When you think about AI disrupting Hollywood, you typically think about CGI characters and creation tools like Sora and Pika that turn text prompts into impressively realistic visuals in seconds. But while technologies that create the things that meet our eyes understandably grab most of the headlines, there’s a quieter disruption happening at the very beginning of the moviemaking process.
Dilip Rajan is the co-founder of Jumpcut, whose tagline is, “Automate grunt work so you can get back to storytelling.” It does that with a product called ScriptSense, which inserts AI into the tedious slog of script coverage — the act of reading and evaluating screenplays. If a script isn’t from a known writer, a studio doesn’t have a lot to go on, so they often outsource it to a network of contractors, which obviously takes time and depends a lot on the tastes of those contractors. Powered by large language models (LLMs), ScriptSense can read way more scripts than any human could, analyze them to a common standard, and then summarize what they're about and if they're any good.
Of course, there's a little more to it than that, but you can see why any movie studio would be interested in a machine that can read screenplays at scale, especially when there are tens of thousands of scripts floating around Hollywood at any given time — a number that will surely increase now that ChatGPT is joining the writers room.
I chatted with Dilip about where Jumpcut came from, how writers and agents should think about the disruption AI represents, and why Jumpcut's script processor might be just the tool Hollywood needs to get out of its current creativity rut. I thought it was fascinating conversation, especially when we went deep on how ScriptSense works — it's not just "Chat with PDF" on steroids.
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AI's Quiet Revolution in Hollywood, With Jumpcut Cofounder Dilip Rajan