Those who disliked the finale or final season of Stranger Things have watched the behind-the-scenes documentary released on Monday and have been picking it apart, frame by frame, trying to find things the Duffer brothers did wrong. These sleuths are dissecting quotes by the Duffers about when they wrote the ending and they’re analyzing the cast’s facial expressions when they read the script.
But there’s one clue that’s been passed around more than anything: a quick shot of the Duffers’ computer screen, which allegedly shows open ChatGPT tabs. This discovery immediately led to an unsubstantiated leap that the show runners used ChatGPT to write the script for Stranger Things season 5.
THR actually asked the director of the “One Last Adventure” documentary, Martina Radwan, about this, prompting her to wonder whether the writers had, in fact, had ChatGPT open. (From the shot, it is very unclear whether that’s true, and the blurred icons are almost impossible to decipher.) Then Radwan went deeper.
“Well, there’s a lot of chatter where [social media users] are like, ‘We don’t really know, but we’re assuming,’” she said. “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.”
Radwan added that, “nobody has actually proved that it 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,” she said.
While pushing back against a series finale that you don’t like is one thing, what is currently going on with the Duffer brothers, including this ChatGPT controversy, is positively ridiculous.
Attempting to say that a blurry tab icon is ChatGPT (even enhanced with AI, nothing like that shows up), then extrapolating that ChatGPT wrote the season 5 script because you didn’t like it is similar to the logic that led to predictions that there was a secret 9th episode of the show. I have noticed overlap between the groups propagating these theories online.
The idea that you would never visit one of the most popular sites on the internet for any reason while working on a show for many months is a reach. As Radwan said, there are an infinite number of ways ChatGPT could be used. Without necessarily endorsing its use, as you can make the argument that using any AI is fundamentally unethical, for many, it’s taken the place of Google, which, of course, also displays AI-generated answers on almost any search now. There’s no avoiding it.
It’s an absurd leap to say that AI was used to write a script or lines of dialogue or anything else because you think you saw ChatGPT open on a computer screen in a frame of a documentary. While AI is prevalent in almost all creative industries now, so are false accusations of the use of AI.
Netflix and the Duffers have not responded to this, but honestly, I wouldn’t even dignify it with an answer. This has all gone way too far, and upset fans are now literally wishcasting bad things they imagine the Duffers did.
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