Alphabet’s AI offshoot DeepMind has created an AI tool called Dramatron that can help co-write scripts, generating things like plot points, character and location descriptions and dialogue. While a human will still need to manage the process by editing and rewriting Dramatron’s suggestions, the app is designed to make the screenwriting process faster and easier. To deploy Dramatron, users will need an OpenAI API key and, ideally, a Perspective API key to minimize the risk of “offensive text.” In addition to AI researchers, DeepMind tested the tool with 15 playwrights and screenwriters who used it to co-write scripts.

Consensus among the creatives is that while they would not use Dramatron to craft a screenplay from scratch, it was useful for “inspiration, world building” and exploring plot twists or fleshing-out characters, according to a paper presented last week by DeepMind and Stanford University.

“Think of it like ChatGPT, but with output that you can edit into a blockbuster movie script,” Engadget reports, referencing OpenAI’s new chatbot.

Use of tools such as Dramtron may raise legal issues “about authorship and who (or what) should get the credit for a script,” writes Engadget, noting that “last year, a UK appeals court ruled that artificial intelligence can’t be legally credited as an inventor on a patent.”

DeepMind says Dramatron can “output fragments of text that were used to train the language model, which, if used in a script that was produced, could lead to accusations of plagiarism,” Engadget points out, citing a legal point that has been raised with regard to AI image generators (as explored by The Verge).

Engadget suggests humans co-writing with AI “search for substrings from outputs to help to identify plagiarism.”

While language models are “increasingly attracting interest from writers,” DeepMind says, AI tools currently have “limited usefulness for long form creative writing because they lack long-range semantic coherence,” a limitation the company has addressed “by applying language models hierarchically.”

Dramatron has already been used to stage “Plays by Bots,” DeepMind notes in its backgrounder. “Hierarchical generation of stories can produce an entire script — sometimes tens of thousands of words — from a single user-provided summary of the central dramatic conflict, called the logline,” DeepMind explains in its paper.

“From the input logline, Dramatron can generate an entire script with a title, list of characters, a plot (i.e. a list of scene summaries with settings and beats), location descriptions, and dialogue.

In this way, the human interactively co-writes the script,” says DeepMind, adding that “our methods can be used with any LLMs that accept an input prompt and then predict which tokens come next.”