A Computer Wrote A Science Fiction Movie And It Makes No Damn Sense

Last Updated on: 8th March 2017, 12:13 pm

Artificial intelligence is at the point where it’s often amazingly, well, intelligent. There are things it can do as good as or better than humans, but judging from whatever the hell this is, there’s still at least one group of meat-based organisms that won’t have to worry about having its jobs taken anytime soon. Screenwriters.

But what if we turned a neural network into a science fiction writer? The answer is that you’d get a complete mess in return.
That is the premise behind Sunspring, a film starring Silicon Valley’s Thomas Middleditch and directed by Oscar Sharp and written by… well, an LSTM recurrent neural network. Sharp and technologist Ross Goodwin fed the network a bevy of sci-fi scripts, from Ghostbusters 2 to Star Wars, and then gave it a selection of prompts to include in the screenplay it churned out.
Forty-eight hours of shooting and editing later, Sunspring is the result.

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2 Comments

    1. I think I remember why I didn’t post the song when I first saw it. I was bummed when I found out that a human person wrote the lyrics. That and my old computer sucked so it was pretty easy for a while there to find reasons not to post things.

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