The effect is kind of like a futuristic, super-nonsensical Shakespeare play. If anything, the film shows that a movie can get surprisingly far relying entirely on body language, tone of voice, and a little mood music. Benjamin's creators have since turned the program to churning out feature film ideas, so watch out for a machine-learning movie to hit theaters in the future.

Knowing that an AI wrote Sunspring makes the movie more fun to watch, especially once you know how the cast and crew put it together. Director Oscar Sharp made the movie for Sci-Fi London, an annual film festival that includes the 48-Hour Film Challenge, where contestants are given a set of prompts (mostly props and lines) that have to appear in a movie they make over the next two days. Sharp's longtime collaborator, Ross Goodwin, is an AI researcher at New York University, and he supplied the movie's AI writer, initially called Jetson. As the cast gathered around a tiny printer, Benjamin spat out the screenplay, complete with almost impossible stage directions like "He is standing in the stars and sitting on the floor." Then Sharp randomly assigned roles to the actors in the room.

Last month, Google took the stage in Mountain View, California, to show off improvements to its digital voice assistant. Its signature ability is to have a conversation with it like you would a normal person. You can ask "Google Assistant" what's on your schedule and then have it text the person you're meeting to say you'll be late. Google remembers your first question, so you don't have to start over with a new command. Like a real person, it builds off what you were talking about earlier.

Google earlier this month released to the public the first piece of original music created by Magenta, a project that utilizes the artificial intelligence engine TensorFlow to determine if an AI system can create compelling pieces of art and music. It's only fitting, then, that the composition be followed by a short film. Sunspring, starring Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch and directed by Oscar Sharp, was written by an LSTM (Long Short Term Memory) recurrent neural network. As Gizmodo recounts, Sharp and technologist Ross Goodwin fed the neural network a smattering of sci-fi scripts and a series of prompts for which to base its film on. Found is a TechSpot feature where we share clever, funny or otherwise interesting stuff from around the web.

That is exactly what Forrester wants to find out - is there something behind the AI and Cognitive Computing hype? What my research directors ask, "Is there a there there?" AI and Cognitive Computing have captured the imagination and interest of organization large and small but does anyone really know how to bring this new capability in and get value from it? And the bigger question - WHEN will this happen? It is time to roll-up the sleeves and look beyond conversations, vendor pitches and media coverage to really define what AI and Cognitive Computing mean for businesses, are businesses ready, where they will invest, and who they will turn to to build these innovated solutions, and what benefits will result.

Their lines are all grammatically correct but occasionally nonsensical, with Ker saying he has to "go to the skull" and Middleditch proclaiming that he's "not a bright light." The script was created by uploading hundreds of sci-fi screenplays into an LSTM recurrent neural network, as you do, and seeing what it returned -- including the surprisingly emotional monologue from Gray that ends the short. A wealth of information on "Sunspring" in general and "Benjamin" (as the A.I. itself is named) in particular is available on Ars. Oscar Sharp directed the film for the Sci-Fi London film festival and does an admirable job of making stage directions like "He is standing in the stars and sitting on the floor" seem reasonable in the final product.

Why not ask AI to do the job? Sunspring, a short film that debuted today on Ars Technica, displays many of the sci-fi tropes that fans of the genre know and love, from shiny metallic costumes to creepy biotechnology. There's just one difference: The nine-minute film was written by an artificially intelligent system named Benjamin, and, in a strangely satisfying way, it makes very little sense. Their banter, layered with an undertone of foreboding, is premised on the idea that "in a future with mass unemployment, young people are forced to sell blood." Benjamin ingested that prompt, which also serves as the film's opening line, and generated the brief script (plus some song lyrics, for good measure).

Artificial intelligence has recently been trying its hand at various human creative endeavours, from cooking to art, poetry to board games, but nothing is quite as surreal as a robot writing the script for a science fiction movie – until now. The script and movie were the product of director Oscar Sharp and Ross Goodwin, a New York University AI researcher. A so-called recurrent neural network, which named itself Benjamin, was fed the scripts of dozens of science fiction movies including such classics as Highlander Endgame, Ghostbusters, Interstellar and The Fifth Element. From there it was asked to create a screenplay, including actor directions, using a set of prompts required by the Sci-Fi London film festival's 48-hour challenge. The resulting screenplay and pop song were then given to the cast, including Thomas Middleditch from Silicon Valley, Elisabeth Gray and Humphrey Ker to interpret and make into a film.

Apple is gearing up to give fans and investors a peek at what's next for the Cupertino, Calif.-based company. Starting on June 13, Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference, or WWDC, will give the firm a chance to share updates on the iPhone, Mac, Siri and more. As usual, WWDC comes on the heels of Google's own developers conference, during which the search giant emphasized its advancements in artificial intelligence. Apple is expected to make similar announcements, including improvements to Siri that would make the virtual assistant more useful. Here's a look at what Apple might reveal during its opening keynote, set for June 13 at 10 a.m.

Little green men in flying saucers may be the least of our worries. There is a growing belief amongst scientists that aliens may not be biological creatures at all, but rather artificial, robot-like intelligence. Because the universe is much older than Earth, singularity may already exist in alien life forms, allowing them to upload their consciousness into an artificial intelligence within a synthetic body. "Most people have an iconic idea of aliens as these biological creatures but that doesn't make any sense from a timescale argument," Seth Shostak, the director of Center for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, said. For Shostak, the argument for more advanced extraterrestrial life is "straightforward." Considering that humans have inhabited Earth for less than .003