Uh, maybe because that’s their job?
This is a quote from the writer of movies like “Taxi Driver” and “American Gigolo.” A notable collaborator of the distinguished director and fellow screenwriter Martin Scorcese, who’s won several awards for his screenwriting abilities. To put it simply, he’s renowned in the film industry.
But his enthusiasm about using AI in his art is … interesting.
I completely disagree with Schrader’s comments on AI. Honestly, robots freak me out, and I don’t think you gain anything from making a machine do your work for you. Schrader’s idea that writers shouldn’t have to think of their own ideas contradicts his whole career. Isn’t that what writers do? Isn’t that what he did?
Homer didn’t use AI. Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë didn’t sit with their backs hunched over laptops as ChatGPT spat out the plots of “Emma” and “Jane Eyre.” Leonardo da Vinci didn’t type in “brunette girl with weird stare in front of landscape oil painting” into ChatGPT and paste the print on a canvas. He spent fourteen years creating what we now know as one of the most famous paintings in the world. Literary and artistic greats are deemed as such because their work is their own; it’s born from emotion, experience, and creativity, all things that AI lacks.
AI, specifically AI artwork, is built on the backs of artists, writers, musicians, and many other creatives. Adobe classifies AI art as “artwork made with the assistance of generative AI—a technology that finds patterns in big datasets and uses that information to create new content.”
Without hundreds of years worth of literature and art to teach AI, it wouldn’t exist. “Screenwriters” who use it are simply utilizing all that has come before them without learning anything. They aren’t using their personal experiences to create. And while they aren’t technically stealing from these past writers or artists, they are relying on a device that does to fuel their careers.
Artistic endeavors, like writing a screenplay, rely on creativity and determination in order to produce meaningful works. A robot, which simply takes from the effort that so many others have given, cannot fully recreate the physical and emotional focus that goes into making something original and it never will.
Even though Schrader isn’t saying writers should use AI to write everything for them, his notion that AI can help writers come up with their ideas is still deeply troubling.
The overarching questions I have about Paul Schrader’s comments on AI are as follows: Why would you become a writer if you need to rely on a machine to do it for you? Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of an entire career? Can writers put their all into exploring an idea if that idea wasn’t theirs? There is no point in dedicating your education, life, and career on something that you can’t even take credit for creating. And if AI has already begun to take creative jobs, which rely on human experience and creativity to sustain, we have no idea where it could be going next.
From a writer’s perspective, AI-assisted ideas feel like a cop out. Talented writers put the effort in. They spend months, years even, coming up with good ideas because after they do, the piece that comes out of it is their own and all the effort makes the final product so much sweeter. The bad ideas, no matter how many, are simply lessons as to what makes the good ideas really good. And if you can’t handle the writing process? Then don’t become a writer, Paul.
