Remember the writer’s strike that stalled Hollywood for a whole summer and then some? Yeah, well,apparently those demands didn’t pan out the way writers, and everyone really, had hoped. After hearing from a screenwriter who had seen scripts closely resembling iconic films likeThe Godfather, writer and programmer Alex Reisner got to digging through a massive data set used to train AI, which he saw in papers about various large language models (LLMs). In a recent article forThe Atlantic, Reisner exposed the AI data set to have been trained by more than 53,000 movie scripts and 85,000 TV episode scripts, including scripts fromThe Simpsons, Twin Peaks,The Sopranos, andBreaking Bad.
Reisner reported that the AI-training data set, used by companies like Apple, Anthropic, Meta, Nvidia, Salesforce, Bloomberg, and others,includes writing from all Best Picture-nominated films from 1950 to 2016.Not only does it include scripts of every episode of shows likeThe Wire, but the data set alsocontains dialogue written in advance for broadcasts like the Golden Globes and Academy Awards.Nothing is safe from the AI machine.
After Reisner brought the public’s attention to the countless pieces of writing used to train LLMs, writers and media fans everywhere were outraged. Some fans and screenwriters began to dive deeper to see just how much these LLMs have to work off of. And it’s a lot.
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Many writers are shocked and revolted to learn that their past works have been used to train something that they fear will replace them in the future.Teen Titans’writer David Slack toldThe Anklerthat he was furious to find 42 of his scripts in the database, including those forPerson of Interest,Lie to Me,andIn Plain Sight.
“I’m livid. I’m completely outraged. It’s disgusting. It’s a huge amount of my work . . . These are things that I poured my heart and soul into.” - David Slack via The Ankler
Writers are being abused by the entertainment industry daily with little to no residuals for their published work. But now they’ve been disrespected on perhaps the greatest level of all. Writers won’t forget this massive overstep from LLM training, and neither will audiences. There is still clearly plenty of work to do to ensure the future of the industry is safe from the emergence of AI.
you may find the database search toolhere. The odds are that you will find your favorite piece of media there.
