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Tim Smithers's avatar

You say, Derek ...

"In conclusion: AI is an excellent editorial assistant, and

occasional professional mentor, in formatting screenplays

once you already understand the basics."

No! I don't think ChatGPT is "an excellent editorial

assistant, and occasional professional mentor," but, from your

brief illustration and explanations, it may be, for you, a

useful aid in "... formatting screenplays once you already

understand the basics."

ChatGPT did not bring to the work you describe the knowledge,

understanding, reasoning, experience, and skills, of a

professional editorial assistant. It didn't do this because

ChatGPT doesn't have any of these things, none! It just looks

and feels like it does to you. But this is an hallucination;

an hallucination you have, not ChatGPT. ChatGPT doesn't have

hallucinations. It uses a massive statistical model to

generate stuff that is close, but not necessarily correct or

truthful, to forms and patterns in the [ginormous amount of]

data it is programmed with in its construction.

What I think really happened here is that you used ChatGPT,

which can generate sufficiently good screenplay formatting in

your judgement, as a kind of mirror which reflects back to you

in certain [strangely] changed and distorted ways what you

present to it. And it proved to be useful to you in what you

were doing because it can make changes and distortions in how

it reflects things back to you of a kind you can't [easily]

do, but which directly aid you in doing what you're trying to

do, and, in particular, which aid your thinking and reasoning

as you do it.

We use other common [computational] tools like this; a

Spreadsheet App, for example. We use a Spreadsheet App to

tabulate some data in a neat and tidy and visually accessible

way, to see things in our data, which results in us changing

our tabulation and presentation, allowing us see other things.

And we can get this App to do things for us we can't do, or

which would be difficult for us to do, like calculate some

useful statistics on the tabulated data, and to make graphical

presentations of these statistics, again, helping us to see

and understand more about the data we have tabulated. It's a

conversation with ourself, aided by -- indeed, made possible

by -- the Spreadsheet App. We've been doing this kind of

cognitive working for thousands of years, in writing, in

drawings and sketching, in making, in improvising, in playing.

They all aid us in sustaining useful and effective

conversations with ourselves as we work out how to do

something. ChatGPT is another aid to doing this common kind

of talking-to-ourself working.

So, I would say, in working on your screenplay script you

usefully, and successfully, in your judgement, used ChatGPT to

have a useful thought and reasoning provoking conversation

with yourself on what you were doing, as you worked on and

formatted your script. It's good stuff. ChatGPT was

important in making this useful talking-to-yourself work

happen, but the only intelligence present in all this, of any

kind, was yours. There's none in ChatGPT. To think there is

is to fool ourselves, and to then misrepresent to others what

ChatGPT is and does.

-- Tim

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Dr. Derek B. Miller's avatar

You wrote: "ChatGPT did not bring to the work you describe the knowledge,

understanding, reasoning, experience, and skills, of a professional editorial assistant."

No. It brought formatting. Like Clippy used to do. That made it a tool and a useful one: a tool that can help turn the screenplay from a good story to a professional product.

It is … beyond my understanding why you would choose to try and get your argument across by telling me I'm "hallucinating." I'm clearly not. I'm a practitioner of an art using a tool, and — having a bit of analytical background — I'm reflecting on practice. There are not many people who have both the artistic and scholastic background to do that, and fewer still so inclined.

The point here is to WATCH and LISTEN to a practitioner using a new tool. It doesn't matter to me how it works. It matters to me how writers will use it and experience it and engage with it. People need roadmaps and breadcrumbs and observations and direction. Eventually, we will ALL need archives into the evolution of AI's integration into the creation of drama because drama is what teaches and entertains and how that drama is being created matters.

You write: "ChatGPT is another aid to doing this common kind of talking-to-ourself working."

So what? It works differently and does something else. So it's worth understanding that difference. Obviously. Whether it is "intelligent" or not is irrelevant.

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