Hey, I'm one of the creators of this -- I trained the LSTMs that wrote the computer generated segments in this film. The ballet choreography was generated with a context-free grammar, because I couldn't find enough material to make a ballet choreography LSTM.<p>Here's our film from last year, Sunspring, which was written entirely by an LSTM trained on science fiction screenplays:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LY7x2Ihqjmc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LY7x2Ihqjmc</a><p>It's worth noting that this year I used subtitle files rather than screenplays to train our LSTMs, so we only had dialogue rather than dialogue + action descriptions. The Ars Technica article explains everything.
Today I learned that Markov chain generation = "AI."<p>Shame on Ars staff for conflating this parlor trick as "artificial intelligence," and failing to explain how this rather simple process works.<p>For fucks sake, they find the raw screenplay of a movie like Knight Rider, regex out the crap, download a Markov chain generator off of github, and train their model on the text. And of course by "training", I mean they run a single command to process the text document, and wait. Why this is described as a "...long short-term-memory recursive machine-learning algorithm" probably has to do with the fact that Ars has their hand in promoting these short films.
Ok, so it's not very smart AI; emacs's eliza might do as good a job.<p>But setting aside the article's lack of technical rigor, and its scientism, the film itself is interesting. I was impressed by how the actors could convey feeling, even with a randomly generated script. I imagine that, in acting school, actors have to do this sort of thing as an exercise: learn how to convey feeling using random words or grunts (is this done?).<p>For me, it's interesting that there's another side to human communication that has nothing to do with verbal meaning. It sounds hard to do THAT using software.
Interesting. Sidenote: a 30+ year old film Death Wish (about a woman who's dying young and how her life becomes a reality tv show) predicted AI-written novels.
do people actually fall for this? It's so clearly just writers passing it off as an AI because ML is the buzzword of the month that gets funding and attention.
Wow, this is probably the weirdest thing I have seen on the Internet so far.<p>But if we end up with androids dreaming of electric sheep, this is where it started.