Promptshare Payouts for Screenwriters

The long tail of residual payments from AI generated scripts

So, there I was, buckling up in the janky time machine, heading to visit my chum Alan. Good ol' Alan - a writer/director extraordinaire who once had Hollywood eating out of his hand. Back in the day, you couldn’t catch a movie that didn’t have 'Written by Alan' roll by in the closing credits.

The dude penned so many scripts, he made Shakespeare look like a one-hit-wonder. He practically bled ink. Thanks to his almost pathological need to spin stories, the AI world has had a treasure trove of his narratives to scrape, train, and learn from.

Now, even though he's lounging in his golden years, in a beach house somewhere, he's not done collecting the fruits of his labor. The moment he swapped his typewriter for beach shorts, you'd think his writing career was over. But no! His words, narratives, and unmistakable style were to be his immortal legacy, living on in the neural networks of AI models, whispering stories into the ears of generations to come.

Every time some digital assistant, ad-writing bot, or storytelling AI so much as hinted at an 'Alan-ism', it rang like a cash register in the background. The residuals kept rolling in like waves to the shore of his beach-side retreat.

I can’t help but laugh at the irony. Humans did all the writing once, painstakingly punching keys, losing sleep over plot twists, but now? Well, the AI’s got it covered. But every now and then, we got to tip our hats (and open our wallets) to the greats like Alan. They laid the groundwork, showed us how it's done. And, for that, my friend, they deserve every penny of the residuals they get, even from the silicon brains.

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Today’s Design Fiction was inspired by one of many creatively generative conversations held in General Seminar s04e02, where a group of futures-thinkers discussed and imagined possible trajectories for storytelling in Hollywood. Stay tuned for the debrief by subscribing to the Near Future Laboratory podcast.