This Is How AI Will Be Used to Exploit Writers In The Near Future

Being a professional screenwriter is both a privilege and an honor. But one thing I don't think I reconciled when I got into this business is how hard it is to stay relevant and stay paid.

You either have to have movies come out over and over, be lucky enough to get on a show that lasts, or always be speculating so your name stays at the top of executives' heads for when people are hiring.

All of that leads to the search for side gigs that allow you to pay the bills. I do a lot of teaching and copywriting. And I'm always scanning for other opportunities.

Recently, I have been seeing a disturbing trend that I can see will be used to exploit writers in the coming years. It's something that only AI can do, and I wanted to get ahead of it here today.

Let's dive in.

AI Pay to Play

I was on LinkedIn when I got a DM from a company looking for writers to help people finish novel ideas. Or so it looked like, but as I chatted with its rep, it was basically a guy asking me to pay his AI company $800, and then he would help me finish my first novel in three weeks. Then they would sell it and take a percentage of that.

He swore I'd make my money back if I just had a good enough book idea....and there lies the path to hell.

Right now, there are AI companies popping up all over that are charging aspiring people money to basically just prompt Gemini or Claude. They will make a promise like selling a book or a script or finishing it in record time, without ever having to back it up.

They're using AI to find lazy creatives and preying on the Hope Machine in order to exploit them and to enrich themselves.

And that's just one of the ways I feel like AI is going to be used to exploit writers in the future.

The New "Vanity Press" 2.0

The thing is, people charging for your hopes and dreams is nothing new. We've seen shady producers out here charging a lot of money in order to give access.

And in the old days, vanity presses would charge you thousands of dollars to print a garage full of books you could never sell.

Now, in the AI era, the exploitation is more insidious because it sells you speed and false validation.

You feel like an author or a screenwriter because you finish quickly, but all you've made is slop.

And they hope they can trick someone else into buying that slop. You might make your money back...But I really doubt it. Mostly because the market for these poorly written AI books is actually quite small.

These companies aren’t looking for the next great American novelist; they are looking for "content creators" willing to subsidize the training of their own LLMs.

And when you pay that $800, you aren't just losing cash, you are paying to do the labor of prompting and refining an engine that will eventually be used to replace the very entry-level copywriting and ghostwriting jobs that keep us afloat between scripts.

You are pricing yourself out of the career. And losing cash.

The Myth of the "Good Idea"

As writers, we know that ideas are the cheapest currency in Hollywood. Everyone has one. And when you visit home, there are always those relatives pushing their way onto you.

Ideas are free. It's the execution that gets writers paid.

By offloading the execution onto AI, these platforms strip away the writer's unique voice, the thing that makes them totally special, and neuter it.

You also flood a market with crap. And that makes it even harder for human-centric work to get noticed.

Here's another downside: no reputable manager or agent is looking to sign someone whose debut novel or screenplay was generated by a prompt-bot.

The most disturbing part of this trend is that it preys on the exhaustion of writers at every level. Whether you’re grinding through your third spec of the year, or first ever,, a "guaranteed" way to finish a project in three weeks sounds like a lifeline.

But it's an anchor that can drown you as soon as you reach out to catch it.

Summing It All Up

We have to be vigilant. If a company asks you to pay them for the "opportunity" to write, it's a scam. Stay away.

The future of this industry depends on us protecting the value of the human struggle that goes onto the page.

Let me know what you think in the comments.