle shavings because 90% of the time, that’s what you want.

JR continues:

Ultimately what these models mean is that with the click of a button you can now be just as good as the average writer who posts content to the Internet, and so the old “average” is now the new “zero.” If you wrote at the average level of the Internet in 2022 you now write at the zero level.

That’s a big idea, so let’s turn it over in our hands a bit.

Let’s imagine we can pick something that represents the average quality of English writing on the internet. It might be an article about holiday lobster prices or a piece of Peloton marketing copy.

from yahoo news: Dec. 21—Maria Minella shopped at Schiff's Marketplace on Tuesday night to stock up for an upcoming family tradition. The Madison Twp. resident purchased smelts, scallops and smoked whiting from the Scranton store on North Main Avenue. They were a bit pricier than in years past, but that didn't matter much to her. "We like to do seven fishes for Christmas Eve," she said. "It's special for the holidays, so you pay a little extra to keep up with the family tradition." While prices of some fish are rising, the cost of other traditional Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve staples is dropping, according to area grocers.

screenshot from Peleton blog post: We get it: Staying motivated to work out regularly can be hard. But that’s where an accountability partner comes in. An accountability partner is there to cheer you on and encourage you to keep going, even on the hard days. They’ll drag you out of bed in the morning and keep you focused on your goals. And you’ll return the favor for them, of course—because accountability partners support and lift each other up.   Looking to find an accountability partner of your own? We asked some of our Members to share how they found accountability partners and how that support has helped them achieve their goals.

Could any English speaker write at that level? No.

You probably don’t have to think that hard to come up with several people in your life who can’t write up to the standards of “Yahoo News article” or “Peloton blog post.”

Many folks don’t write, won’t write, can’t write.

In fact, if we want to consider it “median” writing quality rather than “average,” then approximately half the English speakers on the internet couldn’t hit this level of sophistication.

Only now, with tools like ChatGPT, they can. It’s very good at taking awkward, ungrammatical writing and making something decent out of it.

I fed ChatGPT this text —

if youre stove won’t light here’s what you do 1) check that that the gas is on turn the knob do you hear it 2) lisen if it’s clicking that’s the igniter. if it’s not clickign you could light it with a match 3) lift off the burner cover cuz sometimes that the issue 4) try another burner

— with the instruction to “Rewrite this as a good blog post.” Here’s the result:

If Your Stove Won’t Light: A Step-by-Step Guide

If you’re trying to cook a meal and your stove won’t light, it can be frustrating and time-consuming. Here are some steps you can try to troubleshoot the issue:

  1. Check that the gas is on. Turn the knob and listen for the sound of gas flowing. If you don’t hear it, the gas may be turned off or there may be a problem with the gas line.

  2. Listen for the igniter. If you hear a clicking sound, that means the igniter is trying to light the gas. If you don’t hear a clicking sound, you can try lighting the burner with a match.

  3. Lift off the burner cover. Sometimes, food or debris can accumulate underneath the burner cover and prevent the gas from lighting. Removing the cover may resolve the issue.

  4. Try another burner. If all else fails, it’s possible that there is a problem with a specific burner on your stove. Try using a different burner to see if it lights properly.

By following these steps, you should be able to get your stove working again in no time. If the problem persists, it may be a good idea to call a professional for assistance.

Imagine you’re a technician asked to document how a system works. You could describe the steps and let ChatGPT do the writing. Would you still need to proofread it, to make sure it’s not hallucinating something wrong? Absolutely. But most reluctant writers are competent readers. They should be able to spot when it’s gone off track.

Where I think these tools have even more benefit is for people who don’t feel confident in English. Type in your native language and let the AI do its work, translating not just the words but the intent.

Which brings us back to JR’s thesis, that a tool like ChatGPT resets the levels. In a world in which everyone can write at the old “average” level, what happens?

I’m not sure. There’s not a great comparison in recent human history. Calculators enabled ordinary people to do a lot more number-crunching, but were they transformative? (For the human calculators of Hidden Figures, perhaps so.)

A world filled with AI-polished text might push us in unexpected directions. To err is human, and we might find language incorporating mistakes to porve a hooman wrote it. Or we might use these tools like Instagram filters to make us look like someone we aspire to be.

Personally, I don’t think screenwriters are particularly endangered, at least not in the short term. Future tools may be trained and tuned for scriptwriting, but they’ll be working off a corpus of all the screenplays that have come before. And that’s how it’s always been.

JR notes:

All writers are competing against the cumulative past of our species and its semi-automatic weapons of creative destruction, and are competing to stand out from an average defined over the past couple of decades or so.[…] Writers should only worry about automated writers as much as they are already worried about the agglomerated capacity and output of our species up until the present moment, which, eh, we can do better.

  1. The prompt is “Give me a plot summary for a Knives Out set in space.” ↩
  2. Prompt: “Write me a scene from this movie where Blanc first meets Marta, in screenplay format.” ↩

Social media has always been dying

December 19, 2022 Meta, News

For this week’s Inneresting rebroadcast, editor Chris Csont chose this 2011 blog post in which I wondered how much of ourselves we present online. Even then, I was looking backwards:

In the seven years I’ve been running the blog, I’ve noticed the online version of myself drifting closer to the “actual” version. But there is still a difference, and that’s deliberate. Even though this site has my name on it, it’s still a fairly controlled product: a ton of useful information on screenwriting. You’re getting the screenwriter John August, not the Eagle Scout, the cook or the Real World/Road Rules Challenge completist.

For the newsletter, I wrote up a blurb to put the post in context which ended up nearly as long as the post itself.

Eleven years ago, I was talking about Facebook, a platform I’ve largely abandoned. Nearly all the same points apply to Twitter and Instagram today.

Twitter has been problematic for years, with its trolls and mobs and twitchforks. But I’m honestly grateful for it. It’s where I first met many colleagues and learned new ideas, mostly by listening in on conversations from communities I wasn’t a part of.

For all the talk about Twitter leveling the playing field, allowing direct access to powerful people, I found my blue-check status to be incredibly useful. The moment I followed someone, they would get a notification and often follow me back. That digital introduction made it easy to DM them a question like, “Hey, would you ever want to come on Scriptnotes?”

Scrolling through someone’s Twitter gave you a sense of who a person was, or at least how they wanted to be perceived.

I’m talking about Twitter in the past tense because I think it’s dead. It may still exist in six months or six years, but Elon Musk’s erratic decisions have broken its hold on the conversation. It will ever feel essential again. Maybe that’s good. Other weird things can flourish in its absence.

Meanwhile, I still use Instagram, particularly Stories and DMs. If I meet someone at a party, Instagram is probably how we’ll keep in touch. Yet it’s an every way a more extreme version of what worried me back in 2011. It’s curated, performative and artificial. It feeds body dysmorphia and parasocial relationships. But it doesn’t feel like it’s contributing to imminent collapse of democracy, which in 2022 is the low bar we’ve set.

As I’m posting this, I haven’t officially left Twitter. I still skim and reply. But I’m not going to be engaging in any discussion or debate. I’ll certainly try out Hive and Post and Mastodon, just like I used to have Tumblr and others. But I don’t expect any of them to replace Twitter for me.

Just as it was 12 years ago and seven years before that, I suspect this blog will remain the official version of me, so follow me here. RSS forever.

The Free Stuff

August 11, 2022 Apps, Bronson, Highland, Meta, News, Software, Tools, Weekend Read, Writer Emergency Pack

My friend Nima recently pointed out that most of the stuff our company makes is free.

That’s probably not a great business model, but it’s always been our culture. We only charge for those things that have significant ongoing costs — like upkeep and hosting — or a per-unit cost to produce.

If you’re a writer, here are the things we offer at absolutely no cost. As in free.

johnaugust.com

This blog has been running since 2003. Nearly all of its 1,500 posts are screenwriting advice. The Explore tab on the right is a good way to get started looking through the archives. For example, you might start with the 129 articles on formatting.

Scriptnotes

Craig Mazin and I have been recording this weekly screenwriting podcast for over ten years. It’s always been free, with no ads whatsoever. The most recent 20 episodes are available in every podcast player. Back episodes are available to Scriptnotes Premium members, or can be purchased in 50-episode “seasons.”

Inneresting

Chris Csont edits this weekly newsletter, which serves as a good companion to Scriptnotes. Every Friday, it has links to things about writing, centering on a given theme. It’s a Substack, but completely free.

Highland 2

For years, I’ve written all my scripts and novels in this terrific app our company makes. It’s a free download on the Mac App Store. The Standard edition is fully functional, with no time limits. Students can receive the enhanced Pro edition through our student license program.

Courier Prime

English-language screenplays are written in Courier, but not all Couriers are alike. Many are too thin, and the italics are ugly. So we commissioned a new typeface called Courier Prime. It’s Courier, but better. Since it’s free and open licensed, you can use it through Google Fonts and similar services.

Weekend Read

Reading a screenplay on an iPhone is a pain in the ass — unless you use Weekend Read. It melts down screenplay PDFs so they format properly on smaller screens. Weekend Read also has an extensive library of older scripts, including many award nominees. It’s free on the App Store.

The Library

The Library has most of the scripts I’ve written, and hosts a few other writers’ work as well. For several projects, I’ve included treatments, pitches, outlines and additional material.

Screenwriting.io

While johnaugust.com offers detailed articles on various topics, screenwriting.io answers really basic questions about film and TV writing. If you’re Googling, “how many acts does a TV show have?” we want to give you the answer with no cruft or bullshit.

100 Most Frequently Asked Questions about Screenwriting

We gathered the 100 most frequently searched-for entries on screenwriting.io in this handy 85-page PDF.

Launch

I recorded this seven-episode podcast series about the pitch, sale, writing and production of my first Arlo Finch book. If you’ve ever thought about writing a book, you’ll want to check it out. Free wherever you listen to podcasts.

The Paid Stuff

Given all the free stuff we put out, how does our company make money? We sell things.

Highland 2 Pro

Highland 2 Standard Edition is free, but most users choose to upgrade to Pro for its added features: revision mode, priority email support, extra templates, custom themes, and watermark-free PDFs. It’s an in-app purchase, $39 USD.1

Writer Emergency Pack

Writer Emergency Pack began its life as a Kickstarter, and is now one of the most popular gifts for writers of all ages. Available through our store and Amazon.

Bronson Watermarker PDF

Bronson is the app I needed when watermarking scripts for a Broadway reading. Now it’s become the default watermarking app in Hollywood. It’s $20 on the Mac App Store.

T-shirts and hoodies

We used to print and ship our own t-shirts, but we now sell them through Cotton Bureau. We put out a new Scriptnotes shirt every year. It’s definitely not a profit center, but it’s fun seeing merch out in the wild.

Weekend Read Unlocked

Users can unlock their expanded library for $10 USD.

Scriptnotes Premium

The Scriptnotes podcast runs out of a separate LLC from our software business. Premium subscriptions pay for the salaries of our producer, editor and transcriptionist, along with hosting and management fees. Craig and I don’t make a cent off it.

  1. Prices may change. Also note that Apple sets international pricing, so some apps cost a little more or a little less in some countries. ↩

10 Year Anniversary

Episode - 516

Go to Archive

September 14, 2021 Meta, Scriptnotes, Transcribed

Editor and critic Julia Turner puts John and Craig in the hot seat to review the past ten years of Scriptnotes. They cover the original mission, behind scenes fights, notable guests, and their biggest regrets.

We also predict what we think the next ten years will bring and share a Scriptnotes love story.

In our bonus segment for premium members, Julia has John and Craig play “How Would This Be A Movie?” with the past decade of Scriptnotes. From casting to romance and rivalry, they outline the Scriptnotes Cinematic Universe.

Special thanks to Julia Turner for hosting! Listen to her every week on Slate’s Culture Gabfest.

Links:

  • Julia Turner on the LA Times and Slate Culture Gabfest
  • The Matrix Trailer
  • Scriptnotes, Episode 411: Setting it Up with Katie Silberman
  • Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe
  • The Academy Museum Hawk Deborah Vankin for the LA Times
  • Lego Typewriter, check out John’s finished project!
  • Ketchup Doritos
  • Check out the Scriptnotes Index for our first 500 episodes
  • Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
  • Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
  • Julia Turner on Twitter
  • John August on Twitter
  • Craig Mazin on Twitter
  • John on Instagram
  • Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
  • Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

UPDATE 9-21-21 The transcript for this episode can now be found here.

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