AI-Generated Screenplays and the Shifting Authorship Paradigm in Indian Cinema

Abstract

The entry of generative artificial intelligence into the screenwriting process has unsettled a foundational assumption of cinema: that a film's story originates from a human author. Large language models capable of producing dialogue, structuring plot beats, and generating full screenplay drafts are now deployed across writer rooms in Hollywood and, increasingly, in Mumbai. This paper examines how AI screenwriting tools—ranging from general-purpose models like ChatGPT to specialized platforms like Sudowrite—are reconfiguring the concept of authorship in Indian cinema, a industry where the "writer" has historically occupied an ambiguous position between creative labour and commercial invisibility. Drawing on Roland Barthes' theory of the death of the author, posthumanist frameworks of distributed agency, and comparative legal analysis of the Indian Copyright Act of 1957 alongside the Writers Guild of America's 2023 AI protections, the study argues that AI does not erase authorship but disperses it across a networked assemblage of prompt-engineers, training datasets, proprietary algorithms, and human rewriters. Case studies include the AI-assisted feature film experiment Maharaja in Denims (2025), the landmark AI-written short Sunspring (2016), and the ongoing adoption of AI tools by Indian independent screenwriters. The paper further addresses the regulatory vacuum in Indian copyright law—which offers no explicit provision for non-human authorship—and the labour implications of AI for junior writers in Bollywood's hierarchical writer-room structure. In theorizing AI as a collaborative agent rather than a replacement for human creativity, the study contributes to urgent conversations at the intersection of film production, intellectual property law, and the ethics of creative technologies in non-Western screen industries.

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