John August

QandA

The One with Patton Oswalt

Episode - 589

Play

Books, Film Industry, Scriptnotes, Talk

John and Craig welcome comedian, actor, writer and Jeopardy! champion Patton Oswalt to discuss joke structure and building standup specials. Patton pulls back the curtain on his writing process, how he develops a comedic premise, and earning an audience’s trust.

We also dissect M.O.D.O.K., punching up other people’s scripts, and the art of adaptation. We then answer a listener’s question about writing films that include standup comedy.

In our bonus segment for premium members, we discuss characters who keep secrets for no reas– there’s no time to explain!

Links:

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

Which of these answers was written by AI?

Tools, Words on the page, Writing Process

GPTZero is a new service created by Edward Tian designed to sniff out AI-generated text.

I’m dubious, in part because I’m not sure I could reliably spot the differences between sentences assembled by humans versus machines. But maybe that’s just my human bias.

As an experiment, I decided to run a quick, not-at-all-scientific test. I asked ChatGPT to “write three paragraphs explaining what a manager does for screenwriters.” I also looked up the answer for “What does a manager do?” on screenwriting.io.

Here are the two responses, one written by a human1, the other by an AI. See if you can spot which is which.

SAMPLE A

In brief, a manager manages your career.

This includes tangible acts, like setting up meetings, giving notes and feedback, and assisting with deal negotiation, as well as the more abstract, like helping steer your career’s direction.

Managers, unlike agents, are not required to be licensed by the state. They usually have fewer clients than agents, and often take more personal and less business-focused roles in their clients’ careers. Managers, are allowed to take producer credits on their clients movies, which agents are not.

Like agents, a manager typically receives 10% of a client’s earnings. A manager should never ask for an upfront or flat fee.

SAMPLE B

A manager for a screenwriter plays a vital role in helping the writer navigate the film and television industry. They can assist with finding and developing new ideas, as well as helping the writer shape their existing ideas into marketable concepts. This often involves providing feedback and suggestions to help improve the story and make it more appealing to potential buyers.

Managers also help screenwriters with the business side of things, such as identifying potential buyers and pitching the writer’s work to them. They can also help negotiate deals and contracts, as well as manage any legal issues that may arise. In addition, they can help the writer navigate the many different players in the industry, such as agents, producers, and studio executives.

Finally, a manager can also help screenwriters with their long-term career goals by helping them identify opportunities for growth and advancement. This might include working on larger projects, transitioning to other forms of media, or developing a personal brand to increase their visibility and credibility in the industry. Overall, a manager plays a critical role in helping a screenwriter achieve success in the competitive film and television industry.

For each answer, GPTZero measured the text’s Perplexity — the randomness of the text — across several ranges.

Total Average Highest
Sample A 41 136 219
Sample B 11 36 49

That 219 is an example of “Burstiness,” which GPTZero defines as “spikes in perplexity.” For Sample A, the opening sentence has a perplexity of 219, whereas highest perplexity in Sample B is just 49.

That’s the tell, apparently.

Some human written sentences can have low perplexities, but there is bound to be spikes in perplexity as the human continues writing. Contrastingly, perplexity is uniformly distributed and constantly low for machine generated texts.

After crunching the numbers, GPTZero renders its verdict.

SAMPLE A (score 66.44): Your text is likely human generated!

SAMPLE B (score 9.93): Your text is most likely to be AI generated!

On both counts, GPTZero got it correct.

But how hard would it be to fool the system? I spent two minutes editing the AI-generated version into the following:

Sample C

Managers can play a vital role for screenwriters. Basically, they help the writer navigate the film and television industry. They can assist with finding and developing new ideas, or shaping their existing ideas. They provide feedback and suggestions.

Managers also help screenwriters with the business side of things: who the buyers are and how to pitch to them. They can help negotiate deals and contracts, as well as manage any legal issues that may arise. They help the writer navigate the many different players in the industry, including as agents, producers, and studio executives.

Good managers think about screenwriters’ long-term career goals. This might include working on bigger (or smaller!) projects, transitioning to other forms of media, or developing a personal brand. Overall, a manager can play an important role in helping a screenwriter achieve success in the competitive film and television industry.

Total Average Highest
Sample A 41 136 219
Sample B 11 36 49
Sample C 19 106 439

The verdict:

SAMPLE C (score 118.77): Your text is likely human generated!

Some takeaways

  • The ChatGPT answer was well-written and potentially helpful for someone who didn’t know anything about managers.
  • GPTZero is looking for patterns a human likely wouldn’t notice, which makes sense. But an AI model trained to provide responses with high perplexity and burstiness would likely evade detection. It’s interesting to see this arms race play out, because adversarial networks are already a fundamental tool in AI.
  • It’s currently very easy to fool GPTZero with just minimal rewriting. If this tool meant to detect AI-generated term papers, students will quickly learn how to evade it.
  1. Stuart Friedel wrote most of the early screenwriting.io answers. ↩

Whither Westworld

Asides, Film Industry, Television

Like most writers, I’m trying to understand these wild moves at HBO Max.

Cancelling Westworld? Sure. Happens all the time. That’s TV.

Ditching an unaired season you’ve already shot, like what just happened to Minx? That’s heartbreaking, but I guess not unprecedented after Batwoman.

Pulling Westworld off the service is just bonkers to me. My only guess is that they’re going to stick it on an ad-based service with a different residual formula.

Makes it hard to want to make a show for HBO Max.

I mistakenly titled this post “Wither Westworld” instead of “Whither Westworld” and both work.

How classes use Writer Emergency Pack

Education, Follow Up, Writer Emergency, Writer Emergency Pack

Since the launch of Writer Emergency Pack in 2015, we’ve partnered with youth writing programs to get decks into classrooms and after-school groups. By far our biggest partner is NaNoWriMo’s Young Writers Program.

With the arrival of Writer Emergency Pack XL, I asked NaNoWriMo’s executive director Grant Faulkner for an update on how the original decks are being used.

JOHN: A lot of people are familiar with National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), but what is Young Writers Program?

GRANT: It’s a version of NaNoWriMo, just for kids. When I was a kid, I didn’t dream of writing a novel (and I was bookish). Because of our Young Writers Program, though, now nearly 100,000 kids write novels each year, and educators from over 9,000 classrooms around the world participate.

The challenge is, like NaNoWriMo, to draft an entire novel in November. We believe that giving kids agency and making writing fun is the best way to learn. For 30 wild, exciting, surprising days, kids get to lock away their inner editor, let their imagination take over, and just create! You might say our pedagogy is rooted in joy.

What are students doing in the program?

We provide teachers a virtual classroom so they can do things like read student novels and create chat topics. And then we also provide kids with free classroom kits — which include Writer Emergency Packs! — workbooks, and Common Core-aligned K–12 lesson plans.

Kids set word-count goals for the month (appropriate to their age and capabilities) and then draft their novel right on our site. They track their progress, and then they also get support from published authors and an international community of fellow novelists.

photo of high school classroom, students looking at teacher

How are teachers using Writer Emergency Pack in the classroom?

I’ve heard so many stories. I’ve heard of teachers who weave cards into the mini-lessons they might do on things like conflict or characterization. I’ve heard of teachers who hand out cards to students who might have hit a wall and have writers’ block. I’ve heard of teachers who give the cards to groups of students and have them use the cards to collaboratively create a story together and then tell it to the class as a way to warm up to write in November.

There is one commonality, though: all teachers make the cards part of the classroom, which is important, because the classroom becomes a writing community during NaNoWriMo.

What feedback have you gotten from teachers about the decks?

They love them! The cards are encouraging, approachable, and fun! They provide the same lessons a book might—but in a single illustrated card. Like NaNoWriMo itself, the cards are all about sparking the imagination, making writing not about a teacher’s red correction marks but the joy of storytelling.

Do you think the new decks will have the same reaction?

I do. I think the size of the cards makes them more inviting. All of the relevant information is now on a single card, and with 52 cards there’s enough for every student in class, even bigger classes.

And, just one more thing: I know adult writers who use the cards as well (me).

Writer Emergency Pack XL is now on Kickstarter. For every deck we send to backers, we’ll be sending a deck to our youth writing program partners, including NaNoWriMo’s Young Writers Program.

Photo by Kenny Eliason/Unsplash