Double Crossword
IF YOU’RE looking for a good movie, I suggest It’s No Game. If you’ve never heard of it, that’s okay. The film, just released this week, is a bit less than eight minutes long. It tells the story of a pair of Hollywood writers who learn they will be replaced by an artificially intelligent algorithm that generates screenplays.
By now I’m sure you’ve guessed the kicker: Game was, itself, written by an artificially intelligent algorithm that generates screenplays. Although the algorithm is still crude, we may be looking at the future.
The algorithm is called Benjamin – it chose its own name – and is the brainchild of director Oscar Sharp and Ross Goodwin, an AI researcher who is a graduate student at New York University. Their idea was to feed a neural network lots of sci-fi screenplays and teleplays to give it a feel for dialogue, setting and plot, then switch on the bot and see what came out.
Last year, as part of a competition, Benjamin scripted Sunspring, its first effort at a short scifi film. Three people who seem to be trapped somewhere – it feels like a bunker, but the screenplay calls it a “ship” – engage in quick dialogue that is at once utterly nonsensical and yet oddly charming. (Money quote: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” “That’s right.”) Slate magazine opined that the film “feels like a movie shot in a foreign language Sunspring