We have watched artificial intelligences interact with humans through chat channels and social networks with terrible consequences, generate art, play video games, describe images, drive cars, and even reconstruct films. That said, why not let an artificial intelligence make its own film? The result is Sunspring, a short whose story was written by Benjamin, a recurrent neural network with short-term memory, fed and trained on multiple science fiction screenplays.
Can an AI write a movie?
The question of what an artificial intelligence can and cannot do has been hanging in the air for some time. The number of experiments with neural networks and machine learning keeps growing, but the most robust examples of AI are already used by millions of people around the globe every day. Voice recognition and the interpretation of what we say by the main assistants (Siri, Google Now and Cortana) reach extraordinary levels, but the plan is to go further, push the limits, and work on them. That means artificial intelligences must move deeper into "human territory", sooner or later confronting concepts such as philosophy and art in all their forms. Speaking of art: imagine for a moment an artificial intelligence specially trained to write a science fiction screenplay. That training includes three randomly chosen elements and dozens of screenplays ranging from "2001" and "Ghostbusters" to "Blade Runner" and the entire "Star Wars" saga. What could come out of such a combination? The best way to answer that question is watching the movie:
The result: Sunspring
This short, which barely exceeds nine minutes, is called Sunspring and took part in the Sci-Fi London film festival under a category that imposes a 48-hour limit for the creation of the movie. A trained eye will probably recognize Thomas Middleditch, star of the series "Silicon Valley", which is in its third season. Sunspring's director is Oscar Sharp, and his collaborator Ross Goodwin is an artificial intelligence researcher at New York University... which brings us to Benjamin. Benjamin (the name the artificial intelligence chose for itself) was in charge of writing every line in the screenplay.
There is no doubt the actors did excellent work bringing character, personality and body language to every piece of the screenplay, but I imagine working with Benjamin must have been a very special challenge. From a certain point of view, it's possible to identify the path the neural network tried to follow with the story: a sort of love triangle, full of drama and betrayal, though sprinkled with nonsensical sentences that at times disconnect the viewer completely. In short, Sunspring puts a question on the table: Can an artificial intelligence write the screenplay of a movie? Personally, I would say no... for now. Creativity and intelligence do not necessarily go hand in hand, and that is something neural networks will also have to learn.
