AI Goes Hollywood Inside the Writers’ Room
With David Brownfield, Eleven Canterbury Consultant, Writer & TV Producer and Dan Martin, Eleven Canterbury Program and Relationship Manager
Summary
Can AI really hold a seat in Hollywood’s writers’ rooms, or is the magic still human?
In this episode of Conversations with the Experts, veteran TV producer and writer David Brownfield pulls back the curtain on how artificial intelligence is influencing the future of storytelling. From the lonely grind of writing solo to the collaborative buzz of the writers’ room, David explores where AI can truly help, and where it still misses the mark, especially when it comes to sharp dialogue and authentic humor.
He also takes us inside the dramatic shifts that reshaped television writing during the pandemic, as bustling in-person rooms gave way to remote collaboration, forever changing the way stories are crafted. With optimism and a critical eye, David unpacks the pros and cons of weaving AI into the creative process and reminds us why the spark of human imagination remains irreplaceable.
If you’re fascinated by Hollywood, curious about AI, or passionate about the future of storytelling, this conversation offers a smart and thought-provoking look at where technology meets creativity.
Transcript
Dan Martin: Welcome to another edition of Conversations with the Experts from Eleven Canterbury. It’s a real pleasure today to be speaking with David Brownfield. He’s been a producer and executive producer with several organizations in the TV field, including CBS and Dick Wolf Productions. He’s done some writing, and I think you said sports, news, and comedy, right? And I think if I look at the way things are happening, news and comedy might be fairly close to each other. He’s now working with children, spending a lot of time with the nonprofit with writing for children, right? Helping children learn to write.
We’re going to talk about AI and the impact it’s had on the writing profession today. I use AI a bit to help me become more efficient. I use it as a much smarter Google. It’s able to do some really bright things, but it can also do some really monumentally stupid things.
I find it hard to believe, but I’m wondering how it can help in something so creative as writing for other people? Does, does it have a purpose?
David Brownfield: Yeah, I definitely think it has a purpose. And I also think that for most people, writing is a solitary pursuit.
If you’re lucky enough to be employed and working on a show or even working with a partner, you have someone to bounce things back and forth with and get ideas from multiple sources. If you’re writing alone, you are basically in your own mind. And for some writers, that can be a good place. And some writers, it could be not such a good place.
Where my friends are using AI who are writing solo, they’re using it in terms of helping to bounce ideas off of or to come up with. The more specific they can be with AI, the better the results are going to be. So, for example, if you’re talking about five different ways to kill someone within 30 minutes, that’s a very specific thing for someone who’s writing a procedural. If you give AI that sort of direction, you’re going to get a much better result than saying, Hey, I need an act break. Give me one. You’re not going to get much. So I think the more specific you can be when it comes to helping come up with a story or break a story, the better off you are, which is probably true about a lot of fields.
Conversely, if you are taking something and asking AI to write specific dialogue, then I think you’re going to get a weaker result. And more and more, interestingly enough, from my friends, I hear AI being used, the more obvious it is when something’s coming from a computer or something’s coming from your own head.
Dan Martin: I’ve seen that. I may have talked before about my son who’s a college professor seeing a lot of essays written by AI, and he said it’s very easy to pick it out. When I think of the writing process, particularly for TV, I think of the Dick Van Dyke show and a team of writers writing comedy and, Maury Amsterdam and Sally and Dick.
Is that what happens? How does AI affect that?
David Brownfield: Well, I mean, television writing in terms of on series, if you’re on staff, changed dramatically with COVID because prior to COVID writers came into, most writers came into an office every day. Certainly, if you were writing on a comedy, you were in a room full of people who were hopefully not only making the script make more sense, but also making the script funnier. You would, more often than not, if you’re on the staff of a show, come in and work what would be considered to be a normal workday, and you’d have a writer’s room of anywhere from, I don’t know, six to as many as 12. The big ones had 15 people. For dramas, it was somewhat similar. The rooms might be a little bit smaller. There were certain shows where writers would come in, and maybe have a room in person to break the big arcs of the season, but then they would do individual work, but they would still come in and come into an office.
So not as much group writing as on a comedy, but still going in. With COVID, obviously, the business shut down and writer’s rooms kind of have, I’m not gonna say completely become a thing of the past, but there are far more shows that are doing remote rooms, Zoom rooms, than there are in-person rooms.
So that Dick Van Dyke example that you used, on top of being in black and white, is even more of a dinosaur now because Zoom certainly, I think there’s pros and cons with Zoom, but it definitely made things more efficient in terms of the work being done. It is also cost-effective because you don’t have to rent physical space, feed writers, and pay for their parking when they come in. So, the idea of writers going into a room and actually hashing things out and talking about their weekends and turning that into stories is really becoming few and far between.
Dan Martin: Yeah, it’s kind of interesting when COVID hit and I talked to some people in businesses where everybody was working remotely, one of the things that stuck with me is people said, it’s kind of interesting, it has really dramatically increased our efficiency doing it this way, but it has decreased innovation because we don’t have the kind of serendipitous meetings with people. Somebody was telling me that Bell Labs had designed their buildings to force people from different departments to take long walks to get to the canteen for lunch just so that people could talk. So, that may have fallen by the wayside here with AI and COVID together. It’s a sort of a double whammy.
David Brownfield: Yeah, I would agree with you. I mean, COVID certainly started it. There’s definitely much less camaraderie that is built when you are not in a writer’s room with other people.
There’s no question that there’s a lot of time wasted. But I think overall the working relationship is stronger if you are in person than if you’re on screens, where there are ample distractions.
Writers are notoriously solitary people, so the idea that you have a camera stuck in your face the entire time you’re working is kind of antithetical. But like I said, I think that there is greater room for misunderstandings. There is greater room for resentments building up, and I just think because it’s hard to sit still when you’ve got a camera in your face, as opposed to if you’re in a writer’s room, you can get up, move around.
A lot of writers are thinking about ideas while the rest of the group is talking, and then they’ll say something. That’s less fun to do when you’ve got, like I said, again, when you’re being watched. But coming out of that, I think AI is kind of like a natural source for writers to go to, because even if you were writing alone, because I know sometimes at these offices where writers would come in and you’d be stuck on something, you’d be stuck on a plot point, you’d be stuck on a line for a character. More often than not, you’d get up and you’d go into the office next door and you’d talk about it with someone. You might talk about it with the showrunner, but you might also talk about it with somebody else. That’s gone.
So, where AI is incredibly useful for someone is to sit there again, the more specific you can be, the better. And I think in some ways it’s more useful when it comes to plot points than it is to actual humor. I don’t think many comedy writers are relying heavily on AI, and I think if they are, it’s pretty obvious. I see AI as a great resource in terms of doing things that both colleagues and writer’s assistants used to do.
Dan Martin: I agree with you on comedy. I find it difficult to see how AI could do that.
What you’re saying may also create an environment, a risk-averse environment where you tend to do things that follow a formula and get something really new is going to be more difficult because, if you’re doing it on your own, not with a group, I guess.
David Brownfield: I mean, I don’t know if that’s necessarily, fairly the case, I think, that to me feels less about AI and more about the contraction of the entertainment business. So there’s less money that people want to spend, so they want to use their money on something that they know has worked at least somewhat in the past.
I always used to say, that with some of our shows when I was at CBS, it’s like you want to give people 75% comfort food and then you want to give 25% of a bend so they know they’re in good hands. But they’re also seeing something they haven’t seen before. I’m not sure that that’s become that much different as a result of AI.
I think ultimately, great content will become maybe even easier to spot because people have leaned too heavily on AI. But I feel like, and writers are fighting against this, the more you educate AI, the more films AI watches, the more scripts that are fed into AI, somehow, the more obsolete writers are going to be. And I think that’s true to a certain degree, but I don’t think it’s going to eradicate real quality work because I think when something is real high quality, unique, and is going for something that obviously you haven’t seen before, I think that’s the work of a human being. That’s not something that AI, I think is ever going to be able to replace.
Dan Martin: I think we’re in the early stages of AI.
David Brownfield: No question.
Dan Martin: And I think about, when I got my first cell phone, I used it basically to call my wife if I was going to be late on the way home because there was a traffic jam on the highway. And now I use it for everything.
I think there are some exciting times ahead of us with AI. And maybe we can follow up with another conversation as things develop.
David Brownfield: That would be great. That would be great. Love to.
