Without AI, most British writers will never see their work produced.

We don’t have a film industry, we have a “hope industry” where our dreams of cinematic success are monetized by organisations offering professional script coverage for five hundred quid, contests costing over a hundred quid, and institutional “schemes” designed to keep writers away from actual decision-makers.

The “hope industry” is a loser’s lottery, where creativity is taxed, lives are wasted and countless stories are left untold. 85% of UK film production spend in 2025 came from visiting Hollywood blockbusters – and good luck writing one of them.

For most of us, High End TV is Dead End TV. Will Jack Thorne be given his own channel? Hang on, he already has (Channel 4). A handful of super-indies control over three quarters of total TV drama spend; and unless you are in the miniscule cabal of bankable names, you can go whistle.

Got a great script? So what! You are a nobody, so your ideas do not deserve to see the light of day. The inner circle of regime writers may have been good once, maybe even twice – but are they good enough to block everyone else’s ambitions forever? In our rigged system, quality does not rise to the top. Instead, as Jarvis Cocker observed, “shit floats”.

So, what are your options?

• Blag your way onto an unpopular soap and serve a lengthy “apprenticeship” writing TV for nursing homes?

• Bankrupt yourself at Edinburgh? Maybe you’ll find a stalker and make the next “Baby Reindeer”. Or maybe you’ll just find a stalker…

• Or perhaps you’ll put on your Brave Boy Pants and hit the comedy circuit. It might be cowed by cancellation, and only allow you to “punch up” at a few approved targets, but maybe you will work your way onto Sky’s shiny “new” Saturday Night Live and expose yourself to 85,000 viewers: roughly the attendance of a League Two Play-Off Final.

Sod all that for a game of soldiers.

Why not use AI tools and realise your vision in precise detail? Bin the gatekeepers, break the rules and tell your stories with absolute control.

No sequence is too ambitious. No location is beyond your budget. No stunt is too dangerous.

And best of all, you don’t have to conform.

The establishment want “modernised” period pieces as enjoyable as actual periods, and trite, patronising sociology lectures designed by committees. It is all about ticking HR boxes and telling us what we “ought” to think, rather than anything resembling the visceral experience of actual life or genuine entertainment.

Maybe there really is no checklist of opinions that everyone must agree on. Who knew?

With AI, you can bin these narrow ideological filters, get real, and tell better stories.

You could of course reject AI as “dangerous slop” (can it be both?), and apply for the BBC Writers Room (along with 10k+ other hopefuls) or the BFI Short Film Fund (3% success rate), or you could take up cat-herding. These are all equally effective methods of wasting your time.

I once had a script in development with the American producer of an Oscar-nominated film and the head of a wealthy national film fund (obviously not British, it was wealthy). There was almost infinite fiddling. Why not change the protagonist’s gender? Let’s turn the antagonist into a Chinese nun? Can we make it more like that anime film I once saw on a plane? Five wasted years later, it crumbled to dust, and all that remains is resentment and “Draft 38”.

This is a familiar story. For most writers, the industry is a waiting room, and the only available appointments are with Disappointment.

While we all wait, there is endless time for speculation. How can we appear sufficiently disadvantaged to meet a fund’s diversity and inclusion criteria? Is our story worthy enough to win a few quid from the National Lottery? Shall I lie about my age? Maybe I can cultivate a “friend at court” in the BBC, or better still, master the Netflix algorithm?

In the unlikely event that any of this works, and your script becomes one of the 96 domestic films and 168 “High-End” TV shows made in any given year, the gatekeepers will have gently censored everything that made you want to make the film or show in the first place. Platoons of meddlers and second-guessers with office politics and social impact quotas on their minds will have obliterated any messy human complexity in favour of “The Message”: a GCSE version of The Guardian’s Society pull-out.

Perhaps your film will get a theatrical release. Imagine that! But being a British film, only your friends and family will notice. It will be as widely distributed as a local newspaper. You may as well organise a private screening.

Forget it. Stop paying hope taxes, escape the waiting room, and use AI to become your own showrunner.

With AI tools, the director’s cut can be your cut. A single creator can now possess the production power of a mid-sized studio.

The gatekeepers exploited your hope and your lack of capital. Now, you don’t need to hope, you can act. Your capital is your laptop, your filmmaking skills and your persistence. You can make the film you want to watch, not the one you think will get a grant.

The establishment no longer owns the audience; the internet does. An AI filmmaker with a following can be more powerful than a writer with an agent and a doomed development deal.

The British drama establishment can be a mausoleum of “polite” ideas and preachy bilge; a closed loop where the same fifteen voices whisper into the ears of the same fifty gatekeepers, and all the writers on the outside pay “hope taxes” to the sub-industry that exploits our dreams.

Why not stop paying for your own rejection? AI tools cost less than a single contest entry and offer a thousand times more leverage. Why buy tickets to a lottery that’s rigged against you?

AI tools are weapons that give us the freedom to be dangerous again.

Don’t wait for permission. Greeenlight your own films. The power has shifted – all it takes is our creativity, and our AI tools.