Watch this epic science fiction short film written by an AI

Ars Technica is hosting the online debut of Sunspring, a movie that was written entirely by an artificial intelligence (AI).

“To be specific, it was authored by a recurrent neural network called long short-term memory, or LSTM for short. At least, that’s what we’d call it. The AI named itself Benjamin,” Ars Technica reported.

An LSTM recurrent neural network is a a type of AI that is often used for text recognition.

Director Oscar Sharp made Sunspring for Sci-Fi London, as an entry to the annual film festival’s 48-hour film challenge.

Contestants are given a set of prompts, mostly props and lines, which have to appear in a movie they make over two days.

Sharp teamed up with an AI researcher at New York University, Ross Goodwin, to use an artificial intelligence to develop the screenplay.

To train the neural network, Goodwin used dozens of sci-fi screenplays he found online, which ended up being mostly movies from the 1980s and 90s.

According to the film-makers, the AI was given the following prompts:

Title: Sunspring
Dialogue: It may never be forgiven, but that is just too bad.
Prop & action: A character pulls a book from a shelf, flips through it and puts its back.
Optional science idea: In a future of mass unemployment, young people are forced to sell blood.