The director of the Stranger Things documentary, Martina Radwan, has brushed off speculation suggesting the show’s creators the Duffer Brothers wrote the final season using AI after eagle-eyed fans spotted ChatGPT being used on one of their laptops.
The director of the Stranger Things documentary doesn’t believe the Duffer Brothers wrote the final episode using AI.
Matt and Ross Duffer documented the making of the show’s final season in One Last Adventure: The Making of Stranger Things 5 in which they revealed they started shooting the feature-length last episode before they’d written the script because they were so “low on time” – and eagle-eyed fans speculated the brothers had used ChatGPT to help them get it done after spotting the AI tool’s logo on their laptops as they debated the potential ending with actress Millie Bobby Brown.
However, the documentary’s director Martina Radwan can’t believe the writers would use AI to write the script. When asked about the theory, she told The Hollywood Reporter: “I mean, are we even sure they had ChatGPT open? … Well, there’s a lot of chatter where [social media users] are like: ‘We don’t really know, but we’re assuming.’
“But to me it’s like, doesn’t everybody have it open, to just do quick research? … How can you possibly write a storyline with 19 characters and use ChatGPT, I don’t even understand.”
She went on to add: “Again, first of all, nobody has actually proved that it [ChatGPT] was open. That’s like having your iPhone next to your computer while you’re writing a story.
“We just use these tools … while multitasking. So there’s a lot going on all the time, every time. What I find heartbreaking is everybody loves the show, and suddenly we need to pick it apart.”
When asked if she witnessed any “unethical use of generative-AI in the writers room”, she replied: “No, of course not. I witnessed creative exchanges.
“I witnessed conversation. People think ‘writers room’ means people are sitting there writing. No, it’s a creative exchange.
“It’s story development. And, of course, you go places in your creative mind and then you come back [to the script]. I think being in the writers room is such a privilege and such a gift to be able to witness that.”
The in the documentary, the siblings admitted they were under huge amounts of pressure to get the shoot finished so the story was “plotted out” but the script hadn’t been finalised.
Matt explained: “It’s not like we don’t know what the ending is. It’s all plotted out. I have to write it, and we’re just low on time.”
Production assistant Montana Maniscalco was later seen saying: “We are shooting episode eight, which isn’t completely written yet – spoiler alert! So we don’t even fully know what’s going on.”
Matt then explained: “I’ve never read [episode] 8 through, and we’re just shooting it. I’ve never done anything like this before. This is so weird jumping to eight … Don’t love it. Don’t love it.”
He went on to add: “We were getting hammered by production and by Netflix for episode eight. We went into production without having a finished script for the finale. That was scary because we wanted to get it right. It was the most important script of the season …
“It was the most difficult writing circumstances we’ve ever found ourselves in, not just because there was the pressure of we had to make sure the script was good, but there’s never been so much noise at the same time.”
Stranger Things final ‘wasn’t written using AI’
