by Dan Moren
Sci-fi short film written by an AI
Good news for us writers: AI’s still at least a little ways off from poaching our jobs. Witness Sunspring, 9 minute sci-fi short film that’s written by a neural network and is…well…totally incomprehensible.1
AI researcher Ross Goodwin and director Oscar Sharp teamed up to make this film for a 48-Hour Film Challenge. They essentially fed in a whole bunch of screenplays to the AI, and had it spit out a new one based on a prompt provided by the contest. Despite its incomprehensibility, the result is fascinating, and I guarantee that if you start, you will end up watching the whole thing.
Silicon Valley fans will recognize Thomas Middleditch as the main character “H” (all three characters have one-letter names, apparently because the AI had trouble with proper names). Also, keep your ears open for the pop song interlude, whose lyrics were also written by the AI.
- Part of me wonders how it would have been received if they hadn’t told anybody that’s how it was made. Might some have called it avant-garde? ↩