Maxine Gee

Posthuman Creative Collaboration: Exploring Screenwriting and Screen story development with Generative A.I.

Bournemouth University, UK

Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen A.I.) technologies have been the source of much
recent debate within the creative industries; especially in WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes of
2023 where tentative guidelines for working with Gen A.I. were established. In 2023, the
Writers Guild of Great Britain also developed a framework for its members to engage with
Gen A.I. The AHRC funded project Shared Post-Human Imagination: Human-AI
Collaboration in Media Creation seeks to explore the emerging Gen A.I. environment within
the film production industry. The project is led by an interdisciplinary team at Bournemouth
University including Dr Szilvia Ruszev, Dr Maxine Gee, Dr Melanie Stockton-Brown,
Associate Professor Tom Davis and Professor Xiaosong Yang.

This paper will explore the findings of the screenwriting and screen story development
workshop, one of four workshops exploring elements of the media industry, organised as
part of this project. I will discuss the outcomes of the workshop which will encompass
collaboration, creativity and representation in screen story development and scriptwriting
practice with Gen A.I., as well as engaging with current industry practices and ethical
concerns around copyright, data sets and job security. As part of the workshop, I will cocreate a screenplay with Gen A.I., building on my previous experience in Human-A.I.
screenplay co-creation. I will examine my creative process in developing this screenplay and
how that was shaped by the data gathered during the project.

Dr Maxine Gee is a Principal Academic in Screenwriting at Bournemouth University. She
holds a PhD by Creative Practice in Screenwriting from the University of York. In 2015, she
was a Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science Summer Fellow. Her award-winning
short films Terminal (2018) and Standing Woman (2020) have screened at a range of
international film festivals. Maxine has published on science fiction screenwriting for BSFA
FOCUS magazine, posthuman noir in Cinema: Journal of Film and Philosophy; web series in
the Palgrave Handbook of Script Development; Folk Horror, gender and Japanese survival
horror for The Journal for Cultural Research, and on her practice research screenplay
Golems Inc. in Sightlines: Filmmaking in the Academy. In 2022 she received funding from
the ESRC Festival of Social Science for an interactive theatre event exploring
neurodivergence and how future humans are portrayed in science fiction film and television.