Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

While Oscar Sharp was thinking up ideas for a film submission to Sci-Fi London's 48-Hour Film Challenge, he read a lot of sci-fi screenplays. In fact, he read all of the sci-fi screenplays he could find on the internet. That's when he had the idea: why not feed an algorithm these scripts—ranging from The X-Files to Ghostbusters toInterstellar to The Fifth Element—and let the movie write itself?

Sharp contacted his long-time collaborator Ross Goodwin, an AI researcher at NYU, who put a certain AI bot called Benjamin to the task. Benjamin is an LSTM recurrent neural network, which is often used for text recognition. It worked by ingesting the screenplays, dissecting them down to the letter, and learning to predict which letters, words, and phrases were likely to appear together. Eventually, Benjamin even learned to write in screenplay format with stage directions and dialogue. 

"As soon as we had a read-through, everyone around the table was laughing their heads off with delight," Sharp told Ars Technica. The resulting screenplay and film, Sunspring (which you can and definitely should read), is dramatic and absurdly funny. The characters speak in enigmas befitting of the film's futuristic world. (One of the stage directions Benjamin wrote: "He is standing in the stars and sitting on the floor.")...

They don't look like Guardians Of The Galaxy-style superheroes.

... The porter's lodge is like an airlock, apparently sealed from the tribulations of everyday life. But inside the college, pacing the flagstones of what is called – all modesty aside – Great Court, are four men who do not take it for granted that those undergraduates actually have a future. They are the four founders of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), and they are in the business of "horizon scanning". Together, they are on alert for what they sometimes call "low-probability-but-high-consequence events", and sometimes – when they forget to be reassuring – "catastrophe"....