Tonight at 8pm – 9.30pm UK Time on Zoom, I will explain that AI will rapidly be able to assemble something looks like a sitcom. But a sitcom isn’t just one script with characters wisecracking in a location. It’s a carefully calibrated formula that is repeatable.
So your characters need to be right: human and real.
Your situations need to be true to life: not third-hand fantasy.
You need to be basing your sitcom off your experience of life and relationships. NOT an aggregate of fictional work that AI has digested and is reassembling for you. Like this:
AI sounds so real and human, you can think that it’s alive. But it’s an assembly of words.
Using it to write a sitcom script will result in the worst kind of derivative: like a meal reconstituted from already cooked, prepared and processed food; a chicken curry made from re-heated KFC chicken. Best avoided.
You need fresh ingredients. Use AI to help you find fresh ingredients. We’ll cover how in the webinar.
It’s okay to be inspired to paint sunflowers like Van Gogh. But you won’t achieve anything good by trying to copy Van Gogh’s paintings. Don’t paint sunflowers based on his painted sunflowers. They will just feel phoney. Be inspired by Van Gogh. And then paint real sunflowers.
AI can’t perceive real sunflowers. It does not feel anything by looking at them or gazing at Starry Night, or thinking about the artist himself, who only sold one painting in his entire career before his early tragic death. You cannot short-circuit this part of the process. Well, you can, with AI. But it won’t be good.
It’s okay to be inspired to write a sitcom like Friends – which is already quite stylised. But you won’t achieve anything good by trying to copy it. It will feel derivative and phoney, not least because that show is quite old and life and relationships have changed – partly as a result of Friends.
You need to draw on real life and experiences and characters to stand a chance of creating something original and funny, but still recognisably a sitcom. AI can’t do that. Not least because it fundamentally doesn’t understand situation comedy.
But it can help you. Quite a lot. Let me explain how tonight. It’ s not too late to book in.
Tonight, I’m running a 90-minute practical webinar, showing you how I use 25 years of BBC sitcom writing experience to get the best out of AI. And you’ll leave the session knowing how to use AI to help write scripts that are more compelling, more authentic and, above all, funnier. Sound good?
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