Watch ‘Sunspring,’ a Short Sci-Fi Film Written by An Artificial-Intelligence Algorithm

Michael Nordine
·1 min read
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Science fiction suggests that man’s attempts to create artificial intelligence will probably end badly. Real life proves that we don’t really care. A short film written by an A.I. algorithm seems a happy medium between technophobia and Skynet, and “Sunspring” is the enjoyably strange result. Ars has premiered the nine-minute film, which finds Thomas Middleditch, Elisabeth Gray and Humphrey Ker braving their way through robotic dialogue.

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Their lines are all grammatically correct but occasionally nonsensical, with Ker saying he has to “go to the skull” and Middleditch proclaiming that he’s “not a bright light.” The script was created by uploading hundreds of sci-fi screenplays into an LSTM recurrent neural network, as you do, and seeing what it returned — including the surprisingly emotional monologue from Gray that ends the short.
READ MORE: Watch: 16-Minute Visual Study Of ‘A.I. Artificial Intelligence’

A wealth of information on “Sunspring” in general and “Benjamin” (as the A.I. itself is named) in particular is available on Ars. Oscar Sharp directed the film for the Sci-Fi London film festival and does an admirable job of making stage directions like “He is standing in the stars and sitting on the floor” seem reasonable in the final product.

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