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.
Knowing that an AI wrote Sunspring makes the movie more fun to watch, especially once you know how the cast and crew put it together. Director Oscar Sharp made the movie for Sci-Fi London, an annual film festival that includes the 48-Hour Film Challenge, where contestants are given a set of prompts (mostly props and lines) that have to appear in a movie they make over the next two days. Sharp's longtime collaborator, Ross Goodwin, is an AI researcher at New York University, and he supplied the movie's AI writer, initially called Jetson. As the cast gathered around a tiny printer, Benjamin spat out the screenplay, complete with almost impossible stage directions like "He is standing in the stars and sitting on the floor." Then Sharp randomly assigned roles to the actors in the room. "As soon as we had a read-through, everyone around the table was laughing their heads off with delight," Sharp told Ars. The actors interpreted the lines as they read, adding tone and body language, and the results are what you see in the movie. Somehow, a slightly garbled series of sentences became a tale of romance and murder, set in a dark future world. It even has its own musical interlude (performed by Andrew and Tiger), with a pop song Benjamin composed after learning from a corpus of 30,000 other pop songs.
more info -
http://arstechnica.co.uk/the-multiverse/2016/06/sunspring-movie-watch-written-by-ai-details-interview/
13 Comments
MilkmanDansays...So awesome -- some of the lines that sound like they would be very poignant if they weren't utter nonsense...
"I was going to be a moment."
MilkmanDansays...This *must* get more views. *promote
siftbotPromoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Friday, June 10th, 2016 6:06pm PDT - promote requested by MilkmanDan.
eric3579That got pretty deep *quality
Kinda like Interstellar but BETTER!
siftbotBoosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by eric3579.
Jinxsays...I thought there was a certain poetry to "He looks at me and he throws me out of his eyes"
So awesome -- some of the lines that sound like they would be very poignant if they weren't utter nonsense...
"I was going to be a moment."
entr0pyHere's the full text if you want to see the stage directions also written by the AI. It explains some of the more bizarre visuals. Here's an example.
https://www.docdroid.net/lCZ2fPA/sunspring-final.pdf.html
kingmobsays...I don't know if it was really written by an AI but that was what got me interested. Just the concept even if that was just part of the story.
But the dialogue seemed like texts without context...and I really didn't see the Sci-Fi component expcept in the costuming.
Not my cup of tea.
artician"I need to leave, but I'm not free of the world."
Amen, brother.
Too much credit is being given to the AI here. It constructed semi-comprehensible sentences, but what we're watching was interpreted through the human production, and the rest was put together by our own nature to find patterns and sense in the incomprehensible. (i.e. We see what we want to see, and manufacture the meanings that mean something to us based on our experiences and environment).
newtboy"He was crazy to take it out."
I think he was more crazy to put it in in the first place.
PaybackThis is tech that will be co-opted by those people that make phishing emails that can't be thrown out by parsing.
coolhundsays...Politicians should let their speeches get written by it. They would make more sense and would be more honest that way.
KrazyKat42says...Better than Solaris.
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