WATCH - Sunspring, A Film Written Entirely By An AI

There’s a short science fiction film that just made its debut online;it’s about three people living in a dystopian future on a space station. Thomas Middleditch of Silicon Valley fame stars in it, opposite Elisabeth Gray and Humphrey Ker, who could all possibly be in a love triangle. Stuff Hollywood B-movies are made of.

It’s called Sunspring—and it was written entirely by artificial intelligence (AI).

Having been written by a neural network called long short-term memory dubbed Benjamin, the very fact that it’s a film penned by an AI makes it compelling to watch.

At the helm of the film is director Oscar Sharp, who collaborated with NYU AI researcher Ross Goodwin.

To develop Benjamin, the team gave the AI sci-fi screenplays available online from the 80s and 90s, where it was dissected and studied closely by the AI who then learned how to essentially stitch the entire screenplay together by stringing letters, words and phrases the typically occur. The resulting script was thus entered in the Sci-Fi London contest where it ranked on the top 10.

You can watch the film here: http://video.arstechnica.com/watch/sunspring-sci-fi-short-film