Welcome to Daily Variety, your daily dose of news and analysis for entertainment industry insiders. It's Thursday, October sixteenth, twenty twenty five. I'm your host, Cynthia Littleton. I am co editor in chief of Variety alongside Ramin Setuda. I'm in La He's in New York, and Variety has reporters around the world covering the business of entertainment. On today's episode, we'll talk with Variety's Gene Modis about his eye opening article on AI being used in the front lines of
creative development, reading and evaluating scripts. Is the script reader rung of the production latter about to go away? Gene unpacks his reporting and we'll conclude our week on the French Riviera with the roundtable with my three Variety colleagues who joined me in covering the mipcom content market, Elskis Lassi, John Hopewell, and Leo Baraclough. Before we get to that, here are a few headlines just in this morning that
you need to know. Warner Brothers Discovery has struck a streaming distribution pact with Korea's cj E and M. There's HBO Max will distribute CJE and m's t ving streaming platform in seventeen markets across Asia Pacific, including Southeast Asia, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. CBS News Head of Standards Claudia Milne has exited amid the shakeup in the division and the arrival of Barry Weiss as editor in chief. My colleague Brian Steinberg has the scoop rip to actor Penelope Milford.
She was so good in nineteen seventy eight's Coming Home, for which she earned an Oscar nomination. She was seventy seven. You can find all of these stories and so much more on Variety dot com. Right now. Now we turn to conversations with Friday journalists about news and trends in show business. Gene, Variety Senior media reporter, has the details about a momentous test that was recently staged by the Editors Guild. Who does the job better AI software or
professional script readers? Gene, Mattis, thank you for joining me.
Happy to be here.
Gene, you have been on a mission to look really deeply at AI and look at concrete ways in which this revolutionary technology is changing the business, and you've delivered us a story this week. It's in the Variety's print edition as well as online, a great, deeply reported story about a very specific use case for AI that definitely involves human activity. Tell us the basic concept of what you wrote about, and tell us what was the spark for you to pursue this story.
And we've been covering AI certainly intensely since the strikes, and the writers and the actors both had their own unique concerns about what could happen if AI came into their domains and started writing script and started acting in movies, right and this I was more interested in this case in what is already happening, not what threats are sitting on the horizon and could be in the future happening,
but what is actually happening now. This one was a really concrete one of what can AI do that we know it can do now today? It can absolutely summarize written material. At everybody who's googled something or looked at chat GPT or asked for a quick summary of something knows that it can do that. And so there are people in Hollywood, obviously who are paid to read scripts and summarize them, who would be at the front lines of people who are impacted by AI if in fact,
that becomes like a standard thing in the industry. So that's what I wanted to look at. What are those folks worried about and what.
Are they doing about it?
What is the specific program or platform that is the focal point of your story.
So there are a few of them, and they're all built sort of on top of the standard lms that everybody knows about, you know, chet GPT or LAMA or CLAUDE that's available. And what these things are is they're very small teams of people three four people who can program and an interface that's geared specifically for screenplays based on those language models. So there's a couple. There's script Sense
is a very popular one. There's one called green Light, there's a Veil, and we talk about Screenplay IQ in the story. But there's a number of these that are out there that are using AI technology specifically to give feedback and notes on screenplays, to summarize screenplays. And that's see exactly what a story analyst in Hollywood does is write a coverage report based on a screenplay and tell the bosses, here's what's in this and here's whether you
should make it or not. And that's what these programs are reporting to do.
The proponents of AI say that the AI tools are going to do the drudge work, the labor intensive stuff that nobody really likes doing but is essential to the process. But here we go right to something that there's no question reading a script is a subjective thing. They're looking for voice and nuance and does a person have a flair for dialogue.
What's interesting is the people who make these platforms, I mean, part of their purpose in making them is they feel like that subjectivity is a problem, right, And wouldn't it be great if there were computers that could objectively analyze whether a script is good or not and then sort of the best ones flow to the top. And so
that was the motivation for creating this particular program. And so the people who are supportive of AI sort of see it as like leveling the playing field, right, opening up opportunities and allowing you to focus on things that you might not have otherwise seen. But the script readers themselves wanted to know, like, what are we up against
and can this thing actually do my job? And so they investigated that and they did a study of it to find out what is the difference between AI generated script coverage and human generated script coverage.
And what did they find, Gene.
It's parallel to what people have found about playing around with AI and many others. When it's tasked with just distilling the content, it does a pretty good job of that. It can write a log line just as well as a human being can write a log line, and maybe better. Right, it doesn't have maybe the idiosyncratic problems that a human
would would introduce. It can summarize, so that's a little bit longer, but it can do a summary that's pretty good, but maybe not as good as a professional script reader doing it, but passable. It's when it gets to notes that the real problem begins and evaluating critically, is this a good script does have something new to say? Is it just regurgitating what we've already seen a thousand times. That's where it just cannot do the job. That's what
they found. Now, obviously this is coming from the point of view of people who do this professionally, but they put it up against human script readers versus all these AI programs that we talked about and matched them across all these different dimensions and found that the notes are where the humans still beat the AI hands down.
Is there any union or any organization out there that is really up in arms about this? On behalf of the platoons of script preaders that work in Hollywood.
Yes, so full time story analysts, I should say that is the term. Full time story analysts are represented by the Editors Guild, which is obviously part of myozzi. Freelance story analysts are not. This study was actually done under the aegis of the Editor's Guild. And what's interesting about that is the Editors Guild is actually pretty pro technology. When you think about editors, you know, these are people who are pretty comfortable with, you know, learning the next
software program. The Writer's Guild is obviously very concerned about any AI touching scripts at any point and certainly need notification if AI is being used to evaluate their scripts. And so as of now, this is not really a thing that's being used in any kind of formal way, certainly at the studios, but independent producers agencies other places,
they are definitely using this kind of thing. The AI companies will tell you that story analysts are using this right now on the sly whether their employer is okay with it or not.
What was your sense of talking to industry executives about the use of this technology and whether they were concerned about a loss of specificity and a loss of finding the absolute gem of a writer. In a specscript, if you.
Talk to the top top people who do story analysis at the studios, they will tell you that the executives really do rely on them and value their input and see it as a vital, essential part of their process and would be pretty unhappy to have that person replaced
by a computer. The concern people have is, you know, to what degree does this become kind of normalized over time, and when a younger generation comes up that has spent their whole school years using AI to help with their studying and help write their college essays or whatever, are those folks going to be much more comfortable with this kind of thing and the way that they do things now will just be completely outmoded. That's that's really the fear.
Well, I think we've probably raised enough nail biting concerns for our industry for one segment. Gene, thanks for your
labor as always, thanks for having me. Now we'll wrap up our coverage of the MIPCOM Content Marketing con with a lively conversation with my three Variety colleagues, Elsa Caslasi International Editor who is based in Paris, John Hopewell, intrepid correspondent and editor of our digital dailies franchise, who is based in Madrid, and Leo Barakloff International Features Director who is based in London. We are all running on fumes after a busy market. But here's our best effort to
make some sense of the week that was. And we all extend our gratitude to mipcom chief Lucy Smith and her staff for treating Team Variety so well. Elsa Gaslasi, John Hopewell and Leo Baraclough. We made it through mip Indeed, yes, as we all call it a wrap. Here today on Thursday October sixteenth, thought it would be fun to go through some questions about things that stood out to us. Appreciate you guys coming to play here. Okay, let me start pretty broad. Most surprising moment of.
The week that I noticed how packed the session with YouTube was. YouTube celebrates his twenty year anniversary this year, and they made their first official presence at Midcom. And you had Pedro Pina, who's the bus of EMEA for YouTube we had a conversation with a BBC studio's executive and the session was packed like no other that I've noticed.
At Midcomb, we had CEO Neil Mohan on the cover in March of this year and really put their twenty year milestone into perspective.
What about you, Leo.
I did a non stage interview with Robbie Brenner, who's the head of Mattel Studios, and she was emphasizing the fact that she wanted the projects to surprise, and certainly one of her projects surprised me because it's a live action movie based on Monster High and the director is going to be Gerard Johnston, who's best known for the horror hit Megan.
Mine was probably how happy people seemed, whilst at the same time Guy Bison for Exauplet at Ampere Analysis was saying we're still at seventy five percent of PEAKTV. In other words, you have one hundred percent production sector spawned by PEAKTV chasing seventy five percent of the market. If it's sunny, people tend to forget that.
For me, the biggest surprise overall was how significant the microdrama business is. I attended a really great presentation from an analyst named Claire Thompson, and the size and scope of this business is impressive, growing in the US. Most surprising single fact you heard. We all moderated panels. We sat through panels. There's a lot of facts and figures talked about. I will start with this one. Back to the microdrama panel. This blew my mind in tracing the
arc of microdramas starting in China in twenty eighteen. The first big audience for them in that timeframe was older people, people ages forty to sixty and completely counterintuitive.
It will be raphalike you've said microdramas. I talked to the people who were making the first microdrama in the Arab world. The revenue this year not in twenty thirty, in twenty twenty five for reach eleven billion dollars, which has already double the size of the revenues for fast channels. That is huge.
What about you, Wilsa.
So for me, the biggest surprise was hearing Marco Bassetti from Banije, which is a company best known for unscripted format you know, like Master Chef. They're actually looking to invest more in movies because Marcos seekings that people are going to get tired of series repeating themselves with the same plots, and so it thinks that there's going to be a growing happetite for movies and he wants to invest more.
Leo, what about you.
The fact that surprised me was in Junior, which is for children's shows, and it's that sixty five percent of eight to eleven year olds have their own social media accountant. Amongst greet of eight year olds, they watch five and a half hours day or more.
All eric most calm moment something funny, you overheard or observed, something that would only happen in Can.
So for me, the most Can moment was having a great launch on the beach with Cheryl l Azar, who hosted the Digital up Fronts this year. And then I saw Carolyn Benjo, my great friend, a great producer from Friends, who actually was on the co production panel that she hosted Cynthia, and it was so you know, interesting to have a French producer and an American digital creator Shira. You know, it was like the best of both worlds coming together on the beach in Cahn.
Yes, she was so impressive. John, you are definitely a veteran of the cosset this time around. What was your most can moment.
It's seeing people who know they're on to a great deal. A company called Scene based in the Lebanon Rotana Media, which is one of the biggest studios in the Arab world, presenting that they were going to create the first late ever of microdramas in the Arab world, and they knew, you could see it from their faces of the press conference. They knew that they were going to make a proverbial package.
I'm going to stretch your definition a little bit because last night I went on a set visit to a town down the coast called Casis, beautiful town, and that there's a German production being shot there, a series called West End Girl, and I met the cast and crew, and one of them, Lucas Gogorowitz, is very well known in Germany. He's in the German version of My Agent. For example, he happens to know someone I lived with while I was at the university, and I haven't seen
for decades. So that one of those kind of moments where paths cross that you didn't expect.
That segues nicely into mine, which was I could not believe I ran into Paul Siegel, who was in his mid eighties now, and he was the owner of a little company called All American, which gave the world Baywatch. He and his brother sold All American thirty years ago, but he's still in the business. He owns an animation company in Mumbai. Because I think media entrepreneurs, I think
they have trouble stopping. Last one biggest questions you have leaving this market, what concepts, what stories are you going to chase?
You know, I'm just wondering about the future of the creator economy and if we're going to see another platform as powerful as YouTube emerging in the future, because right now YouTube is in a very dominant position. And also if that creator economy is really there to stay or if it's a phase.
I will say that I have been extremely skeptical of when this world of creators and social media video, when would it amount to a real business for professional, high end content producers. And I do think that moment is coming. There's a whole world of AI and marketing and branding infrastructure around the creator economy. John, what's the big idea, the big concept that you're going to be thinking about.
I think business models which really monetize the collaboration which you now see from the old economy and seen new economy for example, and YouTube.
What about you, Leo.
My question is where is the next big, huge unscripted format can come from? Because a lot of the legacy formats like Got Talent, Idol, the family Feud, the price is right, they are decades old. And so where's the next one coming from? I mean, okay, You've got Traitors, which is fantastic, and Fremantle have something called Pandora's Box which they hope will be us Helper, which is owned
by John Demole. They've got something called The Floor which is now in thirty territories, and ZEP so that is succeeding. But these things are around.
John de mall is a Paul Siegel type. I think he's easily on his fourth or fifth company of the last twenty five years or so. Well, listen, all three of you have worked really hard. Thank you for killing it. I hope you worked in some good meals along the way.
We did have some great meals. Yes always.
Again, as we close out today's episode, here's a few things we're watching. Its Power of Women's season again for Variety We're getting ready to celebrate this year's West Coast honorees at an event October thirtieth and Beverly Hills. Our annual issue will be published October twenty ninth. As ever, we will have five gorgeous covers, one for each of our honorees Jamie Lee Curtis, Kate Hudson, Nicole Scherzinger, Sidney Sweeney,
and Wanda Sykes. Stay tuned before we go. Congrats to Yoshinaga Sayuri, the legendary Japanese actress, will receive Lifetime Achievement honors from the Tokyo International Film Festival. That festival runs October twenty seventh through November fifth. Thanks for listening. This episode was written and reported by me Cynthia Littleton, with contribution from Gene Maddis, Elsi Caslasi, John Hopewell, and Leo Baraclough.
Stick's Next Hick Picks. Please leave us a review with the podcast platform of your choice, and please tune in Monday for another episode of Daily Variety. La Belle Franz to MOUs Monc. Somewhere Louis B. Mayer is going, how did I not think of this? We'll give him one minute. At a time and charge him to keep going