When London’s legendary Prince Charles Cinema advertised a screening of Peter Luisi’s ‘The Last Screenwriter’, billed as ‘the first feature length film entirely written by AI’, the backlash was immediate – and fierce. After 200 online complaints and outrage from film critics on social media, the programmers announced it was cancelling the privately booked, publicly accessible screening, scheduled for the evening of June 23. ‘The feedback we received highlighted the strong concern held by many of our audience on the use of AI in place of a writer which speaks to a wider issue within the industry,’ a cinema spokesperson said.
The announcement acknowledged the film’s experimental nature and its ambition to ‘engage in the discussion about AI and its negative impact on the arts’, but the screening was shelved. Films being pilloried sight-unseen is hardly a new phenomenon: the BBFC famously received hundreds of complaints prior to the release of Martin Scorsese’s ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’, but not a single one afterwards. Pushback against the encroachment of AI into filmmaking, however, tends to be about the protection of artists’ livelihoods, rather than morality.
Marvel endured a backlash for its deployment of AI in the title sequence of Nick Fury-led Disney+ series ‘Secret Invasion’, as did this year’s Late Night with the Devil’ , a horror film that included AI-generated art. The use of AI in screenwriting was a key plank of last yea.
