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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.
Clearly you didn't watch the linked film before commenting.
Keep in mind, the bar is set low here. Is it smarter and more complex, producing better quality movies than say, Uwe Boll?
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
But I've seen worse on Netflix.
At least this was mercifully short (though I still couldn't finish it).
I'd say its at least as good as JJ Abrams
Or maybe he did. If you read his post, it was about as thoughtful as that totally incoherent 9 minutes of acting.
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".
given that "as good" == "as bad"
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
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.
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.
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
https://xkcd.com/1427/
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
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. :)
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.
Beats the hell out of Michael Bay.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
You're right; I'm at work, so I forwarded myself the link to watch it later. The topic just got me thinking! :D
And then I went off on all sorts of tangents from there...
To be fair, when she was repeating those lines, the man's dialogue seemed somewhat more fluid.
Maybe AI is just reinforcing the gender stereotyping where a genius nerd tries to explain his bleeding edge research to an unbelievably hot wife (Alicia in A Beautiful Mind, Penny in TBBT, Evelyn in Transcendence etc).
If they would have titled is "Aphasia" it would have passed for art.
When it has persisted for a billion years. AI just gonna give up. If we understood desire and pain, maybe we could construct a simalacrum.
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.
We aren't even close to AI. This article has to be a joke.
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"?
Indeed, it was basically just a chatterbot. But it was still funny :)
Maybe, but I can barely make out what you're saying because your horse is too high.
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.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
So what you're saying is those writers are as bad as a shitty algorithm. Only difference is, they were *trying* to be shitty.
HILARIOUS
There are programs that can do much better than this
This is barely barely above randomly selected markov chain yielded phrases
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.
Hollywood writers have been getting dumber and dumber over time. They want cheap writers who don't know to ask for more money, too young to remember the writer's strike, and they grab a bunch and shove them in a room. So you get a million plot holes, a bizarre conception of how society works, laughable science, and so forth. In a single hour episode they can't manage to keep continuity. They focus on entertainment and ignore reality, and you see fans who don't mind this ("but it had a great fight scene!", "I thought the cast was cute", "you science types are just so picky, sit back and enjoy it!").
So ya, the AI is probably better.
I still think about Eraserhead and wonder "what the hell did that mean?" Is an AI going to have the same sort of lasting value that haunts you through the years?
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.
Hollywood writers have been getting dumber and dumber over time. They want cheap writers who don't know to ask for more money, too young to remember the writer's strike, and they grab a bunch and shove them in a room.
Ya, but if you were to give a bunch of these writers enough time, you might just get Shakespeare.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The principle is completely constructed for the same time.
No. The policeman's beard is half constructed.
Have to give credit to the actors and producers for managing to stage something halfway reasonable out of the horrid script.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It is neither hilarious nor intense, it is a incoherent stream of loosly coupled phrases. It is entirely reminiscent of Eliza.
... 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
Not the writers are getting dumber, the movie consumers are. The writers just cater to them.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
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.
That kind of sums up why I no longer waste time going to the movies. That being said, there are a handful of decent ones out there, but they are hard to find, and tend to not stay in the theaters for very long.
TV is worse - they went into this "reality" black hole to avoid having to pay lots of writers. But to say that they are unscripted isn't correct either - I believe that there are elements to the shows added to make them more "interesting", and I suppose someone comes up with that crap, and their job title might be something along the lines of "writer".
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.
It's about as coherent as an M. Night Shamalayan movie, without the predictable twist ending.
Movies so bad a series was created to make fun of them. AI's 1st attempt at making a movie is not so bad when compared to the other garbage out there.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
I do wonder how many takes some of these took. Seriously, i'm impressed by the straight face during the speech by the female lead at the end: 'I can go home and be so bad'. WTH? I'd be giggling.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
To the contrary, I think the computer knew exactly what it was doing. Look at these "seeds":
Title: Sunspring
Dialog: "It may never be forgiven, but that is just too bad."
Prop & Action: A character pulls a book from a shelf, flips through it, and puts it back.
Optional Science Idea: In a future with mass unemployment, young people are forced to sell blood.
The computer did just what a human writer would do. It said, "What is this bullshit? Okay, bitches, you want a screenplay based on nonsense, I'll give you a screenplay based on nonsense!"
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
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.
Have to give credit to the actors and producers for managing to stage something halfway reasonable out of the horrid script.
Are we still talking about the AI-generated short film?
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
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
Yes. What part of what I said confused you?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I can think of one Michael Bay movie I'd like to see. He could make a spoof of Transformers where the robots all hunt down and beat the crap out of Michael Bay. It would probably still be over-the-top CGI garbage, but I think I'd pay to see it.
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.
I did NOT hit her. I did not. Oh, hai Mark!
It could as well have been a weekend project by David Lynch.
I genuinely enjoyed it.
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:
I... don't know what you're talking about :-)
Frankly, it felt like I was watching three people who had sniffed too much gasoline fumes, I don't think any screenwriters have to worry about losing their jobs.. not yet,. anyways. And "hilarious and intense" ? Sure the summary wasn't also written by an AI? Think I'll stay with British comedy instead!
I forgot to mention that, as best as I could tell, it didn't even really "write" anything. The lines were already written.. at least that's how it appeared at the beginning of the film when they showed what they fed it. Given it was a screenplay, the AI likely wrote linking direction and actors suggestions ("wearing puzzled look" "Rises out of chair" etc) but for the rest it's like it simply shuffled the entered dialog like a pack of cards..
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.