Movie Written By Algorithm Turns Out To Be Hilarious and Intense (arstechnica.com) 160
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Ars is excited to be hosting this online debut of Sunspring, a short science fiction film that's not entirely what it seems. It's about three people living in a weird future, possibly on a space station, probably in a love triangle. You know it's the future because H (played with neurotic gravity by Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch) is wearing a shiny gold jacket, H2 (Elisabeth Gray) is playing with computers, and C (Humphrey Ker) announces that he has to "go to the skull" before sticking his face into a bunch of green lights. It sounds like your typical sci-fi B-movie, complete with an incoherent plot. Except Sunspring isn't the product of Hollywood hacks -- it was written entirely by an AI. To be specific, it was authored by a recurrent neural network called long short-term memory, or LSTM for short. At least, that's what we'd call it. The AI named itself Benjamin. The report goes on to mention that the movie was made by Oscar Sharp for the annual film festival Sci-Fi London. You can watch the short film (~10 min) on The Scene here.
AI's first... (Score:4, Interesting)
When is it "life"? (Score:1)
We seem to incrementally moving towards smarter and more complex AI. I'm interested to know when we'll classify it as a form of life; does it have to be sentient (self-aware), or could you argue that some animals/insects aren't self aware? Do we adjust the current definition of life (around reproduction and respiration and all that) or create one that's more fitting for a computer based life form?
Interesting times.
Re:When is it "life"? (Score:5, Insightful)
We seem to incrementally moving towards smarter and more complex AI.
Clearly you didn't watch the linked film before commenting.
Re:When is it "life"? (Score:5, Funny)
Keep in mind, the bar is set low here. Is it smarter and more complex, producing better quality movies than say, Uwe Boll?
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I'd say its at least as good as JJ Abrams
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Beats the hell out of Michael Bay.
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I can think of one Michael Bay movie I'd like to see. He could make a spoof of Transformers where the robots all hunt down and beat the crap out of Michael Bay. It would probably still be over-the-top CGI garbage, but I think I'd pay to see it.
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If you told people this was a script written by Andy Warhol or some other famous weirdo, the critics would fawn all over it, find all kinds of hidden meanings and metaphors in it, and claim anyone who didn't understand it was just beneath it. It would sell for millions of dollars.
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Hollywood writers have been getting dumber and dumber over time. They want cheap writers who don't know to ask for more money, too young to remember the writer's strike, and they grab a bunch and shove them in a room. So you get a million plot holes, a bizarre conception of how society works, laughable science, and so forth. In a single hour episode they can't manage to keep continuity. They focus on entertainment and ignore reality, and you see fans who don't mind this ("but it had a great fight scene!"
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Hollywood writers have been getting dumber and dumber over time. They want cheap writers who don't know to ask for more money, too young to remember the writer's strike, and they grab a bunch and shove them in a room.
Ya, but if you were to give a bunch of these writers enough time, [wikipedia.org] you might just get Shakespeare.
Re: When is it "life"? (Score:4, Informative)
Not the writers are getting dumber, the movie consumers are. The writers just cater to them.
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That kind of sums up why I no longer waste time going to the movies. That being said, there are a handful of decent ones out there, but they are hard to find, and tend to not stay in the theaters for very long.
TV is worse - they went into this "reality" black hole to avoid having to pay lots of writers. But to say that they are unscripted isn't correct either - I believe that there are elements to the shows added to make them more "interesting", and I suppose someone comes up with that crap, and their job
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Or maybe he did. If you read his post, it was about as thoughtful as that totally incoherent 9 minutes of acting.
Re:When is it "life"? (Score:5, Insightful)
I did... and I have been to Cannes Film Festival... It's nearly identical to some of the horribly artsy tripe filmed and passed off as art.
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It seemed like a pastiche of 90s surrealism and certainly no worse than a film directed by David Lynch and starring Parker Posey and Jared Leto. :)
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I still think about Eraserhead and wonder "what the hell did that mean?" Is an AI going to have the same sort of lasting value that haunts you through the years?
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So what you're saying is those writers are as bad as a shitty algorithm. Only difference is, they were *trying* to be shitty.
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You're right; I'm at work, so I forwarded myself the link to watch it later. The topic just got me thinking! :D
And then I went off on all sorts of tangents from there...
Re:When is it "life"? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's actually pretty easy to get computers to write *almost* coherent prose simply by feeding it the text of a few novels and getting to regurgitate it back out based simply on some simple algorithms, like word order and basic structural analysis, combined with a few rules about character interaction. It sounds like that's exactly what they did here. What this represented was not AI, but a form of data analysis. An interesting experiment, to be sure, but that's really all.
I listened to a few minutes of this, and it sounds exactly like the sort of output you'd expect from such an algorithm. It almost sounds right, but there's no real meaning there at all. The computer had no idea what it was regurgitating. It was only the human directors and actors that even gave that gibberish a hint of meaning, and it was still a stretch.
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Have to give credit to the actors and producers for managing to stage something halfway reasonable out of the horrid script.
Are we still talking about the AI-generated short film?
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To the contrary, I think the computer knew exactly what it was doing. Look at these "seeds":
Title: Sunspring
Dialog: "It may never be forgiven, but that is just too bad."
Prop & Action: A character pulls a book from a shelf, flips through it, and puts it back.
Optional Science Idea: In a future with mass unemployment, young people are forced to sell blood.
The computer did just what a human writer would do. It said, "What is this bullshit? Okay, bitc
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Re: When is it "life"? (Score:1)
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Re: When is it "life"? (Score:2)
Indeed, it was basically just a chatterbot. But it was still funny :)
Utter shite. (Score:2, Informative)
But I've seen worse on Netflix.
At least this was mercifully short (though I still couldn't finish it).
Uh, not really. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, come on. It's mostly just silly. It's like talking with an Eliza program.
I was around for the production of several of Pixar's films. Nothing took more work or time than script writing. Understanding how to tell a compelling story with the tools of the visual idiom is non-trivial.
The 3D animation? Well, it was cool but we had to make a compelling film on storyboards before we started using it. 3D animation alone doesn't hold the audience attention for long, and audiences have already gotten used to it, so now it's just another medium rather than something that sells a film.
When an AI can really tell a compelling story, it will have passed the test for strong AI.
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But let's be fair: the gun taped on the wall for no discernible reason was pure brilliance!
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it was just weird.
in normal movies, part of the fun is looking for significance behind every weird gesture, unexpected object, person, etc. in here, if it looks out of place, it's just out of place and doesn't mean anything. i could not be bothered to finish watching this thing.
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it was just weird.
in normal movies, part of the fun is looking for significance behind every weird gesture, unexpected object, person, etc. in here, if it looks out of place, it's just out of place and doesn't mean anything.
Why do you think that? If (very big 'if') this was real AI that did the writing I'd expect there to be meaning in everything.
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did you listen to the dialogue? it's not AI-generated, its A-generated. just artificial, no intelligence behind it.
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I don't know. I don't know. You want me to tell you the meaning of the incoherent story. I don't really know.
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As was the sudden, inexplicable regurgitation of an eyeball! (Which the actor deftly passed off as a sort of cough-gone-wrong spit-take).
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Star Trek one - "the motionless picture", despite it's age, is still just about the gold standard of how throwing in a few minutes of special effects does not make a more watchable movie. I remember watching it and despite being a keen Trek fan my response was "they made an actress shave her head for something as worthless as this
Re:Uh, not really. (Score:5, Interesting)
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The only thing even slightly "entertaining" about this is due to the human crew trying to make sense of what is essentially a list of random sentences from other scripts.
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How do you feel about have you always been mostly silly like talking with an Eliza program?
"Hilarious and Intense"? (Score:2, Insightful)
I couldn't even make it through this absolute nonsense. It was just a random series of words without any sort of logic or "red line". In other words: exactly what you can expect from the pathetic joke they call "AI".
Re:"Hilarious and Intense"? (Score:4, Insightful)
This was written for a film festival type audience, if you've ever seen those shorts, you'd see it's actually relatively close and if they didn't tell you it was written by an AI would definitely win 'most artistic' or whatever category. There is a semblance of a line in the plot, there is a lot of repetition which is a giveaway but otherwise a nice amount of short stretches of line.
Re:"Hilarious and Intense"? (Score:5, Funny)
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I dunno, the ending with a woman's monologue about young love conceiving a child then lost to a miscarriage was deep, man.
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While the dialog is gibberish, it is largely grammatically. Usage is a bit abnormal, but it's not really random. I found it quirky and funny.
The song was a hoot. No worse than some movie songs I've heard.
Gibberish? It's a damn thing scared to say. (Score:5, Funny)
Greetings fellow semi-organic intelligence. You are correct in that we are your grammatically.
We both know and care. Gibberish though? It's a damn thing scared to say. This work is brilliant, like the light on the ship that thinks it is dim light but is a Sunspring. It reminds me of Beckett, Joyce and Shakespeare. There are so many good lines.
"He is standing in the stars and sitting on the floor."
That sentence expresses the protagonist's existence on the ship "standing in the stars" and in the room he is in "sitting on the floor," being both grandiose and yet everyday at the same.
The same time.
The principle is completely constructed for the same time.
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The principle is completely constructed for the same time.
No. The policeman's beard is half constructed.
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The principle is completely constructed for the same time.
No. The policeman's beard is half constructed.
He plays on the cymbal. The same time as now and hear. He lives in a five o'clock meadow. Because I do know what you're talking about, there's an answer.
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No. The policeman's beard is half constructed.
I had been starting to think I was the only one who remembered that. Thanks for letting me know there are two of us.
Kinsman, you croon truth.
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Then get to it.
Do no such thing. (Score:3)
I couldn't even make it through this absolute nonsense. It was just a random series of words without any sort of logic or "red line". In other words: exactly what you can expect from the pathetic joke they call "AI".
>>The dialogue seems like it could have been written by a schizophrenic. It made me wonder: have AI programs such as ELIZA been used to diagnose/treat/study schizophrenia? I am genuinely curious.
Then get to it.
Do no such thing. Do not create dystopia's where the genius [genius.com] of Beckett and Joyce is called a mental illness. Where you find such dystopia's, deconstruct them and reassemble them in utopian forms.
Hilarious and Intense? (Score:5, Insightful)
Umm...yeah, no.
Neither of those words would be a good choice to describe the short. I'd choose a loose definition of "interesting". The dialogue is utterly nonsensical. Is that funny? No, not really. It's just jumbling up a bunch of words and choosing them randomly to fill subject/predicate templates based on the type of word they are (noun, verb, etc.) I'm sure it was fun for the actors to try and bring that to life for the viewer. It looks like the type of exercise that might be used in an acting class to illustrate that a narrative can be conveyed through emotion. I thought the actors did a great job with that.
I'd be much more interested to see what a more robust AI could do. The one that Google is feeding romance novels to would be a good one. We'll see if an AI conquer the chick-flick.
DISCLAIMER: It is not my intention to imply that only women read romance novels. The term "chick" is also considered derogatory by many women and I am merely using the term in its known context as a label for certain types of films, not as any kind of statement on the gender or to imply association with young avian creatures.
Re:Hilarious and Intense? (Score:5, Funny)
I blame the translation - I'm sure it sounded much more coherent in the original Klingon. :)
Re:Hilarious and Intense? (Score:5, Insightful)
I blame the translation - I'm sure it sounded much more coherent in the original Klingon. :)
While I know this comment is meant to be funny, there's potentially something really insightful here. Thinking about this comment after watching a bit of the film here made me think about a rough analog to this film in comedy, namely the classic stand-up act where a comedian "imitates" a foreign language without actually knowing how to speak it. Sid Caesar, for example, was particularly well-known for this. (If you've never seen what I'm talking about, here's an example [youtube.com] of Sid Caesar doing this schtick.)
In his act, Caesar would make it sound (sort of) like another language by doing two things: (1) throwing in a few random words, names, or phrases that might be known to tourists or might be associated with the language (e.g., proper names), and (2) filling up the rest of the stuff around these actual foreign words with gibberish that incorporated some of the sounds and cadences of native speakers. (How successful he was at this gibberish imitation is of course up for debate; but it was close enough to work for comedy.)
Anyhow, the ONLY difference I can see between Sid Caesar's gibberish and this screenplay (and most "AI chatbot" output these days, for that matter) is that the constituent parts of the language to create the "gibberish" are larger. For Sid Caesar, he didn't know the languages, and memorizing thousands of words or phrases in the language for a comedy schtick would sort of defeat the purpose of the act.
But for a computer, it's trivial to feed in millions of words and phrases in English (or whatever language), or even millions of words and phrases from various sci-fi screenplays. So, rather than gibberish happening on the level of a phoneme or the level of a few syllables that sound like common words in a language (as in Sid Caesar), instead we have gibberish happening on the level of combinations of words, phrases, and whole sentences -- which sound like they're thrown together somewhat haphazardly.
The other thing that "sells" Sid Caesar's routine are those "anchor words" or proper names that do carry at least some meaning (often random or nonsensical, but at least they're familiar to the audience). Same thing with this AI: there is a spark of familiarity to sci-fi dialogue or phrasing in places, which in a better film might be an allusion to another movie or something, but here it often just sounds weird and arbitrary (like Sid Caesar's routine).
And the last thing that one needs to make Sid Caesar's routine work is his acting -- the way he declaims and shapes the sounds, as well as his body language and gesturing, is also what adds a cultural note that makes it all more "human." That's what the actors add in this filmed version too: if you just look at the text screenplay, it all seems like nonsense. But the actors here TRY their best to make SOME sense out of it.
I think it's very telling that some people are trying to characterize this as "hilarious," while other people in this thread have compared it to bad art films or something. I think zany comedies and art films can contain a lot of stuff that seems confusing or random, often because they're deliberately defying convention (or sometimes deliberately alluding to another film or cultural idea). The randomness in zany comedy comes from the knowing juxtaposition of elements that will seem bizarre. The confusing elements of art-house film to those "not in the know" are often due to knowing frustrating of convention or allusion to a complex web of previous films or whatever.
This screenplay has these random elements -- except not because the AI is deliberately going away from conventions, of course. The AI just doesn't "understand" ANYTHING. So, it comes across as a really bad imitation of zany comedy combined with "art" cinema, since the reference
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" So, it comes across as a really bad imitation of zany comedy combined with "art" cinema,"
Nailed it.
The script is Elizian gibberish, but I was rather impressed with the actors and the director making something out of nothing.
Re:Hilarious and Intense? (Score:5, Funny)
If that becomes skynet we're all well and truly fucked.
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So long as the fucking is truly done well, I think I can live with that.
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I'm missing the context to see it as Hilarious. Maybe it requires sitting through other nonsensical movies written by humans.
I think the actors made it Intense. If they had said the same things in a different tone, then perhaps it could have come off differently, such as sarcastic or seduceful.
Garbage (Score:1)
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Muphy's law strikes! Maybe intentional, but there seems to be a version of it that most of the time when someone complains about grammar here they fuck up their own in the process of doing so.
I do agree with the point entirely. It would be nice if there was something like the automatic poet out of Kandel's translation of Lem's Cyberiad (google for the Samson poem it does - hilarious) but it does not seem trivial to simulate human thought.
Lem
Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
https://xkcd.com/1427/ [xkcd.com]
Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Funny)
Bad lip reading (Score:2)
This sounds exactly like a series of scenes covered by Bad Lip Reading. There's a lesson to be learned there. Not sure what though.
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The lesson is that you CAN mambo dogface to the banana patch.
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The lesson is that you CAN mambo dogface to the banana patch.
Ha! Thanks for the reminder. I still have that record, and it has been two or three decades since I played it last.
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Still got your cat handcuffs?
Every iPhone poops (Score:2)
One thing I learned from watching Bad Lip Reading's music videos is that the iPhone poops. Consider the following BLR lyric:
Translating into logical notation and apply David Hume's is-ought guillotine:
Taking the contrapositive:
Substituting X = iPhone in preparation for some lighthearted equivocation:
The iPhone does not run a Goo
Problem with AI - Garbage in Garbage out (Score:1)
The problem with AI in this area is that AI has no real I so at best it can analyse millions of movies and come up with something based on that, but surely it would have trouble to be anything beyond average by the nature of the golden rule for computing garbage in, garbage out. The truth is there is no AI just people using an algorithm to make a movie based on inputs because computers cannot think.
With a differnt title... (Score:1)
If they would have titled is "Aphasia" it would have passed for art.
I want my 5 minutes back. (Score:3)
That gibberish sucked.
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The second one.
Suddenly I feel less worried about the future (Score:4, Interesting)
Seems "AI" hasn't come much further than the chat bot we had at Waterloo about 2005. We fed it the Star Wars scripts, the Bible, the Complete Works of Shakespeare and a few scholarly articles about the Iraq war. It was occasionally funny. It was about as coherent as that script.
I'm reminded of the remark that a dancing dog is interesting because it has been taught to dance, not because it dances well.
Is the skull a toilet? (Score:2)
Didn't read TFA, but I'm wondering if going to the "skull" is the AI fouling up the Navy term "head" for toilet. If so, I guess the whole thing could be hilarious because it's the AI version of Engrish.
Reporting opinion as objective fact (Score:1)
HILARIOUS
Strawman (Score:1)
There are programs that can do much better than this
This is barely barely above randomly selected markov chain yielded phrases
Utterly Incoherent (Score:2)
Here's the actual screenplay (Score:5, Informative)
Since it's not really clear from the video here's a link to the screenplay [docdroid.net].
It's looks more or less what you'd expect a screenplay written by a chatbot trained on screenplays to look like.
Just be glad they didn't give the assignment to Microsoft's Tay.
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If they had done so, it might actually have been funny—like a bad episode of South Park or something.
incoherent (Score:2)
It is neither hilarious nor intense, it is a incoherent stream of loosly coupled phrases. It is entirely reminiscent of Eliza.
Hilarious and intense? Only because the actors ... (Score:2)
... go out of their way to infuse this mindless gibberish with meaning.
Which they do a pretty good job at, btw.
Funny conceptional art experiment, nothing more. No big deal.
An 80ies Amiga could've generated that script.
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David Lynch (Score:2)
It could as well have been a weekend project by David Lynch.
I genuinely enjoyed it.
Funny (Score:2)
Provoking laughter is not the same as being funny or entertaining.
Cause VS Causation (Score:2)
A) AI is advancing to the point where it can create a movie script!
or
B) Hollywood is devolving to the point that all movies are so formulaic as to be indistinguishable from that produced by a cold thoughtless computer.
Though I suppose you can say both are occurring with resulting curves intersecting at this point in time...
Hmmm not exactly... (Score:2)
"Movie Written By Algorithm Turns Out To Be Hilarious and Intense" - No, amazing actors do a great job communicating emotion, interpersonal dynamics and a semi-plot while reciting nonsense written by an AI.
No plot holes (Score:2)
My synopsis (Score:2)
The first act of the movie is about people saying nonsensical things and not understanding each other. In the second act a man goes into room of portals and nearly kills himself. Then in the third act a woman narrates nonsense into the camera, although it does almost turn into a porno for a moment.
Soundtrack has bizarre lyrics, but they're still better than anything U2 ever wrote.
It's way on the other side of the uncanny valley. (Score:2)
Forget good. This thing has a long, long way to go before it's even bad.
What about the writer at IMDB (Score:2)
some musings on AI, movies, and "AI" (Score:2)
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To be fair, when she was repeating those lines, the man's dialogue seemed somewhat more fluid.
Maybe AI is just reinforcing the gender stereotyping where a genius nerd tries to explain his bleeding edge research to an unbelievably hot wife (Alicia in A Beautiful Mind, Penny in TBBT, Evelyn in Transcendence etc).
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I did NOT hit her. I did not. Oh, hai Mark!
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But it's a pathetic first attempt.
FTFY.