Is ‘The Last Screenwriter’ Any Good?

On June 16^th, The Last Screenwriter, the first feature film written entirely by ChatGPT, was set to premiere at the Prince Charles Cinema in London. Protests by cinema patrons led to the cancellation of the screening , although The Last Screenwriter did, eventually, premiere to a closed audience on June 23^rd. And now, as of July 5^th, The Last Screenwriter is free to view fordy the public. But the bigger question, more than the ethical ones, is just, is the movie actually any good?

The premise of The Last Screenwriter is that Jack is a famous screenwriter, faced with the temptation of using an all-powerful artificial intelligence to do all his screenwriting work for him. It’s never entirely clear whether Jack’s famous for writing movies that are actually good or just ones that make a lot of money. We do know that he lives in a mansion and has a happy marriage that is apparently, somehow, threatened by Jack using artificial intelligence to write screenplays. Jack also feels morally conflicted about writing stories with an artificial intelligence since it doesn’t have a soul or a human essence. Although sometimes the moral conflict is just about him putting other writers out of work.

If these all sound like humdrum cliches selected from other screenplays basically at random, well, that’s probably because they were. ChatGPT-like machine learning works by deriving text from existing writing. It doesn’t actually think in any meaningful way. Indeed, if you check the screenplay, available online here alongside other documentation, you’ll find that ChatGPT’s screenplay includes nonexistent deleted scenes, simply because ChatGPT observes that notation in the screenplays it’s using as a reference.

The Last Screenwriter does have one major deviation from its screeplay. While the AI System in the actual movie is just an Amazon Alexa, the screenplay describes the AI System as “a lifelike AI avatar–almost like a hologram, a gentle face”. While the producers certainly made this alteration for budget reasons, that doesn’t explain why the AI System also looks and sounds like an Amazon Alexa. The Last Screenwriter also very much looks like an artificial-intelligence-generated film just because of stylistic choices with the cinematography. Such granular details aren’t in the screenplay. Subconsciously or not, Peter Luisi and the rest of the crew almost certainly made The Last Screenwriter look like an artificial intelligence film just because in 2024 we all have some fairly specific ideas about what that even should mean.

When ChatGPT came up with this script, it was merely copying these cliches. Consequently, like most human writing about artificial intelligence, ChatGPT makes overly generous assumptions about what artificial intelligence can do. This is why the story quickly jumps to Jack just not doing any work at all, yet he still inexplicably has a job as the pointless middleman between management and his artificial intelligence.

This idea of the writer as interlocutor between life and art was perhaps best impressed by Jay Caspian Kang’s December 2022 piece from the New Yorker about trying to use a chatbot to help write his novel. That essay annoyed me when it was new, and still annoys me now, because of its utterly backwards approach to writing. Kang’s problem that he has people out there who want him to write, but he just can’t muster up the necessary energy to actually do it.

This cliche is exceptionally common regarding writing about writers in media. But that’s mainly because writers working at this high a social level are quite beyond using it for what most people do–self-expression. Why does anyone write anything? To express ourselves, is the simple answer. Indeed, the entire social media economy as we know it only works because people are willing if not eager to express themselves into a void with no expectation of compensation.

Artificial intelligence is appealing as an idea to people like Kang because of its seemingly limitless potential beyond the currently existing sea of trash. That’s how he could write and ultimately publish that piece despite clearly realizing by the halfway point that his premise is intrinsically flawed. A computer scientist friend, of all people, explains in the last paragraph that ChatGPT and programs like it can only reproduce the average of its content, and there’s already plenty of mediocre writing in the world.

The Last Screenwriter itself is loaded with contradictions based on these same thinkpiece flaws. Cutting out the screenwriter to save a buck only really makes sense via Hollywood studio logic, because we’re well into our second decade of their trying to run the film industry entirely by brand awareness, a strategy they refuse to back down on despite the fact that it’s obviously failing.

All of which is to say that the main problem with The Last Screenwriter is just the main problem of artificial intelligence discourse as a whole, which doesn’t even take simple ideas like the means of production into account with any of its analysis. Everyone is so obsessed about the prospect of artificial intelligence as a godlike entity they seem entirely incapable of noticing that artificial intelligence, as it exists right now, is incapable of even doing anything as sophisticated as recognizing that revenge films and justice films serve different audiences. This is, incidentally, the only particularly clear clue in ChatGPT’s screenplay about the purported subject of the movies Jack is writing with artificial intelligence.

A lot of The Last Screenwriter is interesting, but only in the sense that it accidentally functions as a commentary on how stories are written. ChatGPT mixes a lot of genres in The Last Screenwriter, and not the ones you’re expecting. It so thinly defines Jack’s wife and kid as characters that sometimes they feel like family members in a biopic that refuse to support the protagonist’s ambitions for reasons that never make much sense, and other times like figments of his imagination. You can say the same for the mentor character, or the best friend character. Jack himself feels real mostly because he’s always on screen, even though the movie always frames him as if he were an artificial intelligence creation. I mainly blame the lighting for that.

In addition to the accidental commentary on modern screenwriting and artificial intelligence discourse, The Last Screenwriter functions surprisingly well as mockable camp. The skeleton cast and crew do their very best to deliver an entirely sincere performance of a script loaded with basic grammatical errors as if it were a work of true art. This, more than any screenplay, is the real human essence of filmmaking.

To the extent artificial intelligence is useful at all in art is mainly in terms of how we interpret it. As hard as The Last Screenwriter tries to credit ChatGPT with the core concept, ultimately, the only reason The Last Screenwriter exists is because the people who made this movie thought they could express themselves with it, making a commentary on our current moment in technology. Without that implied gravitas, The Last Screenwriter is just a silly modern-art project where whatever value there is comes from how humans interpret it, not any particularly revolutionary screenwriting talent on ChatGPT’s part.