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Inciting Incident: AI and Screenwriting at DePaul University
Sometime last year, Matt Quinn took an excerpt from a script he’d written and put it into an AI image generator to create a character. The associate professor of screenwriting, who also serves as associate dean for student affairs and director of L.A. programs at DePaul University’s School of Cinematic Arts, feels that it is his job to stay current with new technologies. He had previously experimented with various tools and had mixed feelings about generative AI and its connection to the filmmaking process. However, this experience was different.
“It took a second, but it almost took my breath away,” Quinn says. “Suddenly, this person that I had pictured in my brain and written all these pages about across multiple drafts was right in front of me! It gave me a way of bringing to life a thing that previously would have just been in my imagination.”
Quinn wanted to share this experience with other screenwriters, so he will be teaching an undergraduate class titled “AI Screenwriting” this fall. It’s not the first class to integrate AI at DePaul, where the School of Cinematic Arts is located in the Jarvis College of Computing and Digital Media, which also includes the School of Computing and School of Design. The film program’s proximity to both disciplines means that concepts like worldbuilding, virtual production and the intersection of filmmaking and game design don’t require massive reimaginings and unwieldy cross-campus partnerships. GenAI doesn’t feel alien, either. “Quite conceivably in the future, we could have the ability to put a script into AI and have it generate entire sequences, then modify them in a way that is so much more accessible than filmmaking is now,” Quinn says. “I find that really, really exciting.” He adds that this generative creative process could be transformative for screenwriters who often aren’t easily able to create images or film sequences.
For the first class he taught using genAI, Quinn essentially created a lab for experimentation. “I wanted to have a dialogue on the current state of affairs with AI with the students,” he explains. “It was when Sora first came out, and it seemed like every week there was a new announcement or tool.” He divided the class between visits from guest speakers and hands-on exploration. Students started with an idea or concept, then moved on to fleshing out characters before drafting an outline. “The results were kind of all over the place,” he admits, adding that that was the point. “I hoped to demystify some of the mystery around AI and help students see that AI is not automatically evil. Going through this process and allowing the students to experiment opened them up to seeing its limitations.”
As he prepares for his next class, which will be a two-unit elective for undergraduates, he hopes to show students a broad array of options. “How can we use these tools to try to bring more authenticity to our characters and settings?” he asks, noting that rather than just having tools generate scripts, students might better use things like NotebookLM, Claude or ChatGPT as a collaborator or research assistant.
When asked about the program’s policies regarding how students use AI, Quinn explains that the DePaul faculty developed a set of guidelines for how students can cite their use of various tools. “Students have to explain what platform they used, then write a blurb about why they chose to use it and offer a reflection.”
The DePaul guidelines for screenwriters open with this warning: “Writers should be aware that AI (generative artificial intelligence) is a tool and only a tool. It does not create; it aggregates and repurposes previously published content. As such, AI may facilitate the story development process but cannot replace what each individual writer brings to a story: their distinctive point of view and voice.”
The guidelines go on to note that AI should never be a replacement for vision and voice, and further, that while students may use AI to do research, “the entirety of your screenplay/writing assignment must be authored by you.” Quinn says, “Students can do all the research they want, but once you open up that file and it’s ‘Fade-in,’ that’s where AI stops.”
DePaul’s SCA has focused on preparing students for real-world experience in a quickly changing industry for many years. In 2013, the school formed an alliance with Cinespace Chicago Film Studios to create DePaul Cinespace Studios, a 60,000-square-foot production facility where students work with industry-standard equipment while major productions like The Bear shoot a few steps away. The huge space lets students practice their craft on six different stages and access a huge amount of equipment. In addition, the studio houses a greenscreen and virtual production facility with a large LED wall.
I was lucky to visit the space earlier this year when DePaul hosted “AI in Film Education,” a one-day conference for faculty where I met Daniel Klein, professor and director of industry engagement, who worked with Quinn to organize the event; associate professor Scott Roberts, who founded, teaches in and chairs the animation program and has been using AI in his classes in diverse ways; and Meghann Artes, an associate dean of the program who was focused on supporting faculty in learning more about AI. The conference brought together lawyers and industry experts, as well as former deputy commissioner of the Chicago Film Office Jonah Zeiger, for a conversation about AI and copyright. Wolf Games presented a demo of Public Eye, a project that uses genAI to create playable crime narratives on the fly. Filmmakers Oscar Sharp and Dan Willis talked about genAI from a creative perspective, and when asked about AI’s potential to churn out so much slop that no one will be able to find polished work, Sharp offered a helpful analogy: “We’re going to have options, from fast food on one side, where you know what you’re getting and it’s fast and cheap and maybe not that good for you, versus mama’s home cooking on the other side, which is unique, carefully crafted and made with a huge amount of care and love.” The event ended with a discussion among teachers, with Scott Roberts and Özge Samanci from Northwestern talking about assignments, pedagogical approach, excitement and fears.
Asked whether he’s seen pushback against AI among DePaul’s SCA students, Quinn has a common answer: Yes! However, he also sees the changes happening in the film industry, and he is practical about his role: “As [a professor at] an educational institution, I feel that we’re doing our students a disservice to not explore and play with all this stuff.”
