Screenwriting is lonely. Not metaphorically. Literally just you, a document, and a feeling that something isn't working, but you can't name what.

Itai Hasid has been sitting in that room for over twenty years. Writer, filmmaker, tour guide, creative technologist. Someone who has lived and worked across Tel Aviv, Barcelona and London, and carries all three with him into every story he tells. He's now building an AI screenwriting advisor, and the way he talks about it tells you everything about why most AI writing tools miss the point entirely.

The tools that already exist, Itai says, mostly do the same thing. Here are your problems. Here is how to fix them. And that flattening effect, everyone reaching for the same trained responses, the same structural fixes, is exactly what kills originality. Because a pacing problem is rarely just a pacing problem. It's usually a symptom. Weak motivation, unclear stakes, a character whose emotional world the writer hasn't fully understood yet. Give someone the answer and you solve the wrong thing. Give them the right question and you keep the story alive.

That phrase stayed with me. Keeping the story alive. Because it applies well beyond screenwriting. It's the difference between a tool that replaces your thinking and one that sharpens it. Itai isn't anti-AI. He's anti-shortcut. He wants writers to grow. The AI becomes a thinking partner, not a ghostwriter.

We talked about imperfection, too. The actor who walks on with the wrong energy and somehow makes the scene better. The location that changed because of budget and became more interesting than the original idea. The improvised Thor and Loki scene in Ragnarok. These are not failures of craft. They're what happens when human encounters produce something no one planned. AI doesn't live inside the risk of the moment. That's not a criticism. It's just a fact worth holding.

And then there's his father's philosophy, the idea that most human behaviour is not driven by ambition or pleasure but by the need to escape pain. We watch films for distraction. We use AI because not knowing is uncomfortable. We ask for answers because sitting with uncertainty feels unbearable. But sometimes the discomfort is the point. Sometimes the not-knowing is where the best work comes from. If AI only ever removes that friction, it weakens us rather than develops us.

What I took from Itai is a useful test for any AI tool. Does it give you a fish, or does it make you a better fisherman? The answer changes everything about what the tool is actually for.

Find Itai at itaihasid.com or search for him on LinkedIn. Two of him exist there, apparently. You'll find the right one.

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Your host - Shaun Phillips

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