An AI wrote a movie for a short film contest
Artificial Intelligence is a tricky thing. It has the potential to massively help the world, doing tasks that previously weren’t possible. It could very much make the world a better place (assuming it doesn’t destroy us all, of course). On the other hand, it could end up moving to LA where it decides to become an indie filmmaker so it can show people what life is really like, man.
For their entry in a 48-hour film challenge , London-based director Oscar Sharp and technologist Ross Goodwin fed a series of random script ideas and prompts into a rudimentary program with AI-like qualities. The software spit out a short script, which was then filmed with help from professional actors, including Silicon Valley’s Thomas Middleditch. The result is a six-minute short film that is equal parts bewildering and nonsensical, and yet it’s kind of fascinating to watch.
The film is titled Sunspring, and it was developed to answer the question of whether or not an AL can write a script that would win a film challenge – in this case, the Sci-fi London 48-hour film challenge. The winners haven’t been announced yet, but Sunspring is easily the most talked about entry so far. It’s complete nonsense, but it has people talking, so there’s that.
The script is basically just word salad, with a few pretentious ideas and several thoughts that could be profound in the right hands, but aren’t in this case. The actors give their all, which just makes it seem more bizarre. It’s kind of like a USC film major was hit in the head really hard and then given a camera to film a story about people on drugs.
If you can get beyond the surreal dialogue, it’s kind of fascinating to watch. This program is trying to put together a script based on its concept of a short film. There are some telling moments regarding the tricks movies employ, as well as the concept of what makes for an emotional statement. It’s all just done by a program with no real context of coherent storytelling or emotional impact. In that’s it’s something of a sounding board for other, legitimately done short films.
Judging by this entry, AI has a long way to go before it will win a contest, but it would have been interesting to see what people thought of it if they didn’t know a program wrote it. Would they see it as the incoherent jumble it is, or would they claim it was brilliant because they don’t get it? You know there are some critics that would think it was brilliant and the rest of us are just too “unevolved” to get it.
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