Sunspring (2016)

In 2016, Director Oscar Sharp and A.I researcher Ross Goodwin used “Benjamin”, a type of A.I that is often used for text recognition, to create Sunspring – the first sci-fi movie whose screenplay was written by a machine. To train Benjamin, Goodwin input to it dozens of sci-fi screenplays he found online and Benjamin in turn analyzed them and used them to predict which letters tended to follow each other and from there, which words and phrases tended to occur together. Over time, Benjamin learned to imitate the structure of a screenplay and produce stage directions as well as well-formatted character lines. They then fed Benjamin the prompts from a 48 hour short-film competition, and the final product was a nonsensical sequence of scenes containing conversations that only vaguely resembled normal human dialogue. Benjamin was also fed a plethora of pop-song lyrics and was then able to write a song to play along with the film – this however was easily mistakable for a real pop song. This surreal film serves as a reminder that despite the existence of incredibly advanced chatbots and technologies such as Siri and Alexa, their ability to mimic human conversations seamlessly doesn’t necessarily reflect any real understanding of the language they use.

In the interview I’ve linked below, the interviewer raises the question of whether Benjamin should be considered a writer or simply a tool that was used in the writing process. At first, Goodwin stated that its a tool since it didn’t add any original ideas but instead just rearranged a bunch of other movies.However, throughout the interview, Sharp expresses regret that he didn’t have enough time to fully interpret what complicated stage directions such as “He is standing in the stars and sitting on the floor” actually mean. Another topic of interest is that while the film is generally meaningless, it somehow still conveys the same overall feeling a generic sci-fi movie does – down to the implied love triangle. This suggests that there is more to the screenplay than just haplessly arranged words. Whether this is because Benjamin has imbued the screenplay with underling meaning or because we tend to attribute meaning to things in order to comprehend them is not very clear.

The next year – 2017- they carried out a similar experiment to create another short film called “It’s No Game”. Instead of having Benjamin write the whole thing based on vague prompts, this film depicts a future where A.I can be fed specific material – such as only Shakespeare or only David Hasselhoff movies- and create lines and dialogues that could be input directly to chips in actors neck so it can control them and deliver the lines flawlessly. The process of making this film is more realistic than that of Sunspring as it involves cooperation between humans and A.I where the “technology is augmenting rather than replacing humans” since humans came up with the over all plot and delegated some writing to the A.I. This raises the question of what the integration of A.I in the writing process could mean for how movies are made and judged. If the A.I is given lines from the most prominent characters in a specific genre, it could potentially create the ultimate character based on this input despite not actually creating anything original. Therefore writing can move away from being a process of creation and become an issue of choosing the right inputs ie. A.I can stifle creativity. The opposite is also possible where screenplay writers will be freed from the tedious task of writing appropriate small-talk and will therefore put more of their time and resources into developing more interesting stories. Linked below are the two short films as well as the interview I referenced.