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My main thought here is that, compared to 2007, the competition for eyeballs is much more fierce. Even ignoring social media and video games, unscripted streams and independently scripted free YouTube videos offer video entertainment accessible to the masses that Hollywood has to prove themselves better than. Their production values are still much better than even the best independent professionally produced non-Hollywood stuff, but that advantage keeps getting chipped away. The one advantage they won't lose anytime soon is ownership of lots of intellectual property, which gives them a legal monopoly on producing certain stories. I think they need to hold onto this with a death grip if they want to keep being prosperous in the future.
And to do that, they need to make sure the IPs they own are associated with high quality content. Regardless of AI, this has been in some trouble lately; e.g. for all the money MCU and Star Wars films make, the trend has clearly been negative in recent iterations, both in box office numbers and sentiment from longtime fans. A large part of that has to do with the quality of writing, which I imagine AI could help with. In the meanwhile, we're likely to see independently produced scripts become higher quality thanks to AI aid, and with the production values also getting better for similar reasons, Hollywood probably needs to make sure they're at the cutting edge in using these sorts of tech; for as well an independent creator can use this tech, Hollywood has the resources to do it 1000x as much and better.
Given that, I'm not sure that this kind of limiting of AI in script writing is viable. Looking at the quality of writing in modern Hollywood scripts, it's quite clear that an amateur writer with ChatGPT and rudimentary understanding of storytelling principles could write better-than-median quality scripts right now. And it will only get better. Perhaps the writers' guild can group together enough and prevent scabs, but then the entire industry has to compete against independent producers whose quality would go up. If the quality of writing in mainstream professional films and shows go down during this strike and/or fewer such mainstream professional films and shows get released, resulting in less prestige in the IPs that these companies hold, followed by the guild getting what they want in terms of AI leading to them having a harder time competing against AI-assisted independent creators, it could end up with less overall money flowing to Hollywood, a Pyrrhic victory for the writers.
I see your point, but professional writing is a skill that is probably difficult to easily replace not so much because of writing quality as because of the need to have them follow orders while maintaining that writing quality.
I don't think they can even do this. Whenever a piece of media stops being itself so that the characters can turn to face the screen and tell me about how Donald Trump is bad and that I should hire some more black people it immediately throws me out of the story and ruins my enjoyment. It isn't like the writing that we're getting now is of particularly high quality either ("They fly now? THEY FLY NOW!") - I can absolutely understand being scared of AI writers if your writing is already as devoid of humanity as most modern media products are.
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That's a fair point; perhaps Hollywood is doomed anyway, unless they can get AI into the executive suite as well as in the writer's room.
But I also have to wonder if the terrible writing in those Disney films is because they didn't have access to writers good enough to write good scripts while meeting the constraints placed on them by executives. Perhaps the constraints that executives place on the writers makes it literally impossible to write a good script, in which case the prior paragraph holds, but what if it's just that the writers weren't skilled enough to figure that out? I don't know what sorts of constraints the execs at Disney and Lucasarts placed on the writers for Rise of Skywalker, but perhaps a more skilled writer could have written a script that was at least half-decent? And what if AI could/would have elevated those writers to such a level?
It was always doomed, for a few reasons.
Disney rushed Star Wars: The Force Awakens into production which meant no holistic plan for the trilogy. They also went all-in on pandering to existing fans with a derivative plot. It was already broken at this point.
Last Jedi came out, rightly loathing TFA's derivative plot but erasing it (due to there being no plan) which just enraged fans of the first film invested in what it set up
Disney insists on a pivot but also doesn't change the release date so someone had to redo the entire (non-existent) plan from scratch to mollify both TFA and TLJ fans under a time constraint.
Abrams is very often be called a hack, but it was always a cursed endeavor and he's a veteran who's shown he can do competent work.
A lot of the time what seems to happen is that the writer/director is chosen due to being pliable and helpful instead of experienced (see Abrams' proteges who ended up on Rings of Power) and then have to craft a good story between studio mandates. They're neither competent enough to do it nor do they have enough cachet to impose their will even if they had a better plan.
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