The film business used to run on hunches. Now, data analytics is far more effective than humans at predicting hits and eliminating flops. Is this a brave new world - or the death knell of creativity? If Sunspring is anything to go by, artificial intelligence in film-making has some way to go. This short film, made as an item to Sci-Fi Londonīs 48-hour film-making competition in 2016, was written entirely by an AI. The director, Oscar Sharp, fed a few hundred sci-fi screenplays into a long short-term memory recurrent neural network (the type of software behind predictive text in a smartphone), then told it to write its own. The result was almost, but not quite, incoherent nonsense, riddled with cryptic nonsequiturs, bizarre turns of phrase and unfathomable stage directions such as `he is standing in the stars and sitting on the floor`. All of which Sharp and his actors filmed with sincere commitment.`In a future with mass unemployment, young people are forced to sell blood,` says a man in a shiny gold jacket. `You should see the boy and shut up. I was the one who was going to be a hundred years old,` replies a woman fiddling with some electronics. The man vomits up an eyeball. A second man says: `Well, I have to go to the skull.` And so forth. An unwitting viewer might be unsure whether they were watching meaningless nonsense or a lost Tarkovsky script. Continue reading...
|
