Entangled with AI: Questioning authorship and the potential impact on the creative and authentic voice.

To what extent can a screenwriter utilise the analytical and discovery powers of AI as a research assistant and still maintain their authentic and creative voice? Is it even possible to retain one’s creative voice and professional integrity while iteratively engaging with AI? This paper challenges several decisions made by the author before engaging with AI as a research assistant in the design and writing of a mid-budget horror feature film screenplay. By expressly defining clear creative and linguistic boundaries, limiting AI research inputs, providing targeted and specific instructive prompts, filtering and refining any suggestions before use, firmly maintaining sole creative control by not harnessing AI as a creative collaborator, continual self-assessment, and also accessing other sources, such as published screenplays, academic and trade textbooks the author hoped to keep AI quarantined from the ideas and content of their screenplay, and their creative voice, and thus, hopefully, retain their authenticity and academic and professional integrity.<br/><br/>By not turning to AI to generate story ideas, design characters, suggest dialogue, write location descriptions, map out character and story arches, advise on inciting incidents, plot turning points and climaxes the author attempted to steer the tricky course between harnessing AI’s ability to analyse tropes, story patterns, and character development in successful horror movies for idea generation, and still ensure that it is their creativity that is on the page. But is this attempt to maintain the author’s creative and authentic voice by quarantining AI an ultimately futile exercise?