Dear Fellow Scholars, this is Two Minute Papers with Dr. Károly Zsolnai-Fehér.
Today we are going to look at the mighty Dramatron, DeepMind’s amazing new AI that writes
screenplays. Yes, you heard it right. And we will also find out whether what it writes is any good.
So, how do we use this? Simple. All we need to do is provide a short, often one-sentence summary of
the dramatic conflict. This is what they call this a log line and this is what goes in. So,
what else goes in? Nothing. So, in goes this one line, and out comes what? Hold on to your papers,
because out comes…can it really be? Out comes everything. The whole play.
Let’s have a look at an example together. Here is the user-provided log line:
“Teddy is a lounge singer at the Pool Pit, a popular club. Teddy is in love with a patron,
Rosie, who attends regularly with her husband Gerald. Teddy puts out a fire and saves the day.”
Yes, this is all we need to do, and now it generates a set of titles for us. Here is one:
“The Day The Pool Pit Burned Down”. From our log line, it also generates a list of
characters and their short descriptions. Also, an outline, here are the first few scenes,
and here is the end with the fire, the resolution, and then, curtains. This is so cool! I love it.
We also get a location description, and of course, the full script of the screenplay as well.
Wow. All this is absolutely remarkable, because this little AI has to write a coherent story,
and when writing something new, take into consideration what happened earlier, you know,
is this character still alive? Where is he? What is his relationship with the others? Now,
only few know that despite these difficulties, learning-based models are already being used to
write short films, so our Scholarly question today is, is Dramatron any good? And we will
answer an even more difficult question, which is, how do we even evaluate such a work?
Well, let’s pop the hood and have a good look! Mmm, I like this! In this user study, scientists
at DeepMind gave this technique to expert screenwriters to evaluate it, and, my favorite:
not just in a sense that is it good or not good, but the paper gives much clearer view of what
is going on. So, what is going on? Well, almost everyone was quite surprised by how good the AI
did, they enjoyed the process a great deal, found the results coming out of this system unique and
get this 77% of them found that this system helped them express their creative goals quite well.
So, what about the other side where it scored much less on? And that is proudness and ownership. I
will quote the paper’s interpretation of this: “more than half of respondents felt they did not
own the result of the AI system. One participant commented that the generated script was only a
starting point provided by the AI and that the writer still needed to create their own script.
One interpretation is that Dramatron is seen by the industry experts not as much as a full
script writing tool but rather as a learning tool to practice writing and a source of inspiration.”
I think this is a perfect encapsulation of these modern AI-based techniques. These are
meant to help humans create something amazing. So, did they create something
amazing? Are these scripts any good? Oh yes! Yes they are! But, see for yourself now.
Here are some comments from the human experts: one of the participants said
that this can be used as a rough draft and needs quite a bit of work,
while another one said that this could be brought to Netflix with just a bit of editing. That is
absolutely incredible. So they felt that these AI+human made works can be brought to the stage.
And so they did. Yes, that’s right, hold on to your papers,
because four screenplays that were co-written by a human and an AI were
found to be good enough to be performed at a real theater festival. How cool is that?
Make sure to have a look at the paper in the video description, because it is a very enjoyable read
and it is a treasure trove of information. For instance, it contains a more detailed breakdown
where you can see the difference between the thoughts of the theater and TV people.
And for now, it seems that we are entering the age of human-AI collaboration. What a time to
be alive! So, what do you think? What would you use this for? Let me know in the comments below!
Thanks for watching and for your generous support, and I'll see you next time!