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Movie Written By Algorithm Turns Out To Be Hilarious and Intense (arstechnica.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the non-fiction-science-fiction dept.

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.

4 of 160 comments (clear)

  1. AI's first... by messymerry · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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!!!
  2. Re:When is it "life"? by ChunderDownunder · · Score: 1, Interesting

    It seemed like a pastiche of 90s surrealism and certainly no worse than a film directed by David Lynch and starring Parker Posey and Jared Leto. :)

  3. Suddenly I feel less worried about the future by ssclift · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:Uh, not really. by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I have the front panel of the VAX 780 used to render the Genesis Effect in Star Trek II. It's on the wall of my office. I didn't keep the rest of the Vax, it was about the size of a mini-van, and ran at one MIPS.

    --
    Bruce Perens.