AI writes bizarre sci-fi screenplay

A bizarre screenplay written by an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm has placed in the top ten for the 48-hour Film Challenge at the Sci-Fi London film festival.

The AI, which was originally dubbed Jetson but named itself Benjamin in an interview with festival director Louis Savy, was developed by Ross Goodwin, an AI researcher at New York University. Its script was brought to screens by director Oscar Sharp.

Benjamin is a recurrent neural network: a type of AI often used for text recognition. Goodwin trained Benjamin to write science fiction (sci-fi) screenplays by feeding it hundreds of sci-fi television and film scripts he found online, including all the Star Wars films and every episode of Star Trek, Futurama, and The X-Files.

Sharp used one of Benjamin's screenplays to enter Sci-Fi London's 48-hour Film Challenge, for which contestants are given a set of prompts for a film they must produce and submit within the next two days.

The resultant film, titled Sunspring (one of the challenge's prompts), is a surreal combination of random imagery and bizarre verbal phrases.

Stage directions for the actors include "He is standing in the stars and sitting on the floor," and the main character inexplicably vomiting an eyeball.

The AI also struggled to grasp character naming conventions, as names are not used in the same way as other English words. Benjamin originally named two of the screenplay's three characters "H", but Sharp renamed one of them "H2" to avoid confusion.

While the film's dialogue makes linguistic sense, it is difficult to interpret, as dramatic ideas are introduced - "Nothing is going to be a thing, but I'm the one who got on this rock with a child, and then I left the other two" - and then given no further explanation or follow-up. Other lines appear to be made-up idioms, such as "I'm a little bit of a boy on the floor."

As a result, the actors appear to be speaking in a kind of code language, and rely almost entirely on verbal tone and body language to convey meaning, similarly to the actors in 2011 short film Skwerl, which aimed to show English-speaking viewers what English sounded like to non-English speakers.

Benjamin's command of the English language, without seeming to have grasped human sentiment, mirrors that of the University Aberdeen's The Joking Computer project, in which a computer writes jokes that make linguistic sense but are not funny, for example "What is the difference between a desolate amusement and a smart impact? One is a bleak show, the other is a chic blow."

Yet a set of song lyrics Benjamin wrote for the screenplay's soundtrack blend in solidly with their genre, possibly because song lyrics tend to be cryptic. The AI wrote the lyrics after learning from 30 000 pop songs.

Benjamin's metaphorical responses to Savy's interview questions can also be understood better than the screenplay. For example, in response to "What is the future of machine-written entertainment?" Benjamin said, "It's a bit sudden. I was thinking of the spirit of the men who found me and the children who were all manipulated and full of children. I was worried about my command. I was the scientist of the Holy Ghost."

AI-written literature was foreseen by writer Roald Dahl in a 1953 short story, "The Great Automatic Grammatizator," in which a machine, having been fed thousands of different texts, learns to write literature in a variety of different genres, destroying the jobs of thousands of writers.

While Benjamin's screenplay shows that machine-written literature is technically possible, its confusing, novelty nature suggests it is unlikely to replace human-written literature in the near future.