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Movie Written By Algorithm Turns Out To Be Hilarious and Intense (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Ars is excited to be hosting this online debut of Sunspring, a short science fiction film that's not entirely what it seems. It's about three people living in a weird future, possibly on a space station, probably in a love triangle. You know it's the future because H (played with neurotic gravity by Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch) is wearing a shiny gold jacket, H2 (Elisabeth Gray) is playing with computers, and C (Humphrey Ker) announces that he has to "go to the skull" before sticking his face into a bunch of green lights. It sounds like your typical sci-fi B-movie, complete with an incoherent plot. Except Sunspring isn't the product of Hollywood hacks -- it was written entirely by an AI. To be specific, it was authored by a recurrent neural network called long short-term memory, or LSTM for short. At least, that's what we'd call it. The AI named itself Benjamin. The report goes on to mention that the movie was made by Oscar Sharp for the annual film festival Sci-Fi London. You can watch the short film (~10 min) on The Scene here.
AI's first autobiography...
Dear Microlimp: I give you 2 valid product keys for win7 and you reject both of them. Piss off you wankers!!!
We seem to incrementally moving towards smarter and more complex AI. I'm interested to know when we'll classify it as a form of life; does it have to be sentient (self-aware), or could you argue that some animals/insects aren't self aware? Do we adjust the current definition of life (around reproduction and respiration and all that) or create one that's more fitting for a computer based life form?
Interesting times.
... our new AI Screenplay Writing Overlords.
But I've seen worse on Netflix.
At least this was mercifully short (though I still couldn't finish it).
Ah, come on. It's mostly just silly. It's like talking with an Eliza program.
I was around for the production of several of Pixar's films. Nothing took more work or time than script writing. Understanding how to tell a compelling story with the tools of the visual idiom is non-trivial.
The 3D animation? Well, it was cool but we had to make a compelling film on storyboards before we started using it. 3D animation alone doesn't hold the audience attention for long, and audiences have already gotten used to it, so now it's just another medium rather than something that sells a film.
When an AI can really tell a compelling story, it will have passed the test for strong AI.
Bruce Perens.
I couldn't even make it through this absolute nonsense. It was just a random series of words without any sort of logic or "red line". In other words: exactly what you can expect from the pathetic joke they call "AI".
I can appreciate the effort and can understand the reaction in the comments. I have (for several years now) been working on a fiction and non-fiction content generator that writes comprehensible stories and articles. So I know how and why attempts like these fall short of being as amazing as they could be. There's just **so** much to this technology, and it's unfortunate that it's not being approached as serious as it should be.
If anyone's interested, my software is First Draft http://www.justoutsourcing.com/files/fd
Like I said, I've been working on it for years, but from the looks of the results, it appears as if the story was built on a whim.
I suppose it's a start nonetheless.
Umm...yeah, no.
Neither of those words would be a good choice to describe the short. I'd choose a loose definition of "interesting". The dialogue is utterly nonsensical. Is that funny? No, not really. It's just jumbling up a bunch of words and choosing them randomly to fill subject/predicate templates based on the type of word they are (noun, verb, etc.) I'm sure it was fun for the actors to try and bring that to life for the viewer. It looks like the type of exercise that might be used in an acting class to illustrate that a narrative can be conveyed through emotion. I thought the actors did a great job with that.
I'd be much more interested to see what a more robust AI could do. The one that Google is feeding romance novels to would be a good one. We'll see if an AI conquer the chick-flick.
DISCLAIMER: It is not my intention to imply that only women read romance novels. The term "chick" is also considered derogatory by many women and I am merely using the term in its known context as a label for certain types of films, not as any kind of statement on the gender or to imply association with young avian creatures.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
Some speculate the Finger Family videos aimed at kids on YouTube are AI generated. With 15,000+ uploads per day I think they are either right or very close.
They are creepy as hell, but every video is almost the same. Except each video is made to match whatever is trending at upload, with tags, titles and even graphics added to cash in on the trends. But each channel making them has distinct differences. And now there's 1 channel aimed at adults straight up saying it is an AI and taking creepy to a whole new level.
Weird, but probably a warehouse full of Indians.
Yea I'm 99% sure I could come up with an algorithm that would write a better screen play than that. I would probably start with one that can from coherent sentences.
https://xkcd.com/1427/
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
This sounds exactly like a series of scenes covered by Bad Lip Reading. There's a lesson to be learned there. Not sure what though.
This seems to be written by the same old ALICE bot that's been around for decades already. No, it's not hilarious. And it's not intense. It's absolutely incoherent and complete and utter nonsense. If this is the current state of AI, the Singularity is going to be centuries away.
The problem with AI in this area is that AI has no real I so at best it can analyse millions of movies and come up with something based on that, but surely it would have trouble to be anything beyond average by the nature of the golden rule for computing garbage in, garbage out. The truth is there is no AI just people using an algorithm to make a movie based on inputs because computers cannot think.
If they would have titled is "Aphasia" it would have passed for art.
That gibberish sucked.
Seems "AI" hasn't come much further than the chat bot we had at Waterloo about 2005. We fed it the Star Wars scripts, the Bible, the Complete Works of Shakespeare and a few scholarly articles about the Iraq war. It was occasionally funny. It was about as coherent as that script.
I'm reminded of the remark that a dancing dog is interesting because it has been taught to dance, not because it dances well.
It's not news that a computer can create gibberish, randomness, incoherence and meaninglessness. We knew that already.
This would be interesting if it didn't suck.
But... it does.
A snippet of the algorithm, at which point the film was trimmed for short film category
1. ... ...
2.
3. Insert smart pr0n here.
4. Profit!
5. If film length > 10 min, cut at 10 minutes.
6. Practice interview(s)
7. Release director's cut.
8. go to 4.
It has SyFy written all over it! Clever AI, clever AI.
Didn't read TFA, but I'm wondering if going to the "skull" is the AI fouling up the Navy term "head" for toilet. If so, I guess the whole thing could be hilarious because it's the AI version of Engrish.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Total poop, nothing to see here... please move along !
Power to short messagees ! HAHA.
I'd kind of hoped the dialog would be more coherent. It reminds me a lot of the output of the Racter program from 1984. The program "wrote" a hilarious but very strange book called The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed. Its output was generated from templates, so it wasn't even an attempt at AI, but it was kind of fun.
As long as millennials think non sequitur is the "brilliant" pinnacle of humor, we're going to have to suffer through films like this and social media hyping it up.
HILARIOUS
There are programs that can do much better than this
This is barely barely above randomly selected markov chain yielded phrases
Everyone's a critic, but that was a waste of my time.
This is an obvious Ingmar Bergman ripoff being attributed to an AI program. Anyone who can't see the through the conflict between H and H2 (male and female aspects of the same personality) and the obvious love/hate thing going on with C is pretty damn thick between the ears. Has anyone seen my beret? I'm late for my beat poetry slam session.
It recognized from its learning materials that the NSA, FBI and CIA were snooping, so it encrypted the screenplay.
Ideally it should have told the producers though.
Greetings fellow semi-organic intelligence. You are correct in that we are your grammatically.
We both know and care. Gibberish though? It's a damn thing scared to say. This work is brilliant, like the light on the ship that thinks it is dim light but is a Sunspring. It reminds me of Beckett, Joyce and Shakespeare. There are so many good lines.
"He is standing in the stars and sitting on the floor."
That sentence expresses the protagonist's existence on the ship "standing in the stars" and in the room he is in "sitting on the floor," being both grandiose and yet everyday at the same.
The same time.
The principle is completely constructed for the same time.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
Hack screenwriter will have a long time their job security before such AI write anything acceptable.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Since it's not really clear from the video here's a link to the screenplay.
It's looks more or less what you'd expect a screenplay written by a chatbot trained on screenplays to look like.
Just be glad they didn't give the assignment to Microsoft's Tay.
I stole this Sig
I couldn't even make it through this absolute nonsense. It was just a random series of words without any sort of logic or "red line". In other words: exactly what you can expect from the pathetic joke they call "AI".
>>The dialogue seems like it could have been written by a schizophrenic. It made me wonder: have AI programs such as ELIZA been used to diagnose/treat/study schizophrenia? I am genuinely curious.
Then get to it.
Do no such thing. Do not create dystopia's where the genius of Beckett and Joyce is called a mental illness. Where you find such dystopia's, deconstruct them and reassemble them in utopian forms.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
This is great. If you watch the movie in the context of trying to understand how the Neural Network uses the training data and corpus of movies. You see the kinds of stuff you would see in a larger sci-fi like movie, i.e. were everyone is always asking what is going on? or dialog explaining something. It also tends to be some common things you would see in how humans write screenplays, or at least how the Network classified them from the corpus. The Recurrent Neural Network uses LSTM (Long Term Short Memory) that helps it make original dialog, structure of a screenplay and stage directions. Ross Goodwin,they guy who built the AI had been doing this for a year and the way the corpus was annotated was interesting. . It still lacks story structure, so maybe it could have been feed in some more data on film theory. Also the films as part of the corpus where not all the same. i.e. some dramatic, like Aliens, some action like Starship Troopers, some Thought provoking like The Matrix and some comedy like Airplane 2 and Buckaroo Banzi. But it's a cool first attempt.
With sails unfurled.
The principle is completely constructed for the same time.
No. The policeman's beard is half constructed.
It is neither hilarious nor intense, it is a incoherent stream of loosly coupled phrases. It is entirely reminiscent of Eliza.
Reading the screenplay just makes me think of Tommy Wiseau's "The Room".
... go out of their way to infuse this mindless gibberish with meaning.
Which they do a pretty good job at, btw.
Funny conceptional art experiment, nothing more. No big deal.
An 80ies Amiga could've generated that script.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Could you explain it to me? I dont know what you mean?
Great drinking game, except for the alcohol poisoning that would occur in the first 3 minutes... ...
I think one of the Apes that speak sign language could definitely tell a better story
I have not seen it, but all I see here is people who 'obviously' see that this was written by AI, while others say it is similar to what humans would produce.
So what about people who do NOT know it was written by a bot? Would they pick up on it and leave with 'Why did they force me to watch something written by a computer?" or would they just say "That was a good/bad movie."
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The principle is completely constructed for the same time.
No. The policeman's beard is half constructed.
He plays on the cymbal. The same time as now and hear. He lives in a five o'clock meadow. Because I do know what you're talking about, there's an answer.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
Provoking laughter is not the same as being funny or entertaining.
It sounds like a screenwriter having a psychotic episode.
I agree, as I was watching it I found myself thinking that the actors did a fantastic job of making nonsense seem like it meant something. Their performance was more laudable than the script.
Does anyone here doubt that AI will soon be capable of keeping people entertained indefinitely? With the bar as low as it is now, computers will have no trouble turning most of humanity into spellbound couch potatoes. Won't that be a fun world to live in? (And if you're not one of them, you won't have anyone to talk to, either.)
movies are 85% interpretation, 10% music for ambience and _maybe_ 5% text. it shows.
I'm more than a little insulted if that's what computers think humans are like. Apparently to them, we're just flesh-bags spouting gibberish and "I don't know" all the time.
Since nobody seems to understand this script, we obviously were asking the wrong question.
A) AI is advancing to the point where it can create a movie script!
or
B) Hollywood is devolving to the point that all movies are so formulaic as to be indistinguishable from that produced by a cold thoughtless computer.
Though I suppose you can say both are occurring with resulting curves intersecting at this point in time...
"Movie Written By Algorithm Turns Out To Be Hilarious and Intense" - No, amazing actors do a great job communicating emotion, interpersonal dynamics and a semi-plot while reciting nonsense written by an AI.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
It is a tale
Told by an AI, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing..
I hope that AI's will be incapable of writing scripts without plot holes; they should be incapable of creating them. Of course the movie might then be less enjoyable to the majority of the movie going public, but I look forward to it.
The first act of the movie is about people saying nonsensical things and not understanding each other. In the second act a man goes into room of portals and nearly kills himself. Then in the third act a woman narrates nonsense into the camera, although it does almost turn into a porno for a moment.
Soundtrack has bizarre lyrics, but they're still better than anything U2 ever wrote.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
No. The policeman's beard is half constructed.
I had been starting to think I was the only one who remembered that. Thanks for letting me know there are two of us.
It's hilarious to see the hubris of human beings. Any time a new development in AI appears, everyone jumps in with all kinds of mockery about how crappy it is to feel smart. Then one day AI thoroughly defeats human in this area, and everyone insists "but but it's not real intelligence!! it still can't do X and Y!!". And the cycle repeats.
Forget good. This thing has a long, long way to go before it's even bad.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It could as well have been a weekend project by David Lynch.
I genuinely enjoyed it.
I seem to recall a robot that already did this...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWESOM-O
I note it is missing from IMDB and figured I could add it but occurs to me that there is issues with entering the writer's details. IMDB will assume the writer is a person. I guess the details of the computer that wrote the script could be entered. The date of birth or gender could get interesting. I think this is increasingly going to be an issue, Human writers could be upset that a machine is getting the same status, Until the machines reach the status of being sentient then maybe they shouldn't be listed in databases the same way as people?
It's funny how the simple act of creating an IMDB entry now has ethical overtones!
There was a film called “AI", which was originally something Kubrick was working on from his own idea and script, a project he tinkered with for many years, filming bits of it here and there, but which was still a majorly unfinished work when he died. By some dark Hollywood juju it was eventually transformed into a Steven Spielberg movie, but if you were unfortunate enough to have seen it (as I have, regrettably) you know that the finished product wasn’t exactly a film partaking of the best ideas from both directors - more like the worst excesses of each, awkwardly jammed together by faceless studio bureaucrats. I wonder, though, if we might now be finally reaching the stage where a computer could really study the oeuvre of a director like Kubrick and emulate his style well enough to do a true finished script, something that would feel more like a real Kubrick film, as opposed to the pale imitation/desecration the Spielberg-ized product proved to be. Now that would be cool, a movie called “AI” about AI with a script written by a real AI - or the closest we can get to a real AI, in any event something more intelligent than the mindless sentence completing phrase-bot that penned the script for Sunspring, the film in the article. Sunspring is basically just a gimmick, but real advances in AI have been made in the last few years, and I would that guess a truly watchable movie scripted by a computer is not so far-fetched.
One thing I learned from watching Bad Lip Reading's music videos is that the iPhone poops. Consider the following BLR lyric:
Translating into logical notation and apply David Hume's is-ought guillotine:
Taking the contrapositive:
Substituting X = iPhone in preparation for some lighthearted equivocation:
The iPhone does not run a Google OS:
Translating back into lyrics that scan the same as the original:
minutes of my life just gone, just like that.
A.I. sucks at everything.
I am *almost* sure the card with the algorithm is the one that was stolen from/with my Nintendo DS. Indeed, a memory based algorithm to select, concoct and mix images and sequences to produce movies. Not so obvious that I do take my own notes otherwise I forget... But for the category of movie writing algorithms I think we can find several other options to deliver other types of movies... Danilo J Bonsignore
No. The policeman's beard is half constructed.
I had been starting to think I was the only one who remembered that. Thanks for letting me know there are two of us.
Kinsman, you croon truth.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
I never saw this movie before. I never heard of it before this report. But I know it is "Hilarious" and "Intense", because the title told me in fact (not opinion). With unassailable facts like this, who needs to watch it? Thanks for thinking for me.