It appears that my man Paul “Shreddin” Schrader, the greatest screenwriter of all time, has crossed over into the technological abyss. First he discussed his “AI girlfriend”, which, honestly, if you know anything about Schrader, it doesn’t shock me that he had one. But now he has seemingly embarrassed the writing community by embracing AI use in the craft of screenwriting. For neo-Luddites like myself, this is a sad day. Paul might as well have been the last soldier to cross the Rubicon. So the die is cast, folks. It’s now you, me, and the human soul versus Hollywood and the billionaire-technological complex.
Of course my opinions have evolved over time regarding AI. If you recall, my initial reaction to it was kinda ambivalent. To be more precise, I actually found it humorous. I simply chalked it up to a dumb computer program designed to say stupid shit for our amusement exclusively. I never thought that people would use it for legitimate purposes like research, brain storming, and for real and honest creativity. But that’s what The Man wants. They want to slowly chip away at our god-given capacity for reasoning and creative thought. They want to eradicate the soul itself and replace it with a far more malleable software to replace human ingenuity. In short, They want you dumb and under their thumb. Sadly, this was apparent to me when ChatGPT arrived, but I woefully underestimated how aggressively this technology would be promoted and deployed.
The sad part is that even if AI never fully rivals human intelligence, its damage will leave a very real scar. Data centers and their tyrannical demand for land, power, and water will only pile on to the ecological disaster that is the 21st century. So think about that the next time you ask Claude to write a Mad Men script where Don Draper pitches armed robbery while COMMITTING armed robbery. Think about the water you’re wasting.
We, as writers and artists, have a moral imperative to reject artificial intelligence. Save creative integrity. Save the earth. And for god sake, save the human soul.