Published

Sunspring.

Benjamin is a system-on-chip computer. He runs a long short term memoryrecurrent neural network. And he knows how to write screenplays. Benjamin’s creators, filmmaker Oscar Sharp and technologist Ross Goodwin, force fed him with dozens of different 1980s and 90s sci-fi screenplays they found online. Benjamin then dissected everything, and learned to predict which letters tended to follow each other and from there which words and phrases tended to occur together.

With this knowledge, Benjamin wrote Sunspring, and Oscar Sharp turned the AI’s screenplay into a movie for the annual Sci-Fi London film festival. Will artificial intelligence put Hollywood screen writers out of work anytime soon? Judge for yourself.

Personally, I think the answer is “no”. This thing is wildly incoherent, and most of it doesn’t make much sense. At least not as a sci-fi movie. As one of those artsy movies, perhaps, because Benjamin’s work is certainly open to interpretation. Or, has he created something that we humans haven’t evolved to a high enough intellectual level to fully understand?