John and Craig invite over Rashida Jones and Will McCormack to chat about their new film The Invite, out in theaters now. Rashida and Will divulge the origin story and dynamics of their own writing partnership, as well as discuss the process of adapting an adaptation and writing to the truth of relationships. In our […]
The post The Invite with Rashida Jones and Will McCormack first appeared on John August.
Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín has closed the Bartz v. Anthropic case, issuing a 23-page order that grants final approval of the class action settlement, resolves several outstanding administrative details, and rules on attorneys' fees. The fee question was the only part of the order to receive extended treatment.
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OpenAI publicly launched ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. Five days later, Sam Altman, CEO and co-founder of OpenAI, tweeted the following: "I am a stochastic parrot, and so r u".
The tweet is a reference to a 2021 AI ethics paper, "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?", which describes LLMs as stochastic parrots—able to convincingly repeat information based on probability, but unable to truly comprehend their outputs. While the paper ultimately uses this metaphor to frame its argument on the limitations and downsides of AI, Altman's motives are more opaque. Mere days after the release of the most powerful AI chatbot to date, the words are eerie—are they a joke? A warning? A prophecy?
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The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: No, no, no, no. My name is Craig Mazin. John: This is episode 742 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we […]
The post Scriptnotes, Ep 742: Obsession with Curry Barker — Transcript first appeared on John August.
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The original post for this episode can be found here. Craig Mazin: Hello, and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin. No John? That’s okay. Don’t panic. I’m handling this stuff not alone. I’ve got intrepid helpers. Today on the show, we’re going to be doing question-a-rama. Every now and again, we have to do a […]
The post Scriptnotes, Ep 741: Craig Takes Questions — Transcript first appeared on John August.
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Bronson Watermarker Pro, our app for generating personalized watermarked documents, is out today. This all-new version adds support for images (nearly any format) in addition to PDFs, along with many quality-of-life enhancements for professional users. Like most of the apps we make, Bronson exists because of a very specific pain point I encountered. While developing […]
The post Bronson Watermarker goes Pro first appeared on John August.
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As we wrote in May, Elsevier is suing Meta over use of copyrighted works for training Meta’s AI models. It has a set of claims very similar to those in Kadrey v. Meta, but with a different purported class that includes authors and publishers who own copyright in academic journal articles and other academic works.
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How do you keep doing creative work when the world is falling apart around you? To sift through the despair and doubt, John welcomes back legendary Scriptnotes guest, writer-turned-psychotherapist Dennis Palumbo. They discuss the many feelings that catastrophic events can bring up in artists, the personal narratives that often inform those feelings, and how to […]
The post Writing while the World is on Fire (Encore) first appeared on John August.
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Every week, we see new stories of how capable the frontier AI models are becoming. They’re not just generating text and images. They’re making breakthroughs on mathematical conjectures and acing exams. Models like Mythos and Fable can work autonomously for hours to diagnose (and potentially exploit) cybersecurity flaws. But as of July 2026, they’re surprisingly […]
The post Frontier models are surprisingly bad at jigsaw puzzles first appeared on John August.
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Last month, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a notice seeking comment on a proposed new rule. The rule would make highly consequential changes to the Uniform Guidance for Federal Financial Assistance. At last count, OMB had received nearly than 350,000 comments, and more than 50,000 were available to read. Today we filed ours.
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This guest post, by Katherine Klosek of ARL and Stephen Wolfson of the University of Pennsylvania, is the latest in […]
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John and Craig sit down with Ryan Condal, showrunner of House of the Dragon, just as its third season airs. They dive into Ryan’s late start in Hollywood, spec scripts, the anatomy of a writers room, and thinking as a product of movement. They also answer a listener question about the mechanics of writing a […]
The post Thinking on Your Feet with Ryan Condal first appeared on John August.
Hello, everyone, and happy (slightly belated) start of July! With a new July comes a new season of the Interactive Fiction Competition!
Final entries are due on August 28th, 11:59pm Eastern, but you must register by August 1st!
If you miss it, there’s always 2027… If you register and then can’t complete your entry in time, you may always back out of the competition and enter your work elsewhere or next year.
As with the previous iterations of the IFComp, authors will be allowed to participate as judges, vote, and review entries other than their own.
If you have any questions about the competition or its rules, you can contact us at ifcomp@ifcomp.org
In addition to entries, we are also accepting prizes to award contestants! If you would like to donate a prize for this year’s competition, you can email us at prizes@ifcomp.org — no prize is too humble or too grand.
If you would prefer to donate money, our Colossal Fundraiser will launch by August. Another announcement will be made then.
Thank you, everyone. We’re looking forward to another fun year.