The machines haven’t risen and taken over the world … yet. Although Artificial Intelligence has played chess and dabbled in poetry, as well as had some nightmarish dreams, can a computer ever really be considered creative? That is what director Oscar Sharp and AI researcher Ross Goodwin wondered when they fed dozens of science-fiction scripts into a recurrent neural network and asked it to create a screenplay. The result is Sunspring, a weird, gibberish-filled but oddly moving sci-fi short, starring Silicon Valley’s Thomas Middleditch.
It’s a strangely compelling film involving a trio of characters. At times it sounds like the script was written by someone who struggles in English. “The sentences make sense in isolation, although the dialogue doesn’t really when taken together,” comments the Guardian, “but if you were half watching while doing something else you would definitely get the feeling that something just happened.” My favorite line? When Elisabeth Gray says “I’m a little bit of a boy on the floor.” I don’t really know what she means when she says that, but I’ve already used the line in three separate conversations today, so it might yet become a classic movie line.
