Stranger Things director’s snarky response to claims season five was written with ChatGPT

Did the Duffer brothers really use ChatGPT to write season five of Stranger Things? The internet certainly thinks so. In the new Netflix documentary One Last Adventure: The Making of Stranger Things 5, you can glimpse Ross Duffer’s laptop screen as he writes the script for the finale. Some viewers are convinced he has three tabs with ChatGPT open. The director of the Stranger Things documentary had a pretty stark response to claims the Duffer brothers wrote Stranger Things with ChatGPT.

When The Hollywood Reporter asked Martina Radwan about this, she said: “I mean, are we even sure they had ChatGPT open?”

She continued: “Well, there’s a lot of chatter where [social media users] are like: ‘We don’t really know, but we’re assuming.'”

It’s not 100 per cent clear whether ChatGPT is open
(Image via Netflix)

Radwan pointed out that if the Duffer brothers were using ChatGPT while they were writing Stranger Things, they may have been using it for “quick research”, instead of asking it to generate the script for them.

“But to me it’s like, doesn’t everybody have it open, to just do quick research? How can you possibly write a storyline with 19 characters and use ChatGPT? I don’t even understand. Again, first of all, nobody has actually proved that it was open. That’s like having your iPhone next to your computer while you’re writing a story. We just use these tools… while multitasking. So there’s a lot going on all the time, every time.

The Duffer Brothers had three ChatGPT tabs and one Reddit tab open while writing the ending of ‘STRANGER THINGS.’ pic.twitter.com/ESWa8Z1njT

— A Shot (@ashotmagazine) January 13, 2026

“What I find heartbreaking is everybody loves the show, and suddenly we need to pick it apart.”

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Radwan denied seeing either Matt Duffer, Ross Duffer, or any other Stranger Things writers use generative-AI in an “unethical way” while she was filming them for the documentary. She continued: “I witnessed creative exchanges. I witnessed conversation. People think ‘writers’ room’ means people are sitting there writing. No, it’s a creative exchange. It’s story development. And, of course, you go places in your creative mind and then you come back [to writing the script].

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Featured images via Netflix.