What does a creative writer do that a computer can’t?
Could an AI have drummed up Hamlet?
Artificial Intelligence has come a long way in the last several years, and now the filmmakers behind “Sunspring” have returned with a new short starring David Hasselhoff. Once again, Oscar Sharp who directed the first ever all AI Artificial Intelligence has come a long way in the last several years, and now the filmmakers behind “Sunspring” have returned with a new short starring David Hasselhoff. Once again, Oscar Sharp who directed the first ever all AI movie has teamed up with “Benjamin,” an A.I. programmed by Ross Goodwin to write screenplays.
This year, they trained four new long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network models on subtitles from David Hasselhoff’s 1980s TV shows, Shakespeare, Golden Age Hollywood films, and Aaron Sorkin. In addition, they used a context-free grammar loaded with words from a ballet dictionary to make a choreography generator, and re-used an LSTM recurrent neural network from “Sunspring” to produce Hasselhoff’s final soliloquy. The process required the use of New York University’s supercomputer for training, and a Razer Blade laptop outfitted with a high-performance graphics processing unit (GPU) for text generation.
The result is a weird and unnerving look at the clash between creatives and corporate suits in Hollywood. With a looming writers’ strike now hovering over the industry, the questions posed by It’s No Game are uncannily prescient.