LAS VEGAS — Oscar- and Emmy-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin looked out from a vast stage at thousands of marketers, content creators, business process consultants and systems engineers, and had just one question.
“Why am I here?”
Indeed. But Sorkin’s speaking engagement during a tech conference this week in a Las Vegas hotel was emblematic of a much bigger journey that screenwriters, directors, actors, editors, unions, streaming services and others are facing. Seemingly everyone is concerned about artificial intelligence and what it means for those who make movies and TV shows.
The bigger question for many creative talents as AI insinuates its way into our lives might be, “Do I get to stay here?” Sorkin was more sanguine than some creators, but these concerns will dominate Hollywood conversations for years to come, especially if they fuel a feared writer’s strike.
“Somehow my job changed over the last few years, and I’m a content creator now,” joked Sorkin, who won a screenwriting Oscar for The Social Network, and seven Emmys for writing and executive producing The West Wing and spinoff programming.
Sorkin spoke at the Adobe Summit, which attracted 10,000 attendees who leverage Adobe’s many data and marketing tools to sell more stuff. Adobe is also a major force on Hollywood’s creative side, with programs such as Premiere Pro, Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects.
Adobe used the summit to announce significant new artificial-intelligence capabilities for its creative tools, while knitting its marketing and creative side more closely together.
Wall Street welcomed the news, sending Adobe shares up 5% for the week. With the announcement, Adobe joined fellow tech titans Microsoft, Meta, and Alphabet (and hundreds of smaller startups led by OpenAI, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney) in the AI pool. Creators and consultants said Adobe’s new capabilities should make their jobs easier and more efficient as they create unique, targeted text, images and video for the proliferating content platforms out there.
AI’s potential impacts are being greeted less pleasantly in Sorkin haunts in Hollywood and New York. The Writers Guild of America’s “pattern of demands” in negotiations that started March 20 includes proposed limits on the use of AI that would replace screenwriters. The union’s membership is spoiling for a fight, and appears likely to go on strike for the first time since 2008 when the contract expires May 1.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other AI tools are already generating a wide array of text-based material, from search-engine answers to website verbiage to school reports. Scripts could get an AI gloss too, though Sorkin suggested AI-generated programs trained on thousands of existing popular films and TV shows aren’t likely to create compelling projects.
“Knowing what people want and giving it to them is a bad recipe for storytelling,” Sorkin said. “There are hundreds of ways to prepare beef. But if I prepared beef in the way most people consume it, it would be a McDonald's hamburger.”
Storytellers are “leaders, we’re not followers,” Sorkin said. “Writing is hard, at least it is for me. I try to write what I like, what I think my friends will like, then I keep my fingers crossed that enough other people will like it that I'll get to keep writing.”
The WGA’s members want to keep writing as a human, financially sustainable job. Their concerns go well beyond AI, in many cases trying to fix festering issues left unresolved when the pandemic lockdown significantly curtailed 2020’s negotiations.
Netflix and other streaming services are partly to blame for the writer distress: They’re ordering far fewer episodes per season for most series, typically six to eight per season, rather than as many as 26. They’re ordering far fewer seasons too, three or less in many cases. When you’re paid on a per-episode/per-season basis, that matters a lot.
Worse, studio contract holds limit writers’ ability to get a second writing job between those short seasons. The growing use of writers “mini” rooms mean far fewer staff jobs, endangering career prospects for up-and-coming Sorkin successors.
And WGA members already were exercised about being required to do free polishing and even new versions of scripts without additional pay. Now, the same penny-pinching studios and producers could just run a finished script through an AI program for “free” polishing.
Sorkin, who has directed as well as written his most recent three films, said he understands the value of technology in show creation. New technologies have transformed moviemaking since even before sound capabilities created the “talkies” almost a century ago.
Sorkin’s own screenwriting work was transformed in the late 1980s, when he and a roommate cobbled together enough money to buy a first-generation Macintosh computer. In downtime while working as bartender in a Broadway theater, he would scrawl out bits of dialogue on cocktail napkins for what became A Few Good Men, then later typed the material into his computer.
“I couldn't imagine who would use this (computer) except for a playwright,” Sorkin said. “You could copy and paste. It had a delete key.”
Now, Adobe and other companies talk about technology as a co-pilot to augment both professional creators and those with great ideas but few technical skills.
“Technology that's been developed has allowed people like me to make movies I wouldn't have been allowed to make 20 years ago,” Sorkin said. “I think technology can be a co-pilot, too. I have to sit in a room with people who are experts at it (while I don’t) know anything.”
The same day Sorkin spoke at the Adobe Summit, the New York Times published a previously conducted interview with Sorkin around his upcoming remake of the stage musical Camelot, now in previews for a Broadway run.
Partway through, the story casually mentions that Sorkin had a stroke in November that left him slurring his words for a month and unable to sign his name until recently; that became the story when dozens of other publications rewrote the Times interview.
“There was a minute when I was concerned that I was never going to be able to write again and I was concerned in the short term that I wasn’t going to be able to continue writing Camelot,” the Times story quotes Sorkin. “Let me make this very, very clear. I’m fine. I wouldn’t want anyone to think I can’t work. I’m fine.”
Onstage, Sorkin betrayed no limits to his language or sense of humor, nor did he speak about the stroke. But for others dealing with physical or other limits like Sorkin’s stroke, AI promises to be a particularly powerful co-pilot, enabling far more than previously possible.
“Where I get nervous about technology, where I don't think it is as useful is when I hear about software that can write a screenplay for you,” Sorkin said.
Asked if he thought AI could write The West Wing, Sorkin had a simple response: “No.”
As he pointed out, the companies making script-writing AI tools are training them using existing screenplays written by non-computers, aka humans.
“A computer didn't write those screenplays that are being fed into the machine in the first place,” Sorkin said. “I think you're going to enjoy things written by humans for a long time.” ■
