Ars Technica
1 HN recommender · recommended in 4 months, 2016–2017
9:03 · 1.5M views · Jun 9, 2016
Sunspring is a sci-fi short film starring Thomas Middleditch. Its screenplay was written by an LSTM neural network trained on sci-fi scripts, and the team shot and edited it in 48 hours.
HN cites it as an early, quirky example of machine-generated screenplays and what LSTMs could do.
4 comments from Hacker News
Check out this rather entertaining talk from GitHub universe about the use of an LSTM to generate a film script: [LINK] and the short film they made, using that script: this video (disclosure: i work for github on events/AV)
But this part isn't science fiction, we already have AIs that do this. See AIVA for pretty good musical composition[0], new sites are using AI to write and compress news stories[1], and screeplays are being written via machine learning[2]. Obviously these are still in their infancy, but doesn't this perfectly encapsulate your point? There's not really an interesting story or thought piece there, because people are working on these in all sorts of fields all over the world, today. If we can build AIs that create "good" art, is it much of a stretch to teach a super AI what "better" means? By default a super intelligence doesn't have to start out as super intelligence, just have the capability to improve. [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] this video
Hey, I'm one of the creators of this -- I trained the LSTMs that wrote the computer generated segments in this film. The ballet choreography was generated with a context-free grammar, because I couldn't find enough material to make a ballet choreography LSTM. Here's our film from last year, Sunspring, which was written entirely by an LSTM trained on science fiction screenplays: this video It's worth noting that this year I used subtitle files rather than screenplays to train our LSTMs, so we only had dialogue rather than dialogue + action descriptions. The Ars Technica article explains everything.
I guess this is close: this video . It's a script written by an RNN acted out as a short sci-fi film, and Thomas Middleditch is in it. Don't expect too much, though. I was reading an article on it and was excited to watch it, but it's too incoherent, in the usual fashion of today's RNNs.