Understanding Screenwriters' Practices, Attitudes, and Future Expectations in Human-AI Co-Creation

TL;DR

This study investigates how screenwriters currently integrate AI into their workflows, how they feel about AI's impact, and what they expect from future AI tools. Using in-depth interviews with 23 screenwriters, the authors identify a nonlinear six-stage workflow and reveal that AI is already used most in story structure, plot development, screenplay text, and dialogue, with mixed satisfaction due to limitations in coherence and emotional understanding. They articulate four future roles for AI — actor, audience, expert, and executor — and outline design opportunities across model development and interaction design to enhance emotional intelligence and multimodal generation while preserving creative agency and authorial identity. The findings offer practical design guidance for AI tools that support divergent thinking, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and transparent attribution, with implications for workflow, education, and policy in human-AI co-creation in screenwriting.

Abstract

With the rise of AI technologies and their growing influence in the screenwriting field, understanding the opportunities and concerns related to AI's role in screenwriting is essential for enhancing human-AI co-creation. Through semi-structured interviews with 23 screenwriters, we explored their creative practices, attitudes, and expectations in collaborating with AI for screenwriting. Based on participants' responses, we identified the key stages in which they commonly integrated AI, including story structure & plot development, screenplay text, goal & idea generation, and dialogue. Then, we examined how different attitudes toward AI integration influence screenwriters' practices across various workflow stages and their broader impact on the industry. Additionally, we categorized their expected assistance using four distinct roles of AI: actor, audience, expert, and executor. Our findings provide insights into AI's impact on screenwriting practices and offer suggestions on how AI can benefit the future of screenwriting.

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: Overview of This Study’s Findings. This figure summarizes the three themes aligned with the research questions: existing practices, attitudes toward AI integration, and future expectations for AI, including nine sub-themes and key findings.
• Figure 2: A Common Screenwriting Workflow Summarized from 23 Participants. The six blue blocks represent common stages in the nonlinear workflow, without a specific order. The detailed workflows are provided in the supplementary material.
• Figure 3: The Three Categories of Screenwriter Engagement with AI Actors