When Annalee met Benjamin:
Investigating the AI that Wrote a Screenplay

Though Goodwin began by saying he was certain that Benjamin was a tool, he finally conceded, “I think we need a new word for it.” Sharp agreed. It’s clear that they believe there’s something magic in what they’ve created, and it’s easy to understand why when you watch Sunspring. The AI has captured the rhythm of science fiction writing, even if some of Benjamin’s sentences are hilariously nonsensical.

— Annalee Newitz “Movie written by algorithm turns out to be hilarious and intense” (2016)

Annalee Newitz’s Ars Technica article investigates a curious entry into the 2016 Sci-Fi London 48-Hour Film Challenge. The film in question, Sunspring, has turned many heads since its creation, even earning a top ten placing out of the competition’s hundred total entries. Contrary to the critical reception of any film, however, there has been no talk about its directing, no praise nor criticism for its acting, and not even a mention of how it was shot, cast or edited. In fact, there is only one thing about Sunspring that has garnered any significant attention at all, and that is the film’s screenwriter, Benjamin. Most screenwriters would surely find it difficult not to envy the man responsible for such a notable debut in the film industry. But Benjamin is not a man; he is an Artificial Intelligence.

Director Oscar Sharp and AI researcher Ross Goodwin collaborated on the ambitious project of creating a truly unique film in Sunspring. Both Sharp and Goodwin admit to having an obsession with the concept of generative text, in which AI programs such as Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) learn how to imitate certain material and produce their own content. The concept of an AI-made screenplay had long been a dream of Sharp’s, and Goodwin’s newly built RNN offered a means of making that dream a reality. Goodwin’s AI program, which later named itself Benjamin, was initially fed with a corpus consisting of dozens of science fiction screenplays. From the database provided, Benjamin learned the structure and typical tropes of these screenplays, and ultimately produced his own attempt at writing a sci-fi film.

Sharp and his crew followed Benjamin’s script to the letter in filming Sunspring, and it certainly shows in the final product. Although much of the dialogue is, as Newitz puts, “hilariously nonsensical”, the screenplay does retain some elements that one would expect to find in a typical science fiction movie, like the main characters trying to make sense of an obscure environment. For example, there are many instances of dialogue in the film consisting of lines such as: “No, I don’t know what that is”, and “I’m not sure”.

Newitz recounts that, despite the screenwriter simply being a series of algorithms, both Sharp and Goodwin were not content with describing Benjamin as a “tool” after working with the AI. The fact that Benjamin appears to mirror some of the behaviours observable in real human beings seems to give their argument some impetus. The actors in Sunspring interpreted Benjamin’s script as containing a love-triangle between the three main characters, although there was nothing in the screenplay to suggest that this was actually the case. This led Sharp to muse on the idea that humans expect certain things in a film; calling upon their own corpus of previously watched movies. Benjamin acts in a very similar way, observing the frequently occurring elements of a screenplay, and making decisions based on averages.

And so the final cut of Sunspring does more than just elicit a barrel of laughs, it poses a fundamental question: was Benjamin just a tool, or was he something more?