Generative Storytelling: The Role of the Screenwriter in the Era of ChatGPT

Citation: Zelenov Dmytro, "Generative Storytelling: The Role of the Screenwriter in the Era of ChatGPT", Universal Library of Innovative Research and Studies, Volume 02, Issue 03.

Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Something shifts when a writer opens a blank document and types a prompt instead of a first line. The scene still needs to be written - but the question of who is writing it has become genuinely unclear. A writer who spends an afternoon cycling through ChatGPT’s suggestions for a confrontation scene is not simply using a tool; they are negotiating with a system that has read more scripts than any human reader could, and that has no particular investment in what the scene means. That negotiation leaves traces. Writers report noticing their own defaults more sharply - the conflict structures they reach for, the rhythm they fall into, the kinds of emotional resolution they apparently find satisfying. The tool makes visible what habitual writing keeps hidden. This article looks at what happens to screenwriting when generative AI becomes part of the room. It draws on research published between 2023 and 2025 - across law, cognitive science, and creative practice - not to settle the question of whether algorithms can be creative, but to ask a narrower and more useful one: what does a screenwriter actually do that the algorithm cannot, and does working alongside one change how writers understand that themselves? The answer, as the research suggests, has less to do with technical skill than with intention - with knowing not just how a scene works, but what it is for. A scene used to take days. Now it takes a prompt. The time that disappears is not the thinking - it is the writing-as-thinking, the part where the scene finds out what it is by being written badly first. That process had a function. When it is gone, what remains is a clean draft with no record of what it decided not to be, and a writer who has to evaluate it without having lived through making it.

Keywords: Generative Storytelling, Screenwriter’s Role, AI Authorship, Creative Identity, Narrative Intention, Co-Authorship Ethics, Screenwriting Education, ChatGPT in Creative Practice.

https://doi.org/10.70315/uloap.ulirs.2025.0203015