‘Run It Through GPT-5’: The Phrase Changing Hollywood Overnight
Showrunners, writers, producers & marketing jumped on OpenAI’s update. Industry jobs will never recover
This is part one of my two-part series this week for paid subscribers on OpenAI’s new tools and what they mean for Hollywood. Today: how ChatGPT-5 instantly changed writers rooms. Later this week, the Sora 2 panic.
When OpenAI unveiled GPT-5 on Aug. 7, CEO Sam Altman opened with a flourish worthy of a Casablanca finale: “our smartest, fastest, most useful model yet.” The implication was clear — management consultants, lawyers and other white-collar professionals were about to get supercharged.
What I didn’t expect was who grabbed it first. Within hours, Hollywood writers, showrunners and producers were quietly running scripts, coverage, even pitch decks through the new model — testing what it could do before their bosses did.
Beneath the showmanship was something real. GPT-5 isn’t just a bigger brain; it’s a directorial system — a single AI mind composed of specialized sub-models, with a “router” that decides which sub-model takes on the assignment. It behaves less like a chatbot and more like a studio of specialists behind one front door.
That design is a genuine departure from GPT-4, which forced users to choose between different variants or carefully engineered prompts. Despite bumps in the launch, Hollywood, already trembling with fear, noticed — GPT-5 performs better?
And then something strange happened: Hollywood didn’t roll its eyes. It logged in.
Within days, “GPT-5 pass” became a new phrase of the week — shorthand for nearly every script, pitch or coverage doc being run through the machine. Showrunners swapped router demos like new Final Draft plug-ins. Assistants realized their notes were being outpaced by a system that could remember every line of a season’s worth of scripts. And for the first time since the strikes, the fear wasn’t abstract — it was happening right now, inside the rooms where stories are made. And from the people who vowed to never use AI.
Here’s what I’ll tell paid subscribers:
Why the WGA’s “AI protections” from the 2023 strike are already outflanked — and what the guild can’t actually stop this time
How the “GPT-5 pass” is transforming writers rooms as showrunners use the model to rewrite faster, cheaper and in secret
The quiet gold rush in studio marketing and post teams, where GPT-5 can cut 20 trailers before lunch and nobody’s sure whose job that is anymore
GPT5’s memory superpower as it can now ingest pilot, a bible, drafts and coverage notes for a mulyi-season continuity check in minutes
Inside the studios drawing up color-coded AI risk charts — the green-light zones, the red lines and who’s already crossing them
The unexpected winners (and losers) of the GPT-5 era — from assistants and coverage readers to legal departments trying to hold the line
What OpenAI’s commitment to open and public iterations of the tech means for future versions and how they’ll impact Hollywood workflow
And the uncomfortable question hanging over every creative contract now: Who owns the work when the machine remembers every draft you ever fed it?