A robot recently wrote a script that was subsequently made into an actual science fiction film. The result was a short movie titled “Sunspring,” starring Thomas Middleditch of Silicon Valley.
Director Oscar Sharp and AI researcher Ross Goodwin of New York University provided scripts of several sci-fi movies to the recurrent neural network, which named itself Benjamin. There were various popular titles included to provide the robot scriptwriter with its creative juices, such as Ghostbusters, The Fifth Element and Interstellar, among others. The result was the short movie, “Sunspring.”
The Guardian wrote that after feeding the different movies, the robot was required to write a screenplay and actor directions, based on a set of prompts. The screenplay and pop song that was written were forwarded to the cast to be interpreted and turned into the film, “Sunspring.” Parts were assigned to actors randomly.
Sharp shared that when they had a read-through of “Sunspring,” they were all laughing with delight. The robot managed to create a dark sci-fi plot with elements of love and despair. People can make some sense when taking the sentences singly, although they may not understand the dialogue fully when the statements are read together.
ArsTechnica revealed that in “Sunspring,” there are three individuals living in a strange futuristic setting. They seemed to be involved in a love triangle inside a space station. H (MIddleditch) has a shiny gold jacket on. H2 (Elisabeth Gray) is dealing with computers, while C (Humphrey Ker) said that he has to head to the skull and then placed his face into green lights.
Sharp came up with the project for Sci-Fi London, an annual film festival that features the 48-Hour Film Challenge, where competitors were provided with a set of prompts, consisting mostly of props and lines, that need to appear in the resulting film. They have to create the movie within 48 hours only.
The line of dialogue from Sci-Fi London was, “It may never be forgiven, but that is just too bad,” and a stage direction, which the AI converted into a script. In turn, Sharp adapted it into a movie. The pop song in “Sunspring” was also made by Benjamin based on 30,000 other pop songs.
The creation of “Sunspring” is another breakthrough in the field of robots, showing that AI can now be almost as creative as humans in writing songs and scripts. More updates and details are expected soon.
