Hollywood's anxiety about artificial intelligence moved from boardroom argument to cinema screen when Swiss director Peter Luisi premiered what is widely regarded as the first AI-written feature film. His movie, "The Last Screenwriter," had its entire screenplay composed by ChatGPT—and the reaction from the industry was swift and unforgiving.
How ChatGPT Wrote a Feature Film
Luisi began the experiment with a prompt of roughly 17 words: essentially asking ChatGPT to write a plot about a screenwriter who realises he is less skilled at writing than artificial intelligence. From that single seed, he guided the chatbot through successive stages—generating characters, building a step-by-step outline, and finally drafting individual scenes—a process that stretched across several days of intensive prompting.
The resulting script required only light editing. Luisi trimmed repetitive dialogue and cut scenes that added little, but otherwise left ChatGPT's output intact. The film's budget came in at $850,000, though Luisi has acknowledged the difficulty of attracting further funding for the project—a signal, he says, of the market's deep scepticism toward AI-generated creative work.
The story itself follows Jack, a celebrated young screenwriter who becomes financially successful after embracing an AI scriptwriting system, only to be gripped by writer's block as the technology increasingly outpaces him. It is a premise that proved uncomfortably close to the anxieties of real Hollywood professionals.
London Premiere Cancelled After 200 Complaints
The first AI-written film was scheduled to make its world premiere at the Prince Charles Cinema in London on 23 June 2024. The announcement triggered an immediate public backlash. Within 24 hours of the screening being publicised, the cinema received roughly 40 complaints; overnight, another 160 followed—totalling around 200—prompting the venue to cancel the event entirely.
Audience members characterised AI-generated content as an affront to human creativity and called it a form of creative theft. The cancellation came against a backdrop of acute industry tension: only the previous year, Hollywood's writers had staged a prolonged strike, with AI protections for screenwriters among their central demands.
Director Luisi Defends the Project
Peter Luisi, a multiple nominee for the Swiss Film Award, did not retreat in the face of the criticism. He maintained that engaging with AI is not optional in the contemporary world—it is a condition of working in it. The director has been transparent about the production process, publishing full documentation alongside the film's release.
Despite the controversy, or perhaps because of it, "The Last Screenwriter" was made freely available on YouTube on 5 July 2024, so that audiences could judge the AI-written film for themselves.
A Divided Industry
The public response to "The Last Screenwriter" exposed a genuine split in how people think about AI in the creative industries. Critics argued that machine-generated content lacks the lived experience, emotional nuance, and cultural specificity that human writers bring. Supporters—or at least those willing to engage with the experiment—pointed out that AI is already embedded in production pipelines and that the question is not whether it will be used, but how.
Luisi's position is that the film is less a provocation than a provocation of a conversation the industry needs to have: on what terms will AI be permitted to participate in storytelling, and who decides?
The controversy around the first AI-written film underscores that these questions are no longer theoretical. They are playing out at the box office—or, in this case, at a cinema door that was closed before anyone could walk through it.
