In the wake of Google’s AI Go victory, filmmaker Oscar Sharp turned to his technologist collaborator Ross Goodwin to build a machine that could write screenplays. They created “Jetson” and fueled him with hundreds of sci-fi TV and movie scripts. Building a team including Thomas Middleditch, star of HBO’s Silicon Valley, they gave themselves 48 hours to shoot and edit whatever Jetson decided to write.
This short film was written by a sci-fi hungry neural network. After feeding the network a healthy diet of classic films, ‘Sunspring’ was born.
Remember when we played with Google’s Deep Dream neural network to create trippy visuals that featured a whole lot dogs? The creators behind the short film Sunspring do. Instead of Google’s product, however, they turned to a neural network named “Jetson” to do all the heavy lifting. The result? A bizarre nine minutes that you’ll remember for quite some time.
Starring Silicon Valley’s Thomas Middleditch and directed by Oscar Sharp, the short features a special script compiled by the neural network that even wrote a song unique to the film. After being fed scripts like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Watchmen and Aliens (as well as tons of others) it produced a nonsensical mess that actually works quite well in practice. It’s terrible. But then again, it’s so intense it’s entertaining. The film was shot and edited in 48 hours, which is a feat considering how polished it looks in practice.
As one character says “Well, I don’t know anything about any of this, so…” You might get that feeling after viewing the film, but it’s just like watching the insane ramblings of porn stars in Vernon Chatman’s Final Flesh. They’re both eerily similar in tone, though Sunspring is far more incoherent. Check it out for yourself below.
Source: https://www.engadget.com/
Mm yeah. There was nothing surpassing human intelligence there. It was pattern matching without context, subtext, plot, point, etc. I can feel the trend line wandering through average phrase occurrences…*shrug* like most AI creative endeavors, this is little more than a novelty.
Thomas But how do we distinguish something incoherent because it lacks human intelligence and something that seems incoherent because it surpasses human intelligence? 😉 See Turing’s Nightmares,
Yeah the AI based on nengo that wrote and edited my film in 2013 had the same issue this had. The genre of surrealist scifi is the best place for feedback imo
Just saw this yesterday. It was disappointingly incoherent.
But on the other hand, it seems that “this algorithm” was so focused on finding “meaning”, the story was about finding a “meaning”.
Super weird.