“In a future with mass unemployment young people are forced to sell blood.”

This is the first line of the first movie written completely by artificial intelligence. It’s arguably the best line in the far-out film, and probably the only line that might resonate with people for being somewhat, if not apocalyptically, reasonable.

The film, Sunspring, stars Silicon Valley’s Thomas Middleditch, who takes his lines from a robot screenwriter – a recurrent neural network with long short-term memory (LSTM) called Benjamin – that had previously been fed a long list of eclectic sci-fi movies including Interstellar, Alien, Blade Runner, Airplane 2 and Ghostbusters.

Sunspring was directed by Oscar Sharp and Ross Goodwin, the latter an A.I. researcher at New York University. It was made to contend in an annual film festival called Sci-Fi London in which films can be entered in the 48-Hour Film Challenge. This prompted the team to create a screenplay, replete with stage directions, with an A.I.. Actors were assigned lines, and somehow managed to make something completely incoherent into something touchingly surreal.

Although in the past scripts have been written by A.I.s putting together entire excerpts written by humans, Benjamin worked out which letters generally follow each other, then which words, and then how phrases work together.

Ars Technica, where the film was hosted online, writes:

“The advantage of an LSTM algorithm over a Markov chain is that it can sample much longer strings of letters, so it’s better at predicting whole paragraphs rather than just a few words. It’s also good at generating original sentences rather than cutting and pasting sentences together from its corpus. Over time, Benjamin learned to imitate the structure of a screenplay, producing stage directions and well-formatted character lines.”

The film came in the top ten of the festival for best 48 Hour Film, out of hundreds of entries. As an experiment Sunspring is definitely interesting, but as an emotive piece of cinema it’s a none starter. A similar experience might be akin to taking a very powerful hallucinogen such as DMT and finding yourself in the part of your brain associated with 80s and 90s science fiction movies.

However, garble, as is often demonstrated by translation tools, can sometimes sound profound. Here is some more of Benjamin’s work:

“I need to leave, but I’m not free of the world.”

Or poetic:

“He looks at me and throws me out of his eyes.”

And who’s to say it isn’t, even if the writer had no intention of being either profound or poetic? Our interpretation of the words has its own meaning, and that can be wonderful.

Photo credit: robmcbell via Flickr