In what may be one of the most fascinating projects to crossover science with art, filmmaker Oscar Sharp, in collaboration with AI researcher Ross Goodwin have produced a movie written entirely by an artificial intelligence. Essentially what happened is they fed a ton of sci-fi movie scripts, mixed with prompts and a few specific lines of dialogue, into a neural network. That neural network, by the way, is called Benjamin. A name it gave itself…
Some science happened, and the AI spat out a script for a short film. Sharp then went on to produce that screenplay, starring Silicon Valley’s Thomas Middleditch. The film make almost no sense in terms of plot, and thanks to the strong cast, is highly amusing and enjoyable. What’s scary though is the dialogue, which gets very meta very quickly. Characters’ repeatedly blurt out that they don’t know what’s going on or they don’t understand what another character is saying, before they’ll immediately go back to talking utter nonsense. There’s also a hint of one character feeling trapped and longing for freedom, which when you take into account that this was written by an AI, makes you pause for a moment.
