The Coming Revolution In Writing For Television
How Agentic AI is going to change the business of writing for television in the next five years.
Introduction
2026 has been an interesting year for my spare time so far. I have been doing some writing on various projects, studying the impact of artificial intelligence on writing in general, and studying what its potential impacts on the writing of television might be.
The results are, to me, quite amazing. I’d like to share them with you, if you don’t mind. They are basically that there is a new wave of artificial intelligence coming along right as we speak, and it will change, well, everything, really, but it will make a huge, almost revolutionary impact on the business of writing, especially for writing for television.
If this sounds interesting to you, please continue reading. These are my thoughts regarding the coming revolution in writing for television.
Contents
Who Am I and What Am I Doing?
An Occasional Writing Hobby
An Amusing Introduction to AI
Writing Star Trek Fanfiction
Researching Writing for Television
A Striking Realization
The Virtual Writers’ Room
The Virtual Animation Studio
The Current State of AI Is Like The Early Days of Automobiles
What This Might Mean
How Do You Share This Information?
Conclusion
Who Am I and What Am I Doing?
I’m just an average guy who doesn’t write for a living. I have an average sort of job that pays the bills, and I write as a hobby, in my spare time. I have written all sorts of things over the years, but never tried to get them published. I am not in it to make money, it’s just a fun thing to do. Trying to publish it might turn it into work, and then it might not be so much fun any more. Or so I thought.
An Occasional Writing Hobby
Recently, since about the beginning of 2026, I have been playing around with the idea of writing fanfiction, something that I have never seriously considered before. Apparently, it can be a lot of work as well, but it sounds like fun.
The one thing I have learned about fanfiction is that there are basically no rules to the game. You can write anything you want, post it to The Internet, and share it with others if you like. How that turns out is a whole other ball of wax, one I am not writing about now, but I thought I might try it out. So I was thinking about what to write, and then this happened:
An Amusing Introduction to AI
I was idly piddling around on my Facebook page and ran across a meme from an artificial intelligence company, possibly ChatGPT, that said it could create a caricature of me based on information in my Facebook profile or just based on a few lines of text. This sounded like a harmless bit of fun, so I tried it out.
It created quite an interesting picture. Harmless fun. Then I began to think about it for a moment. Drawing a full-color picture of any person used to be quite a challenge. It took an artist, possibly a graphic artist trained on using digital tools, hours or even days to create a very complex image of a person. A simple sketch could take just minutes, but a colored image that looked really good was harder to make, used more materials, and took considerably more time.
Yet here comes artificial intelligence, and it can do the job in minutes, or seconds even. Even if the picture was personally unsatisfying, that mere act of creating it and so completely and so quickly is in actuality quite a shock when you compare it to the time, effort and skill needed for a human to do the job. Amazing.
While I thought this over, contemplating the potential meanings, I thought of something else to do to play with the technology while I was thinking. I had been, up to this time, trying to watch some of the new Star Trek television series, particularly Strange New Worlds. I was not satisfied with it much.
I am an old-school Star Trek fan, what I call a Grognard. The word grognard comes from the realm of historical war gaming, particularly the sort of gaming that history nerds like to do where they play or even create simulations of battles that actually happened in the past. They use paper maps, little chits of cardboard with very small text on them, and dice. It’s very complex, detail oriented, and a bit obtuse.
Those who love it can tend to be a bit obsessive and were nicknamed after the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte’s Old Guard soldiers, who were famously allowed to complain about their lot in life. I think the type of Star Trek fan that prefers the older types of Star Trek and very vocally dislikes the newer stuff is much like a war gaming Grognard, and ought to be identified as such. I certainly don’t like the kinds of Star Trek made since 2009 or so, and I don’t mind saying so. So I’m a Star Trek Grognard. (Are you?)
So when I was playing with the AI tool that was making images of me as a caricature, I suddenly thought of having it draw me in a Star Trek uniform, like a cosplayer at a convention. It did so, very quickly. I was immensely amused.
I had it make several different versions of the image, in different Star Trek uniforms. Great fun. Then it struck me: Since I could not find good Star Trek to watch on television, I ought to write up my own Star Trek fanfiction, and satisfy my Trek itch that way. More great fun. Cool.
Writing Star Trek Fanfiction
As I thought about this new idea, to write Star Trek fanfiction, I continued to make more pictures of people in Star Trek uniforms. I made pictures of each of the members of my family and a picture of my daughter’s fiancee as well. It made me think of using them as the crew of a starship, with myself as Captain, of course. As I thought up ideas to write, the AI did something amusing. It gave the image of me a name.
I had been playing with the image making tool for a while now and I had never given the AI my actual name. So it invented a name for the image of me that it had made several pictures of: Fred Beard. I couldn’t help but laugh.
I have a long white beard, so it named me after my beard. Great fun. So I had the AI generate fictional names for my family members to portray as well, and it quickly did so. Then it offered to create character backgrounds for these persons, as well. Suddenly, I was getting an entire set of detailed backstories and more. This would be great fodder for writing up fanfiction, I thought.
I then thought up several ideas for stories to write. Before I knew it, I was creating full outlines for stories that would include a Pilot Episode for a Star Trek television series and enough stories for an entire season’s worth of episodes. Before I was done with the planning stages, I had the basic ideas for four separate series of stories, enough material to write for years. Very cool.
What made this possible was that I was using the AI to not only create images of people in Star Trek uniforms, but images of sets and props and spaceships as well. As I looked into all of this, I also found out how AI can help you organize your thoughts to get ready to write stories. Using AI to help you write really speeds up the entire process, and can help you to write more material faster than you could on your own.
Suddenly, my little writing project was becoming quite a big deal. Then I began to encounter another issue I had never thought about before. I wanted to write my fanfiction in the format of television scripts. I just thought this would be fun. It became a lot of work, because writing television scripts can be quite a challenge indeed.
Researching Writing for Television
At first I collected a few books about writing for television. Since I collect books on the side, I dug through my collection and found even more books about writing for television. Then I began to research the topic on The Internet. Then, since I was using AI anyways, I began to use the AI to further research writing for television. There was an amazing amount of information available, and it all led to a lot of work.
I began to set up an entire training project to learn how to write for television. This led to an entire lesson plan, with step-by-step lessons filled with how-to tips and more. I am currently using this information to write up my Star Trek fanfiction stories, which are quite a lot of work, and quite a lot of fun, too. It beats watching disappointing television shows by a long shot.
As I learned about how writers work when they write for television, I began to understand more about how they did their work, and how their work was organized into Writers’ Rooms. With a little research, I found out about the history of Writers’ Rooms in television production. While I was doing this, I began to learn more about how AI is being used to write for television. This led to a couple of amazing realizations.
The world of artificial intelligence use in business, including the entertainment business and writing for television, is evolving quickly. What has been understood as AI is changing rapidly into something completely different than what came before, and this is happening sometimes before many people who have not yet used the technology realize. The type of AI that is coming next, that is going to change the very way people work, that may upend jobs and careers and change industries forever, is called Agentic AI, and it allows AI to do tasks, not just answer questions.
The Virtual Writers’ Room
As I began to also study the AI I was exploring to write with, I began to understand that the next wave of AI was going to allow me to replicate the work of an entire Writers’ Room with Agentic AI. It will be possible soon, perhaps in the next three to five years, for anyone with a computer and the right software, to do the writing jobs of up to a dozen or more writers working together. This is because of what Agentic AI can do.
Agentic AI doesn’t just look up stuff on The Internet and answer your questions. Agentic AI will work by allowing you to ask it to do a specific task. You simply tell it what you want it to do, it researches how to do it, it opens the programs to do the tasks, moves the mouse cursor and clicks on the right buttons to do the tasks, saves the files, and sends them to where they need to go next. Agentic AI actually does the work, it doesn’t just share information, it goes through the steps of creating information for you.
You line up enough AI agents to do the different jobs that need to be done, give them AI managers who organize the finished work and present it to you, and then you analyze the results and organize them into finished products. If writers do this for writing television, this will revolutionize the creation of television.
Right now, the actual number of writers assigned to write for television programs in Writers’ Rooms is dictated by contracts between Studios and the Writers Unions. But before a show is greenlit for production, smaller groups of writers are set up to create television show concepts and pilots. These smaller groups are sometimes called Mini-Rooms, and have three to five writers in them, sometimes with limited support staffs. It is here that AI-driven changes would occur first.
With Agentic AI, one or two showrunners with a smaller support staff would be able to do the jobs of a complete Mini-Room or even a full-size Writers’ Room. In other industries, Agentic AI is being set up to run many hundreds or thousands of AI agents with dozens or hundreds of AI managers, reporting to fewer humans who manage the entire process. What a Mini-Room can do for 80-90% less than the cost of a full Writers’ Room, a Virtual Writers’ Room can do for 97-99% less.
More impressively, a Virtual Writers’ Room will automate the tedious and time-consuming researching, note-taking and file management processes that slow down Mini-Rooms and full Writers’ Rooms. Such Virtual Writers’ Rooms will get more work done faster then current rooms can do. The end result for Studios will be that there will be more production units producing more script ideas and Pilot Episodes, of better production quality, than ever before.
Writers and showrunners will be able to field more story ideas faster, and more frequently than ever before. Studios will be able to process more television concepts more quickly, and for much less expense. As television audiences fragment further and get smaller, as potential markets shrink and diversify more and more, there need to be more and more less expensive programs presented. Virtual Writers’ Rooms will make this happen.
The Virtual Animation Studio
Now, I had been coming up with ideas for my Star Trek television series using AI to speed up production and thinking about all this for a couple of months. As I worked on my stories, I decided to work on the look and feel of my stories as well. My Star Trek stories are set in a time period before The Original Series, even before Strange New Worlds. But I wanted to make them different yet again.
So I decided to give them the look of Star Trek: The Animated Series instead of the various live-action TV series. This led me next into studying the production of animated television series. This led to me to then thinking about how future animated series would be effected by Agentic AI as well. If the results of Agentic AI would be revolutionary for the Writers’ Room, it would be downright shocking for animation production companies.
Just running a comparison of what it takes to create conventional animated television fare to that of what could be done with Agentic AI is astounding. What it takes dozens or hundreds of artists of all sorts to create today could be, with Agentic AI, created with as few as a dozen or fewer artists in the next few years. The technology exists now to create 3D animated, or combined partially 2D and 3D animated television series as it is. You need only to look at such films as Flow and War Is Over to see what is possible.
In fact, using tools like Unreal Engine rendering in real time, you can replace entire animation rendering farms with just a couple of computers and time. In five years time, a half a dozen artists spending the equivalent of the price of a used car will be able to produce the same output as a full animation studio on a complex and expensive rendering farm for 98-99% less cost. Amazing.
The Current State of AI Is Like The Early Days of Automobiles
So what is happening now, and what is possible, that makes all of these assumptions true? As I studied, and continue to study, Agentic AI and how it will be used in the future I came to realize three things:
The technology to do all this exists not in the future, but in a primitive state RIGHT NOW. It is buggy, breaks often (and spectacularly), and it is not ready for actual production work yet, but it is out there in the real world, you can get your hands on it now, and it can do amazing things. Just not quite well yet.
The primitive state I mentioned is akin to the state of affairs that existed in the early days of the automobile industry. The engines that make things go exist right now, they are very powerful and can do great things, but the rest of the package is not complete. Some parts of it haven’t even been imagined yet. This is like the early days of automobiles, when brakes were an afterthought, steering was rudimentary at best, and all the controls that made cars work in today’s world simply did not exist. Driver’s licenses, proper roads, traffic signs and signals, rules and regulations hadn’t even been imagined yet. This is where we are with AI today, and the next, more incredibly powerful wave is not just coming up next, it is already here and running without guardrails or protections yet.
In less than three to five years, all of this technology is going to be in everything that we do, everywhere. For the television industry, Writers’ Rooms and Animation Production Companies are going to be so radically changed as to make them practically unrecognizable today. The only things that are in place to regulate them as of yet are such things as the contracts between the Studios and the Writers Guilds. This will inevitably change, and anyone not changing with the times will be left behind or left out.
What This Might Mean
Especially for writers, artists, musicians, and other creators in the entertainment industry, combine all of the above suggestions with the tumultuous changes already going through the industry that are costing jobs and changing career paths, altering incomes and opportunities to work, and changing what is being produced and how it is being made, and you have a shattering and remaking of the entire worldview of what it means to create and share entertainment at all.
All of this is going to happen in the next three to five years (this is written in April 2026). By 2030, the landscape will be forever changed, and all those who do not change with it will be left behind or left out.
It is said that the next generation of youths is abandoning technology en masse, refusing to work with AI, and refusing to accept the work made by AI. As the other generations age out, what will happen to the very act of enjoying entertainment? Will there even be people creating entertainment on a large scale any more if the next generations will not consume what is produced? Or will everyone be watching the smallest screens, feeding their time with TikTok and YouTube videos instead? Who knows?
What is certain is that it will soon be possible for massively fewer people with much less hardware and much more sophisticated software to create materials as good or better than the old Hollywood ever made, for pennies on the dollar. This is amazing, revolutionary, and shocking. I am overwhelmed by the thought of it.
How Do You Share This Information?
So, what do you do with all of this information? I don’t know. I’ve looked into writing several of these points up into articles and sending them to periodicals for review or publication, but I’m just beginning to do that and don’t really know what I am doing. How do you publish an article in today’s world? I just don’t know.
So I will write up the articles anyways and maybe post them to a blog somewhere. I have a blog, Mogreland https://mogrelandia.blogspot.com/, but I hardly ever write to it and nobody ever reads it. Maybe I’ll just post my articles there.
I have emailed several publications doing such things as asking for writer’s guidelines, but have not yet heard back from any of them yet. Maybe I never will. Who knows?
Maybe trying to get published can be another big project. But again, I’m not trying to do this to make money, or get attention for myself. I just think that the information is interesting, and I’ve never seen anything like it presented anywhere else yet.
If I do publish the articles they will follow The Current State of AI Is Like The Early Days of Automobiles section above, with separate articles for:
The Virtual Writers’ Room
The Virtual Animation Studio
How the Current State of AI Is Like The Early Days of Automobiles
Who knows? Maybe someone would like to read them some day. It would be funny if they were only read after 2030, after it all came to pass anyways. I could always say, “I told you so”.
Conclusion
So, what does this all mean? If you are a creator, say a writer, or a visual artist, or a musician, or a filmmaker, the world is going to change incredibly in the next few years. It used to be that technological change meant a democratization of the availability and freedoms of the means to get things done. You could get computers and digital cameras and audio recorders and create your own video production company that fit into a briefcase, allowing you to create anything anywhere, and then go share it on The Internet for anyone to see and share further.
Now you are going to be able to manage a virtual team of people to do any kind of activity you want them to by assigning tasks to AI agents and letting them do the grunt work for you. You just do quality assurance to make sure the finished information is good, package the results together, and BAM! You’re done! The work is ready to be spread out there to the world.
You will be your own production company, your own studio. You just need to manage an outlet for your work, promote it and market it. And any part of that that is online can by automated, too. Amazing. Is your mind boggled? Mine is.
What do you think about that?
Christopher Nathan Carroll
chriscarroll.ogreoftheozarks@gmail.com
April 25, 2026
Springfield, Missouri, U.S.A.
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