TV soaps could be made by AI within three years, director warns

Television soaps could potentially be created by AI within the next three to five years, according to a leading director. James Hawes, vice-chairman of Directors UK and director of the Apple TV+ Gary Oldman spy drama Slow Horses, told parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport committee inquiry into British film and high-end television that digitally made scripts will soon be upon us – particularly for soaps.

“We at Directors UK held a forum about Doctors, the BBC show that’s been cancelled,” said Hawes. “One of the members there started talking about AI and it sent me investigating how long it would be before a show like Doctors can be made entirely by generative AI.”

“I took a poll with various VFX people and spoke to some of the legal team who advised SAG [the Screen Actors Guild] and the Writers Guild over the summer ... The best guess is within three to five years.”

Hawes believes AI will create the scripts and the footage, potentially removing the need for writers and actors. To explain the latter, he referred to Sora, the OpenAI tool that instantly creates video which was launched last week.

“The expert I was talking to said: ‘I thought this might happen in 18 months to two years and suddenly it’s here.’ It’s not live-action perfect, but it’s pretty damn close. There’s [video of] a dragon festival – it’s hard to tell if it’s real or not.

“That makes me think the changes are coming dramatically and very, very soon.”

There are still questions, at least in terms of scriptwriting, about how effective human-free AI’s generative process will be. The writer Charlie Brooker has previously talked about trying to use ChatGPT to create a season six Black Mirror script and failing due to it coming up with “something that, at first glance, reads plausibly, but on second glance, is shit”.

Brooker said of the technology’s scriptwriting capabilities: “All it’s done is look up all the synopses of Black Mirror episodes and sort of mush them together. Then if you dig a bit more deeply you go: ‘Oh, there’s not actually any real original thought here.’ It’s [1970s impressionist] Mike Yarwood – there’s a topical reference.”

However, AI’s threat to MPs on select committees may be slightly more pronounced. “I have to tell the committee that before coming in I asked Chat GPT to come up with the questions you might ask me,” said Hawes during his appearance. “And thus far it’s scoring pretty high.”