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.

Comments

Re:When is it "life"?

[pellik]

We seem to incrementally moving towards smarter and more complex AI.

Clearly you didn't watch the linked film before commenting.

Uh, not really.

[Bruce Perens]

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.

"Hilarious and Intense"?

[Anonymous Coward]

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".

Re:"Hilarious and Intense"?

[guruevi]

This was written for a film festival type audience, if you've ever seen those shorts, you'd see it's actually relatively close and if they didn't tell you it was written by an AI would definitely win 'most artistic' or whatever category. There is a semblance of a line in the plot, there is a lot of repetition which is a giveaway but otherwise a nice amount of short stretches of line.

Hilarious and Intense?

[pr0t0]

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.

Re:Hilarious and Intense?

[AthanasiusKircher]

I blame the translation - I'm sure it sounded much more coherent in the original Klingon. :)

While I know this comment is meant to be funny, there's potentially something really insightful here. Thinking about this comment after watching a bit of the film here made me think about a rough analog to this film in comedy, namely the classic stand-up act where a comedian "imitates" a foreign language without actually knowing how to speak it. Sid Caesar, for example, was particularly well-known for this. (If you've never seen what I'm talking about, here's an example of Sid Caesar doing this schtick.)

In his act, Caesar would make it sound (sort of) like another language by doing two things: (1) throwing in a few random words, names, or phrases that might be known to tourists or might be associated with the language (e.g., proper names), and (2) filling up the rest of the stuff around these actual foreign words with gibberish that incorporated some of the sounds and cadences of native speakers. (How successful he was at this gibberish imitation is of course up for debate; but it was close enough to work for comedy.)

Anyhow, the ONLY difference I can see between Sid Caesar's gibberish and this screenplay (and most "AI chatbot" output these days, for that matter) is that the constituent parts of the language to create the "gibberish" are larger. For Sid Caesar, he didn't know the languages, and memorizing thousands of words or phrases in the language for a comedy schtick would sort of defeat the purpose of the act.

But for a computer, it's trivial to feed in millions of words and phrases in English (or whatever language), or even millions of words and phrases from various sci-fi screenplays. So, rather than gibberish happening on the level of a phoneme or the level of a few syllables that sound like common words in a language (as in Sid Caesar), instead we have gibberish happening on the level of combinations of words, phrases, and whole sentences -- which sound like they're thrown together somewhat haphazardly.

The other thing that "sells" Sid Caesar's routine are those "anchor words" or proper names that do carry at least some meaning (often random or nonsensical, but at least they're familiar to the audience). Same thing with this AI: there is a spark of familiarity to sci-fi dialogue or phrasing in places, which in a better film might be an allusion to another movie or something, but here it often just sounds weird and arbitrary (like Sid Caesar's routine).

And the last thing that one needs to make Sid Caesar's routine work is his acting -- the way he declaims and shapes the sounds, as well as his body language and gesturing, is also what adds a cultural note that makes it all more "human." That's what the actors add in this filmed version too: if you just look at the text screenplay, it all seems like nonsense. But the actors here TRY their best to make SOME sense out of it.

I think it's very telling that some people are trying to characterize this as "hilarious," while other people in this thread have compared it to bad art films or something. I think zany comedies and art films can contain a lot of stuff that seems confusing or random, often because they're deliberately defying convention (or sometimes deliberately alluding to another film or cultural idea). The randomness in zany comedy comes from the knowing juxtaposition of elements that will seem bizarre. The confusing elements of art-house film to those "not in the know" are often due to knowing frustrating of convention or allusion to a complex web of previous films or whatever.

This screenplay has these random elements -- except not because the AI is deliberately going away from conventions, of course. The AI just doesn't "understand" ANYTHING. So, it comes across as a really bad imitation of zany comedy combined with "art" cinema, since the reference

Re:When is it "life"?

[Lumpy]

I did... and I have been to Cannes Film Festival... It's nearly identical to some of the horribly artsy tripe filmed and passed off as art.

Re:When is it "life"?

[MightyMartian]

Beats the hell out of Michael Bay.

Re:When is it "life"?

[Dutch Gun]

It's actually pretty easy to get computers to write *almost* coherent prose simply by feeding it the text of a few novels and getting to regurgitate it back out based simply on some simple algorithms, like word order and basic structural analysis, combined with a few rules about character interaction. It sounds like that's exactly what they did here. What this represented was not AI, but a form of data analysis. An interesting experiment, to be sure, but that's really all.

I listened to a few minutes of this, and it sounds exactly like the sort of output you'd expect from such an algorithm. It almost sounds right, but there's no real meaning there at all. The computer had no idea what it was regurgitating. It was only the human directors and actors that even gave that gibberish a hint of meaning, and it was still a stretch.

Re:When is it "life"?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you told people this was a script written by Andy Warhol or some other famous weirdo, the critics would fawn all over it, find all kinds of hidden meanings and metaphors in it, and claim anyone who didn't understand it was just beneath it. It would sell for millions of dollars.