Main content

Succession writer: “I’m pretty worried” about A.I.

Lucy Prebble says A.I. presents a threat to screenwriters and is already being used

Acclaimed British playwright and screenwriter Lucy Prebble says she’s “pretty worried” about entertainment companies using A.I. to replace the work of writers. Speaking to the 鶹ҳ’s HARDtalk programme, Prebble said: “I do think it is worrying…It is a cost saving exercise and I do believe they are already doing things like cutting trailers quietly with A.I.”

Prebble, whose writing credits include Succession and I Hate Suzie on television, and Enron and A Very Expensive Poison in the theatre, told Stephen Sackur that A.I. presents big copyright issues. She said she had experimented with basic A.I. by asking it to ‘write in the style of Lucy Prebble’. “You recognise what it’s drawing from” she said. “It isn’t necessarily of a high quality…but I’m reading them and I’m thinking ‘ok so you are drawing on material that’s available from me’ so there’s a copyright issue there that’s rarely discussed”.

Most concerning, warned Prebble, is that “it may not be sophisticated yet but it will be one day. Really sophisticated”.

The Writers Guild of America – which represents 11,500 screenwriters – has been on strike since May this year, over an ongoing labour dispute with the studios and streamers. The strike is in part over concern about the use of A.I.

But the multiple award-winning Prebble, whose play The Effect is currently running at the National Theatre in London, is optimistic that audiences will be able to tell a difference between work created by humans versus A.I. “There’s something about art that means that human beings are more affected the more effort they know has gone in to something” she said. “If A.I. was generating content in the way that they wanted it to, it would actually be less emotionally valuable to people. As long as they knew A.I. was creating it”. And she said that “studios and streamers don’t realise….that audiences will respond” differently.

Release date:

Duration:

2 minutes