How AI helps with a screenplay

In one line: what AI can and cannot do to a .script — seven field-level tools, changes reviewed in place on the page itself, quick actions on a right-click, and why the old Script Studio's coach no longer answers.

First: the old studio's coach is switched off

If the book you opened is an old Script Studio project, there is no AI panel at all any more — it was taken out, not left empty. It cannot read that book's scenes, characters or storylines, and it cannot change anything. The old docs promised "the coach reads your whole screenplay"; for those books that promise is no longer true, and the person who gets misled is the one following the old docs — so it goes first.

For AI to touch your screenplay, the screenplay has to be a .script file in the Writing Studio. How to bring an old project across is in the old Script Studio: what still works.

.script is a structured file, so AI works field by field

With a .md manuscript, AI rewrites a passage and you confirm it in a side-by-side review. A .script does not go that way. Like relationship maps, timelines, beat boards and world maps it is a structured file: AI never hands back a whole document, it sends named operations one at a time.

The reason is concrete. What AI reads is not the raw JSON, it is a summary — and each scene prints at most 40 lines before it says "N lines omitted". Let it rewrite the file whole and the dialogue past the cut is treated as nonexistent and silently disappears, with no error anywhere. So whole-file writes, partial replacements and deletes are refused for .script, not merely discouraged.

The screenplay group has seven tools:

What it can do	The kind of request it serves
Add scene / change scene heading / remove scene	"Put a scene before the night market where Shen Yan walks back to the scriptorium alone"
Add element / change element / remove element	An element is one line: action, character, dialogue, parenthetical, transition, shot
Batch	"Add a scene and write three lines in it" — one call instead of four round trips

A few things it deliberately cannot do, worth knowing so you don't wait for them:

• It cannot change the format settings. Taiwanese vs Hollywood is your decision and no tool reaches it (see format toggle).
• It does not set scene numbers, sort order or word counts. Those are computed; all it can say is "after this scene".
• It never invents an id. Every scene and line it points at has to be one it actually read. When it can't see something it asks instead of guessing.
• A line's type can't be changed. Turning a line of dialogue into action means removing it and adding a new one.
• It should not touch lines it hasn't seen. Past 40 lines it has a truncated scene, and its instruction is to tell you the scene is too long to see in full and ask — not to edit blind. For a genuinely long scene, split it first and then ask (splitting and merging scenes).

The full account of field-level editing is in AI structural editing; it isn't repeated here.

Changes appear on the page, not in a corner

Every change AI proposes is drawn into the script itself, bracketed by a coloured stripe on the left: added lines on green, modified on amber (the old line struck through and faded, the new one under it), deletions on red. A whole new scene appears as a green block whose header reads New scene; a heading change reads out in full, like Heading → INT You'an Scriptorium · NIGHT. The layout uses the real screenplay typesetting, so what you see is what accepting gives you.

A small pill floats top-right saying N changes, next to Accept all in this file. Until you press Accept, not one byte of the file has changed.

The whole system — the four markers, what "stale" means, how a batch merges into one spot — is in reviewing AI changes in place, including why you can still review on a phone.

Right-click a line: no panel needed

Right-click any line and the menu carries, alongside copy, split and the note types, a row of AI quick actions: Polish / Expand / Rewrite / Condense / Comment / Inspire, plus Add to Chat.

Unlike .md, you don't have to select anything first. With no selection the target is the whole line — right-clicking a line of dialogue means you want something done to that line.

Polish is what the old docs called "dialogue polish". It has the book's context, so asking it to keep a character's way of speaking is a reasonable request — except that the voice now comes from your screenplay itself and from the character sheet you wrote, not from fields in a character bible (see characters: the cast list and character sheets).

Add to Chat sends the line into the AI Writing Coach panel as context, which is what you want when the problem isn't that line but the shape of the whole scene.

Chapter Analysis works on screenplays too

A .script has a prose rendering, so Chapter Analysis is available for it — all four analyses on the right panel's analysis tab run: Pacing Scan / Dialogue / Repetition / Consistency.

That happens to replace two promises from the old article: the old "scene structure analysis" is roughly the pacing scan, and "character consistency" is Consistency. The difference is that the unit is now one episode, one file, not a season. For anything you need to see across episodes, a beat board or a timeline reads better.

Analysis only runs when you press it, behind a two-step confirmation. Nothing analyses in the background. What each of the four looks for is in the Insight overview.

Setups, payoffs and consistency now live in notes

The old "setup / payoff proofing" leaned on a foreshadowing column in the old notes tab. The same work happens in notes now: right-click a line → Add Setup (Foreshadow) or Add Payoff (Resolve), and the note anchors to that line. AI can read notes and write notes, so "did every setup pay off?" is still a question you can ask — the answers just live in the notes panel rather than a screenplay-only tab. See setup and payoff notes and notes and AI.

The runtime estimate now moves when AI writes a scene

The Est. Xm / target m readout on the toolbar is recalculated live: every scene's dialogue and action are re-scanned each time. It used to read a stored value, so scenes written by AI or over MCP counted as zero — which is exactly why "I asked AI to write a scene and the runtime didn't move" happened. Accept a change now and the number moves with it.

When it says it can't

Ask the same thing in Ink Tide (Screenplay) and it does it; ask in a book you just created and you get advice instead of an edit. That isn't a fault. The seven screenplay tools are not present in every conversation: they turn on when this book already contains a .script, or you have one open, or AI just created one for you — any one of the three. The test and the fix are in why AI can sometimes edit structure and sometimes can't.

Related

• Docs: AI structural editing
• Docs: Reviewing AI changes in place
• Docs: Why AI can sometimes edit structure and sometimes can't
• Docs: What the AI Coach is
• Docs: Quick actions on a selection
• Docs: Characters: the cast list and character sheets
• Docs: Structure: acts and beats against files
• Docs: The old Script Studio: what still works