If you believe the alarmists out there, robots are eventually going to take every job. They’re already being hired as advertising executives, legal aides, and teacher’s assistants, and making art and music. So perhaps it’s inevitable that they will be able to write movies in the future. But it doesn’t seem they’re quite there yet.
Led by director Oscar Sharp and technologist Ross Goodwin, a team in London made a film for a 48-hour film challenge by feeding a neural network a series of random script idea prompts and recording the result.
Watching the semi-sensical film is like watching a cross between a Shakespeare play and a Bad Lip Reading video. Everything in it, from stage directions to dialogue to the lyrics of a featured song, was written by the computer, and it shows.
Regardless, the actors, who include Silicon Valley’s Thomas Middleditch, do a impressive job of conveying emotion in a futuristic world, which, according to the computer, is “a future with mass unemployment” where “young people are forced to sell their blood.”
It seems the AI has some feelings about what humanity will have to do to survive once the robots have taken over.