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Syed Mohammed Ahmed is one of those names whose presence in Pakistan’s film industry is felt both on and off screen, with both acting and screenwriting credits on major projects throughout his long career.

But he says he’s no longer interested in doing the latter after studios and production companies keep changing his work to reflect their vision and the industry has gotten comfortable with letting his contemporaries churn out scripts using Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Speaking to Sheeba Khan on her podcast Dareecha, Ahmed said there were good writers out there who wrote decent scripts, only for producers to mangle their work in the pursuit of virality.

“Sarah Majeed is a good writer. She’s young, she has a knack for fun writing, but who are the ones getting this writing done, what do they do? They twist [writers’] arms. My own serial, that I’d written 17 episodes of, did they not ask me to delete everything past episode 11?”

He said screenwriters had no say in what they wrote and things were instead dictated to them.

When Khan asked why so many writers complained of people changing their work without permission, Ahmed said he had given them full permission to change his scripts as they saw fit.

“I gave them permission because my thoughts are my own. I can’t write as Sheeba, now can I? If, say, Sheeba wanted a particular script from me, how can I write as her, I can write as Mohammed Ahmed. So then I say, ‘Sheeba, this is what I’ve written, now you can tear it apart, do whatever you want to it.’ Because if they don’t get it even after I’ve rewritten it, then they can do it themselves.”

Another problem the screenwriter identified was the sheer lack of effort some other writers were putting into their work since it was going to be rewritten anyway.

“A lot of writers are now writing 26-episode scripts with the help of AI. And you can tell it’s with AI, because these writers don’t even try to change the dialogue to fit our culture. It’s not in the language that we speak because AI just wrote it and gave it to you.

“It takes me a good 10 to 11 months to write a single serial, then how are they churning out four serials a day? It’s not humanly possible” Ahmed exclaimed.

The writer said there was a serious issue of uncredited labour, where writers were having their students write scripts or people in content teams were editing AI-generated scripts, but none of them were being acknowledged “because names sell. [Production houses] want so and so to write because their name sells”.

Khan asked how writers could let studios do this. Her guest replied, “They’re desperate, everyone needs to earn money and run their household, I do too, I just decided not to write anymore. I just can’t write for them, I don’t have it in me… I can’t write toxic mothers and daughters-in-law, I just can’t.”

Ahmed said he had written a drama on a topic that was important to women in the world, but nobody seemed interested in a script that had a good chance of empowering girls in Pakistani households.

“Sheeba, there was such a deafening silence after people heard the script, nobody even responded, that’s what our society is. It would have exposed men… This is a secret we’ve suppressed for so long because we need our daughters-in-law as punching bags.”

He said that if his script had gone into production and aired on television, then “men would’ve cried, mothers-in-law would have cried and these TV channels for sure would have cried”.

“All these educated producers, or so-called educated producers, they went silent on it.”

The writer said there was a chance someone would take his idea and give it to someone else to write a script on later and asked Khan to remember him whenever that happened.