Last month, by pure chance, I found myself being interviewed by an ad agency based in San Francisco. One twist though: it wasn’t a conventional agency, but an AI-powered one. Which meant they were looking for a scriptwriter for ads created entirely with AI tools. No set. No shots. Just you, the writer, and then an editor who would stitch all the generated images together.
It didn’t work out in the end, but the experience sent me down a rabbit hole of AI image tools. I started experimenting, hopping from one platform to another. I would describe what I imagined to one tool, get a refined prompt from there, and paste it into the next. You rinse and repeat, over and over, just to reach something that vaguely resembles what’s in your mind.
Generating an image out of words alone, and not needing a whole crew for it? At first, it sounded like every screenwriter’s dream. But as time went on, it started to feel more like fast food: highly processed, instantly gratifying, and not exactly nourishing.
Did I want to try everything on the menu? Sure. Was it cheaper and faster than the real thing? Oh, absolutely. They even looked great, I mean, if you didn’t look too closely. But probably not that good for my creative health in the long run. Because I believe the process of creating affects the outcome. The shortcuts we think we’ve cleverly found often drain the life out of what we make.
Around the same time, Series Mania Institute hosted a short webinar about their upcoming AI Storytelling Bootcamp, which I joined out of curiosity. And they are not the only ones. I keep seeing creative people experimenting with AI and I’ll probably end up doing the same from time to time, given my complicated relationship with junk food (and other things that aren’t necessarily good for me).
But still, I can’t help wondering: as we eagerly (or not so eagerly) bring AI tools into our creative process, what are we slowly turning into? A character from a dystopian Kafka novel, perhaps? Like this: As a screenwriter awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, she found herself transformed into a prompt-writer.
P.S.: Jokes on me: I chose this image over the AI-generated ones. It actually belongs to Laura Vazquez.
A Screenwriter’s Journey 
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