Co-Writing Screenplays and Theatre Scripts with Language Models: An Evaluation by Industry Professionals
Language models are increasingly attracting interest from writers. However,
such models lack long-range semantic coherence, limiting their usefulness for
longform creative writing. We address this limitation by applying language
models hierarchically, in a system we call Dramatron. By building structural
context via prompt chaining, Dramatron can generate coherent scripts and
screenplays complete with title, characters, story beats, location
descriptions, and dialogue. We illustrate Dramatron's usefulness as an
interactive co-creative system with a user study of 15 theatre and film
industry professionals. Participants co-wrote theatre scripts and screenplays
with Dramatron and engaged in open-ended interviews. We report critical
reflections both from our interviewees and from independent reviewers who
watched stagings of the works to illustrate how both Dramatron and hierarchical
text generation could be useful for human-machine co-creativity. Finally, we
discuss the suitability of Dramatron for co-creativity, ethical considerations
-- including plagiarism and bias -- and participatory models for the design and
deployment of such tools.