LMU builds AI screenwriting course around craft, with new department planned

Loyola Marymount University is expanding its teaching of artificial intelligence for screenwriters, with Justin Trevor Winters offering a course called “Producing and Screenwriting With AI” and working toward a Creative Technology and Innovation department targeted to open in fall 2027.

Winters’s approach treats AI as an aid to established creative skills rather than a substitute for them. He tells students that 80% to 90% of screenwriting is craft, with AI supplying the remaining advantage only after they understand and master the fundamentals.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Winters became interested in large language models after ChatGPT’s public release in fall 2022, seeing possible uses in research and brainstorming. While developing a new version of Popeye the Sailor Man with his creative partner Mixa Martinez, he used an AI system to help resolve a logline problem.

The project was set in Prohibition-era Florida in the 1930s and recast Olive Oyl as a second-generation Afro-Cuban character. Winters uploaded some of his own screenwriting lectures to guide the system, found a logline within an hour and said the project sold within weeks.

He subsequently brought ChatGPT into his teaching for students whose loglines lacked force. The tool did not make students “amazing screenwriters,” Winters said, but it generated stronger concepts and loglines and made students enthusiastic about the results.

Winters also introduced Midjourney for pitch decks, saying it immediately raised their production value. He said AI-assisted work had helped students obtain meetings and contacts that might otherwise have been unavailable. One student used generative tools to make an animated short that produced several industry meetings and job offers; another completed the 15-week class with a short film and was hired directly after graduating.

In June 2024, the university said Winters, a professor, screenwriter and principal of Verified Labs, was preparing an AI and screenwriting course intended to help students use available technology to make the best product possible. By August 2025, it said students initially sceptical of AI often became more engaged after learning its creative uses.

The teaching has unfolded amid deep unease in Hollywood. Less than a year after Winters began sharing the tools with students, he joined SAG-AFTRA and Writers Guild of America picket lines during the industry’s dual strikes. Students were left confronting an apparent contradiction: they were being taught a technology that parts of the industry were warning them against using.

Generative AI has since spread across email, note-taking tools, editing software and screenwriting platforms. Dara Resnik, a USC School of Cinematic Arts instructor, uses it for ideation and personal-project brainstorming but not for work she is hired to produce.

Film schools have nevertheless added AI teaching for several years. New York University’s Martin Scorsese Virtual Production Center runs a six-week AI for Visual Storytelling workshop, while USC has an AI for Media & Storytelling initiative examining generative AI’s effects on journalism and cinema. Winters also created a 54-lecture AI screenwriting course for Curious Refuge.