Regarding AI
Logline
The creator of a tool for writers considers whether AI can be used ethically to help its clients explore story space faster while avoiding swaths of plagiarized material.
Inciting Incident
Soon, anyone will be able to generate broadcast quality, high continuity, feature length media using generative AI.
With just an idea and access to the compute, anyone could challenge the media gatekeepers with stunning worlds, incredible action, and lifelike characters.
But it will only hold our attention if creators use it to tell engaging stories.
Plot Complication
A multipoint disturbance in the plot is appearing onscreen now:
- The WGA rightly feared and fought for protection against producers using AI trained on existing scripts to generate new scripts. Concerns about unintentional plagiarism were well-founded.
- The WGA was only negotiating with the studios and streamers, because they are the current gatekeepers, who must green-light and fund all that the WGA members will be paid to write. This situation exists ONLY because it costs a lot of money to make quality content at this moment in time.
- In short order, the gatekeepers will be challenged by a tide of self-published content from the masses. Just like the digital self-publishing wave before it, most will be bad, but some will rival everything that came before.
Impact Impending
As technology has shown time and again, when the masses can create content of equal fidelity to that previously only produced by the gatekeepers, a bit of chaos ensues.
- Content sources become more diffuse
- Content itself becomes more diverse
- Discovery becomes more difficult, but often more rewarding
In this particular revolution, individuals will be able to create box-office quality audiovisuals. How their product ends up in the hands of consumers is not our interest. Youtube is already a paying outlet, there will be more.
The big concern is where the stories will come from. If open-source AIs are trained on scripts available on the internet, and creators use them to create new scripts, there is a high probability of plagiarism. That's no good and will be to the generative AI movement what crypto scams were to blockchain.
Certainly there will be AI tools that allow creators with no writing experience to generate entire episodes at the push of a button. Plotrocket will never be that.
Our Strategy
AI, where it intersects with writing, has proven to be a polarizing topic. Writers tend to fall into two camps, for and against. But as the provider of a tool with the goal of helping individuals produce engaging episodic stories, should we choose a side?
Embrace and Serve All
Because of the way we break down the series, with AI suggestions offered at a granular level, we feel we can serve both audiences without contributing to a glut of plagiaristic push-button pilots or distracting those who prefer to eschew the AI.
Go Humans, Beat the Robots
Firstly, we offer a plan that allows the user to opt out of AI from the beginning, so that they can use the tool to build worlds and outline episodes with their PDF documents being marked clearly as containing no AI generated content.
There will be no "Ideate" or sparkle buttons to distract you.
This is a purpose-built series planner whose features are focused on capturing and expanding upon ideas in a structured way that leads to a coherent outline and series bible.
Improving the tools and covering any gaps in the creative process for this audience will ALWAYS be our first priority. Take it from the founder, who is writing on this plan.
Cyberpunk Writer
PlotRocket is for writers, experienced or aspiring. It does not hide story structure; it puts structure first. You and the AI-collaborator work together within that structure. Its purpose is to give you suggestions at a granular level, as another writer in a writers' room might.
Rather than ask the AI for a whole story with a single prompt, we guide the creator from an initial idea for a series, through a world-building phase where characters, settings, and lore are produced about the story world, and into an arc-plotting phase where series and season level story arcs are planned, or to the story-breaking phase where episodes are outlined.
At every step, the creator can provide their own thoughts, and optionally request the AI suggest improvements. Suggestions can be accepted, dismissed on a field by field basis, or refined in an iterative collaboration with the AI.
Each element of the story, be it Series, Precinct, Lore, Setting, Character, Arc, Season, Episode, Plotline, Act, Scene, or Beat, is a small amount of information, about enough to fill an index card, that affects your AI collaborators' ideation on all downstream elements.
The upshot of all this is that the AI-assisted creator has no choice but to build her story in a piecewise manner, one idea leading to the next, extending the story structure, until an outcome is achieved.
Anyone seeking to use AI for churning out low-effort pablum would do better to just ask ChatGPT or Claude for a full script.
Conclusion
Studios and streamers produce high quality episodic fiction like hot dogs these days. They are well-oiled machines.
And while it takes a room full of talented writers months to "break" the season's story ideas down into the component "beats" that compose every episode, without process and structure, they would yield at best a pile of scribbled notes.
First and foremost, we want individuals to have the benefit of that story structure and writers' room process that can reliably turn foggy but promising ideas into coherent stories.
Secondly, we're interested in how we can make AI collaboration a focus-multiplier for talent without building a tool for push-button pablum at scale.
Thirdly, we will never train models that others will have access to for generating content. If you use the AI collaborator, we may train models on your content for the sole purpose of helping you get better suggestions on your own content.
Our hope is that if the creator's strong suit is not writing and a writer would not be within their budget, they can get to an engaging and non-infringing story while learning more about the craft of screenwriting in the process.
But the person who understands storytelling to a more advanced degree and has definite ideas about the story they'd like to tell and how they want to tell it will be able to explore and define their story world and characters rapidly and get an idea if a story could have legs beyond the first few episodes. Should they choose to use it, the AI-collaborator can be a way of ordinary breaking writers' block.