Written for the pitch package, then never opened again: that is the most common mistake with a series bible. Four ways of keeping it up to date compared, and the role AI can play without your show getting around.
The same scene plays out from one project to the next. The bible was written with care for the pitch package: forty pages, detailed character portraits, a season arc that holds up. Then the writing of the episodes began, one draft followed another, and nobody opened it again. By episode 5, the lead's older sister has become the younger one, a location has moved to another city, and the secret meant to come out at the end of the season was mentioned in passing in episode 3. The first person to notice is often the broadcaster's script executive.
The temptation at that point is to paste everything into a consumer AI tool with a "sort all this out for me". The whole bible then goes out, with the premise, the world and the twists, to a provider nobody chose. This guide compares the ways of keeping a series bible and shows where AI can help without your project circulating.
A bible is not a summary. It is the project's memory: the concept and tone, the world and its rules (a period, a milieu, a geography, sometimes a fantasy system), the recurring characters with their backstory, what they want, what they hide and how they relate to each other, the season arc and each character's arc, the episode list with what is at stake in each, and often ideas for later seasons.
That makes it the most sensitive document in the project. An episode script gives away one story; the bible gives away the entire mechanism, including the twists the audience should only discover in the final episode. It is the document that goes round producers, broadcasters and the writers who join the room, and it is the one you need to keep under control.
Copyright, in Switzerland as in most countries, protects a work in its form, not an idea as such. A series concept, a sketched-out world, an arc summed up in three lines are precisely what is easiest to take without it counting as copying. Until the project is signed, its protection rests mostly on the discretion of the people who read it.
Then there are your contractual commitments. An option or commissioning agreement, or a non-disclosure agreement signed with a production company, often requires the project not to be shared with third parties. Sending the bible to an outside service that keeps conversations is sharing it with a third party, even if nobody ever reads it. Finally, registering your drafts with a writers' guild or a copyright registration service remains the way to date your work: no writing tool replaces it.
In writers' rooms, you come across four ways of doing it. They do not perform equally on the same criteria.
| By hand (word processor, spreadsheet, wall of index cards) | Online shared document or the production's tool | Consumer AI | Confidential AI | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What leaves your hands | Nothing | The bible, with the document's host | The bible and the pasted episodes, with a provider nobody chose | Nothing to a third party with the confidential models |
| What is kept, and where | Your files, on your computer | Every version, on the host's servers | The history, often for a long time, with the provider | The history in your browser, nothing on our side |
| Who decides on access | You | The account holder, and whoever they invite | The provider's terms | You, by choosing the model |
| Spotting contradictions | On rereading, when you remember to | No better than by hand | Fast, but only on what you pasted | Fast, across the project's episodes and character notes |
| Effort to keep it updated | High, and that is where it all goes wrong | High, shared between several writers | Low, but everything has to be pasted again each session | Low: the drafts stay in an added folder |
| Working as a team | Sending files around | Easy, that is what it is for | Everyone on their own | Everyone in their own browser; a space can be exported and passed on |
By hand, if the project is still an idea of a few pages, or if your contract rules out any outside tool. It is the safest solution and the most fragile at the same time: over an eight-episode season, the bible falls behind as soon as the writing speeds up.
The shared document or the production's tool, when the production company has chosen it and the room has several writers. It is a sharing tool, not a consistency tool: it keeps the bible up to date only if someone takes charge of that. And it is the production company that decides where it is hosted.
Consumer AI, for whatever can be shown without harm: thinking about a genre, about season structure in general, about a question of dramatic craft with no detail from your project. Before pasting an extract into it, read the data you should never paste into an AI; and bear in mind that a world remains recognisable even when the characters' names have been changed, as our guide to anonymisation and pseudonymisation explains.
Confidential AI, as soon as the project really exists: a bible, episodes, a file that keeps growing. That is where AI is most useful, because it can reread everything, and where exposure would cost the most.
In IA Confidential, the bible becomes a "Writing" space, with one conversation per workstream: the characters, the world, the season arc, each episode in progress.
The project's rules, set once. In the space's Assistant tab, the space instructions fix what does not change: the genre, the period, the tone, the established facts (the sister is the older one, the story is set in Glasgow), and your working rule, for example "flag contradictions, don't resolve them". These instructions take precedence over your general preferences and apply to every conversation in the space.
The episodes stay on your computer. On a computer, with Chrome, Edge or Opera, you can add to the space the folder where the bible and the episode drafts live, ticking the "Confidential models" option: the folder is never sent to an external model. With a signed-in account, the assistant finds the relevant passages there by itself when you ask a question, and the search index stays in the folder, on your computer. Elsewhere, on a tablet or in another browser, you simply attach the files to your message.
Models that pass nothing on to third parties. By default, your requests are handled by open models installed on servers in Switzerland. For an unproduced bible, stay with them: they are more than enough for rereading, comparing and organising.
This is where the bible can be rebuilt from what has actually been written, rather than from what was planned:
Using episodes 1 to 4 of the series, draw up a profile of each recurring character: their backstory as it is shown or stated, what they want, what they hide, their relationships with the others. For each element, give the episode and the scene where it is established. Flag any contradiction with the bible, without resolving it and without rewriting anything.
You then compare these profiles with the ones in the bible, decide what is canon, and update the space instructions.
A cleaned-up bible. The corrected character profiles, the episode list, the statement of intent: the assistant writes them as documents that you can edit, print to PDF or export to Word or OpenDocument. The layout is redone: expect a clean, readable document, not the design of your pitch package.
On the arc, AI is a good checker and a poor writer. It quickly sees that a character stalls for three episodes in a row or that a subplot has no resolution. Its suggestions for twists, on the other hand, tend towards the predictable: don't ask it to write your season.
Here is the planned season arc for eight episodes, followed by a summary of the episodes already written. For each main character, tell me in which episode their arc moves forward, where it stalls for more than two episodes, and which subplots are left unresolved. Present it all in a table, with characters as rows and episodes as columns. Don't suggest any twists.
The resulting table is a starting point for discussion in the room, not a verdict. AI can make mistakes, attribute a line to the wrong character or invent a detail that is written nowhere: check every remark against the text before making corrections. The bible remains your work, and what it states is on your name.
Over a whole season, sessions run long. The context sent to the model is lightened automatically, with the recent exchanges plus a summary of the earlier ones, which keeps answers relevant late in the conversation; a conversation that has grown very long can also be compacted so you can start again from a clean base.
For a room with several writers, be aware that each writer's history lives in their own browser: there is no shared online space. You can export a space to a file and pass it on yourself to a co-writer, who imports it on their side. You choose who gets it and how.
With the confidential models, the bible, the episodes and your exchanges are processed on servers located in Switzerland, under the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection, outside the reach of the CLOUD Act, and nothing is kept on our side: the history stays in your browser. A folder added with the "Confidential models" option is never sent to an external model.
If you choose an external model for a question unrelated to the project, the Confidentiality filter first checks your message and offers to answer with a confidential model, message unchanged, or to send an anonymised version that you review. Sending it as it is remains your decision. For an unproduced bible, the simplest answer is still the confidential model.
An exported space file, on the other hand, leaves the tool: it goes by the means you choose, to the person you choose. And on a shared computer, such as the one in a writers' room, the history can be read by anyone using the same session: log out when you leave.
For the writing method itself, scene by scene, read our guide for screenwriters working on an unproduced script. And to rebuild the profile of a first character from your episodes: open the chat.
