In fall of 2022, when OpenAI released ChatGPT to the general public, Justin Trevor Winters was intrigued. A screenwriter and professor at Loyola Marymount University, he saw the potential of large language models to help with research and brainstorming.
He was pitching a reimagining of the “Popeye the Sailor Man” comic strip that he had developed with his creative partner Mixa Martinez. It was set in 1930s Prohibition-era Florida and told through the point of view of Olive Oyl, a second-generation Afro-Cuban. Struggling to get the logline right, he wondered what would happen if he uploaded some of his screenwriting lectures to guide the AI to help him.
Within an hour, he landed on his elusive logline, and within a few weeks, the project sold.
He immediately shared the technology with his students. They were toiling away on their own lackluster loglines, and Winters thought ChatGPT might help them.
“It wasn’t like, all of a sudden, the students became amazing screenwriters,” he said. “But what I found was there were stronger concepts and stronger loglines because of it, and my students were excited about the results.”
But less than a year later, Winters was on the SAG-AFTRA and Writers Guild of America picket lines during Hollywood’s dual strikes, surrounded by signs about how AI was destroying creativity and causing job losses.
“My students, who I had been teaching all this technology to, were now confused,” he said. “They were like, ‘We don’t understand. Now the industry is telling us we can’t use it.’”
Fast forward four years, and generative AI has infiltrated email, note-taking apps, editing software and even screenwriting platforms. Though AI remains a polarizing topic in Hollywood, driven by serious concerns about job displacement, it has become an undeniable presence in modern writing and filmmaking.
Dara Resnik — a writer whose credits include “Pushing Daisies,” “Castle,” “Jane the Virgin” and “Daredevil” — wrote a Substack earlier this year titled “Everyone Is Lying: Including Me.” It was a confession of an industry veteran who “quietly and effectively” uses AI.
“The uncomfortable reality is that usage is pervasive, and most people know it and are scared to name it. It’s time to name it.”
“A lot of people eviscerated me for that Substack,” she told The Times. “Many also applauded and said, ‘Yay, I’m glad someone’s saying it.’”
Resnik, who teaches at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, has set her own boundaries and won’t use AI for work she’s hired to produce. But if she’s developing her own projects, she’ll, for example, use it to ideate medical scenarios that she’ll later fact-check with physicians. She’ll use it to brainstorm at 1 a.m. when she can’t confer with writer friends.
“The more we don’t talk about AI, the more people are going to use it unethically,” she said.
Hollywood companies are already actively integrating AI into their production pipelines. Earlier this year, Netflix bought Ben Affleck’s AI company, InterPositive, and reported that roughly 300 of the streamer’s programs have used generative AI in their production process this year. The 2026 Disney Accelerator has backed five AI startups to help drive technological innovations. Google has invested in indie movie studio A24 to develop AI-powered technologies for filmmakers.
Top film schools have been teaching AI classes for at least a couple of years. NYU’s Martin Scorsese Virtual Production Center hosts a six-week AI for Visual Storytelling workshop. USC has an AI for Media & Storytelling initiative that explores the impact of generative AI on journalism and cinema.
Winters, who teaches LMU’s popular “Producing and Screenwriting With AI” course, is working toward creating a new department called Creative Technology and Innovation, with the goal of launching in fall 2027.
While it can seem like a daunting time for students to enter an industry grappling with contraction and AI-driven shifts, many educators who have embraced AI remain optimistic. They choose to focus on the emerging opportunities for the next generation of talent.
“At some point, previous versions of ourselves who went to film school benefited from the paternalistic model that you just had to find your place in the machine,” said Fred Grinstein, who teaches cinematic AI at USC and Chapman University.
“It was about paying your dues. … It often meant sitting at the right fancy person’s desk in Hollywood. Knowing the right people, waiting at the right tables. It often meant nepotism. There were all these things that made up the system that weren’t great.”
“We love to gatekeep in Hollywood,” Resnick wrote in her Substack post. “We like to think we’re the special few. But storytelling is human instinct, not a credential. AI is one more way for people who don’t live in L.A., don’t have access to great teachers, don’t have time to dedicate themselves entirely to craft because they have to earn a living — to learn to write and present better.”
That’s not to say that she isn’t worried about the growing warnings that AI could put humanity at risk. But she acknowledges that people are going to keep using it and the ones who don’t will have a hard time keeping up in the hyper-competitive entertainment industry.
Grinstein recalls working on a screenplay with his co-writer and using Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant, to generate initial drafts for them to edit and refine. After feeding the AI a 50-page research document and transcripts of their Zoom brainstorming sessions, re-prompting and polishing, they were struck by a particularly poignant flashback scene in the output — one neither of them had written, even though the story was based on his co-writer’s life.
“I think a lot of people calm themselves down, saying it’s just a tool,” said Grinstein, who is also the co-founder of the AI filmmaking community Machine Cinema. “But you’re not letting your imagination run wild enough by [merely] calling it a tool.”
AI is an active collaborator, he said. It helped them process their discussions and ultimately shape their creative vision.
But there still needs to be a foundation of original ideas, critical thinking and refined taste for the AI to build upon, the experts all emphasize. Though industry veterans can leverage AI to accelerate their already-established workflows, what about the writers who are just starting out?
Clayton Colmon, director of curriculum design for online learning at University of Pennsylvania’s School of Arts & Sciences, studies how emergent technologies influence traditional practices of writing and research. He teaches a summer high school program offered by the university called “Writing & Research in the Age of AI Academy.”
His goal is to teach students to develop their own creative processes, so they can filter through generative AI content with awareness, discernment and critical thinking, rather than using it as a passive shortcut.
He wants them to understand that the hours of mundane practice and the drudgery of sorting through the unknown is often what breeds meaningful art. Relying on AI too early in the creative cycle can prevent beginners from finding their unique point of view, he said, since AI can often flatten distinct voices into generic storytelling.
“Intelligence is: How do I notice a thing and how do I articulate what I notice?” he said. “But wisdom is knowing when and how to hone it. How to practice it, how to reflect, how to revise when you get new information. What directions to run in, what to do in the long term and how might this impact the world around me.
“We often have an abundance of intelligence, but not as much wisdom,” he said.
Winters, who created online film school Curious Refuge’s 54-lecture AI screenwriting course, knows that some take the class hoping he’ll unveil a magical AI tool that’s going to turn them into talented screenwriters.
“I tell them from the very beginning, this is 80 to 90% craft,” he said. “You are basically taking a normal screenwriting course I usually teach, but I’m going to give you 10% that will be your superpower, once you’ve understood the craft and mastered it.”
Shortly after he first experimented with large language models to write loglines, he started using Midjourney, the text-to-image AI generator, to help create pitch decks. “I can take an actor that I have envisioned for this role that’s set in the 1920s, put her in exactly the outfit and wardrobe and location that I want,” he explained.
When he shared this tool with his students, he immediately saw a higher production value in their pitch decks.
“If you want to work in ‘show business,’ the show is creative and the business is the business,” he said. “You have to master both in order to find success. … Master the craft of writing and master the craft of pitch decks, visuals, pitches, meetings, branding and dealing with the s— show of Hollywood.”
AI has opened doors for his students, helping them secure meetings and make connections that might otherwise have been out of reach.
He rattles off numerous anecdotes from the last two years of teaching “Producing and Screenwriting With AI.” One of his students used generative AI tools to create an animated short, which led to multiple industry meetings and job offers. Another who knew nothing about AI left the 15-week class with a short film that got him hired immediately upon graduation.
Grinstein sees an irony in the fact that screenwriters often feel most vulnerable to the rise of AI. He believes writers who are open to expanding their skill set across the entire production pipeline will find themselves remarkably empowered. That includes doing your due diligence to understand union regulations and how to protect your intellectual property.
“You, as the writer, if you want it, don’t have to wait for someone to make a reel of your script,” he said. “You don’t have to wait for a director to come on board. You’ve never been more empowered to be a writer-director in terms of the way these tools can pre-visualize for you.”
Hollywood, and the way we tell stories, is being upended at its core, he said.
“I think this is a time to lean in, experiment, wonder out loud, maybe even enjoy how crazy this life of creativity can be.”
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