Good Old Benjamin

For Sharp, the most interesting part of the Benjamin experiment has been learning about patterns in science fiction storytelling. Benjamin’s writing sounds original, even kooky, but it’s still based on what humans actually write. Sharp likes to call the results the “average version” of everything the AI looked at. Certain phrases kept coming up again and again. “There’s an interesting recurring pattern in Sunspring where characters say, ‘No I don’t know what that is. I’m not sure,'” said Goodwin. “They’re questioning the environment, questioning what’s in front of them. There’s a pattern in sci-fi movies of characters trying to understand the environment.”

— Annelee Newitz “Movie Written By Algorithm Turns Out To Be Hilarious And Intense” (2016)

This reading is about creating a movie for the Sunspring Short film festival using an AI to write the script and direct the camera shots shown throughout the short movie. The creators, Sharp and Goodwin, first got together with the idea of creating an AI capable of creating original writing. The technology, however, relies on a lot of sci-fi scripts, all of which are fed to the AI, affectionately named Benjamin, in order to give the machine a basis from which to form a new script. Without the ability to reach a human ‘Eureka’ moment of inspiration, the machine puts recurring features in the scripts and in human language patterns, which leads to some unusual language as the AI tries to figure out the more complex forms of language. This leads to phrases such as ‘I’m a little bit of a boy on the floor’, which make sense to the AI, while actually holding no significance to human readers.

The unusual language and cut scenes are part of the reason the creators wanted to put this film in the genre of science fiction, particularly in the future, because audiences might be able to accept the ‘strangeness’ of the story. The genre is not the primary reason for the film’s creation however, as the author’s make no attempt to disguise the fact that this is an AI generated film. The creation, as the quote earlier suggests, is both an attempt to explore the patterns in our own story writing and to see if a machine is capable of producing such a story. So there are two ways to evaluate this film, one which is exploring our own humanity. As the quotation suggests, questioning the environment is a large aspect within science fiction, as was the love triangle, which formed the main storyline of the Sunspring film submission. The final film script was trained on numerous science fiction scripts, such as Blade Runner and the Alien films, although some scripts dominated the film in terms of content, with the entire nine seasons of the X-Files, 24 episodes of forty-five minutes each, controlling the direction of the final script. Thus the conversations between characters are largely based off conversations between Mulder and Scully and could perhaps reflect specific areas of the genre over others. At the core of the creation through the text is a reflection of how humans write, of what we write about, and how we create suspense, condensed into a film with a run time of only nine minutes. The creation is a mathematical, ‘averaged’ script, created by calculating scripts spanning across decades and with different directions.