What will AI (artificial intelligence) do to Hollywood? Who better to answer that question than ChatGPT, a thrilling but scary chatbot developed by OpenAI. When the Guardian asked it about AI’s potential impact on the Film industry, it made the following points:

1. Scriptwriting: AI can be used to analyze existing screenplays and create new ones, potentially leading to more efficient and cost-effective screenwriting.

2. Pre-production: AI can be used to streamline the pre-production process, including casting, location scouting and storyboarding.

3. Special effects: AI can be used to create more realistic and immersive special effects, potentially reducing the need for practical effects and saving time and money in post-production.

4. Audience analysis: AI can be used to analyze audience data and preferences, helping studios make more informed decisions about which films to greenlight and how to market them.

5. Distribution: AI can be used to personalize movie recommendations for viewers and optimize distribution strategies, potentially leading to higher ticket sales and revenue.

It was a reasonable answer that did not hint at HAL 9000-style malevolence or Terminator-like plans for world domination. But nor did it have much to say about how AI might be a disruptive force for actors (dead or alive), audiences, screenwriters, the principle of intellectual property or the fundamental art of storytelling.

When the Guardian turned to human interviewees, they offered a more ambivalent set of predictions – acknowledging the power of AI to help a screenwriter overcome writer’s block or an editor to skip mundane tasks, but expressing alarm about the risk of machines replacing humans or effectively forcing them to work for free.

AI is already here. It can be heard in synthesised voices and seen in visual effects such as deep fakes and de-ageing. It has been used to knock decades off Harrison Ford for a scene in the upcoming Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

Not all ageing action stars are happy about the technology, however. Last month Keanu Reeves told Wired magazine of a clause in his film contracts that bans studios from digitally editing his performances. “If you go into deepfake land, it has none of your points of view,” he explained. “That’s scary.”

Meanwhile ChatGPT has taken the world by storm with its facility for writing essays, news reports and poems and even passing business and law school exams. It may only be a matter of time before it can come up with a decent script treatment or turn a novel into a blockbuster screenplay.

Ben Mankiewicz, a primetime host of Turner Classic Movies (TCM) and grandson of Herman Mankiewicz, who co-wrote the 1941 classic Citizen Kane, has just been experimenting with ChatGPT. “I signed up for a week and asked it to write a TCM introduction for Citizen Kane,” he says by phone from Los Angeles.

“It lacked some detail and context but it was pretty well written and thoughtful and certainly got the movie’s importance and mentioned Gregg Toland, the cinematographer. (It did not mention my grandfather – that was, of course, the real test!) It was very impressive and I thought right away if I had to write something about a movie, I might use that as a springboard.”

But how does Mankiewicz, 55, feel about the idea of AI writing an entire film script? “While it’s exciting, of course it’s disturbing. I find it very hard to believe that it’s ever going to get the humanity that makes a screenplay great. I have to believe that the things that my grandfather did that made his movies great, that Joe Mankiewicz did, that Dalton Trumbo did, that Scott Frank did, are impossible for the the AI program to get right.

“I’m worried but I don’t want to sound reactionary. It’s probably OK. It’s probably mostly useful if it gets a creative person who finds the blank page daunting to think, ‘Oh, all right, here’s some pages, here’s some ideas.’”

The Writers Guild of America, which represents TV and film writers, has stopped short of calling for an outright ban on AI. Instead it is proposing that writers could use chatbots to help write a script without having to share the credit or divide residuals, according to a report this week in Variety.

But some screenwriters are already worried about how far the AI revolution might go. Marc Guggenheim, who has numerous film and TV credits and is also author of the LegalDispatch newsletter, sees both promise and peril in the technology.

He says: “Right now I don’t think AI is ready for primetime in terms of being able to write scripts or craft stories but I see a world where it absolutely will be able to do that. Look at how fast the technology has advanced in the past couple of months even. It probably will be a real threat to writers down the road.

“Who’s to say that ChatGPT won’t be ready in very short order to do a pass on a script, revisions on a script? They could even say: ‘Do a set of revisions in the style of Aaron Sorkin.’ If you were to ask me what do I think we’re going to see sooner rather than later it’s that, rather crafting an entire script from a blank page.”

The tech industry is notoriously male dominated and AI is no different. Guggenheim, 52, comments: “Where is the AI getting its information to be programmed and is that information only coming from a certain subset of society? If it’s going to tell stories from the perspective of its programmers, essentially, then you have to worry about the lack of diversity among the programmers.”

Writers are not the only ones facing potential upheaval. The voices of celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain and artist Andy Warhol were posthumously recreated by AI in the documentaries Roadrunner and The Andy Warhol Diaries. Actor James Earl Jones has given his approval for AI to use early Darth Vader recordings to replicate his voice in future Star Wars series.

The National Association of Voice Actors, an advocacy group, insists that it is not anti-technology or anti-AI but is calling for stronger regulation. It warns that it is increasingly hard to know when and where synthesised voices are replacing humans in audio books, video games and other media.

The group’s president, Tim Friedlander, says: “The biggest concern is that we just don’t know what’s out there and there’s no way to track it and no way to find out if it’s being used.

“For voice actors, a lot of how we make our our living is based on the licensing of our voice and so, if we have an unlicensed version of our voice working for free, then that is instantly taking work away from us and money out of our pockets and hurting our ability to make a living.”

He adds: “We don’t know if our voices are being used or have been used to train synthetic voices for machine learning or to create synthetic voices that could potentially be out there without our knowledge. We hope that potentially we could help guide this technology or be a part of the conversation as it goes forward.”

Not everything that AI touches will be obvious on screen. It could save huge amounts of time and effort in the editing process, during post-production and in film preservation or restoration. AI could sift through vast amounts of footage to locate a certain variable.

Joshua Glick, visiting associate professor of film and electronic arts at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, pointed to the benefits of AI in the 2020 documentary film Welcome to Chechnya, which examines the persecution of LGBTQ+ people in the republic in south-western Russia.

He says: “There have been instances where these tools have been used in quite progressive and creative ways. In Welcome to Chechnya Ryan Laney, the effects supervisor, was using deepfake technology as a way to protect the onscreen subjects to essentially create what was called ‘digital veils’ for the individuals that appear in the film.

“It allowed those people to communicate and engage with audiences but also to maintain their anonymity. That was one instance in the human rights context where the technology is having some impact. There’s been some other projects that Ryan Laney has worked on recently related to protests in Hong Kong and using some of this same technology to protect the people that are appearing on film.”

But what if AI was able to script a sequel to Casablanca, recreate the same cast – deepfakes of Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman and co – simulate their voices and turn it into a finished film that looked convincing? Glick is sceptical. “It creates a strange relationship between the audience and those characters in the film and the story that they’re involved in. It plunges us into the uncanny valley.

“There’s this idea that we have in our head as audiences of who these people were and what they did. They’re no longer with us and yet we’re seeing them appear on screen, doing all of these dynamic things, playing all these different roles? It creates a cognitive dissonance, or at least I think it would.”

Taken to its logical conclusion, a film industry that depended solely on AI, rendering actors extinct, would wipe out the circus of gossip columns, late night TV interviews, red carpet film premieres and the Oscars. That is not a Hollywood that Glick wants to live in.

“Our knowledge of who these people are, their personalities, what they’re like, what their families might be like, their background, what they’ve been like on set swirl around a production,” he continues. “They give the production of a film or TV show a sense of allure and intrigue and a part of what we might call the media culture today.

“What it means to follow a project as it’s unfolding, not just to watch a finished film or stream a TV show, is important. Our knowledge of the creative labour and these human dimensions of it are part of the enjoyment that spectators derive from the films and part of what makes the film and television industry distinct. It needs to do its business in public.”

AI could also have far reaching social and economic consequences. Olcun Tan, a German-born visual effects supervisor based in Los Angeles, says: “In robotics, in the 80s and 90s, the whole car industry got upset and Detroit was affected very negatively: the whole city turned into a ghost town. This is now happening with the middle class through AI.

“A lot of people are not even aware of it. I wonder sometimes if the workforce cuts you see at Microsoft or Google are also driven by the fact that you don’t need three people; you need one person who, with assistance from AI, can do the workload of three people. In the context of movie making, it will take far less people to do the work than originally needed.

“It reduces the prospects for people entering the workforce as an assistant or as somebody doing research to start their career. If the AI does a better job then how do people start getting into an industry to learn from ground up, to grow into a position of expertise eventually?”

AI is already earning comparisons to the agricultural revolution, industrial revolution and internet revolution. It is moving fast and gathering speed. The most profound effects for Hollywood and elsewhere have probably not yet been imagined.

Tan adds: “I feel we’re creating a world like the Greeks had. They would make pilgrimages and ask the Oracle. In these temples they would have places where you put your hand in and then you would ask for your future. We’re going in that direction because AI is getting so powerful.”