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.

We've previously reported how AI is developing rapidly and gaining the ability to do things like defeat human champions at the game of Go, describe photos in words for vision-impaired users, detect cyber attacks and even write novels and financial reports. That's old hat – there's now an AI that can write screenplays. It's named itself Benjamin and its first film, a sci-fi short, has just been released on YouTube for the world to enjoy. 'Sunspring' was directed by Oscar Sharp and stars Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch. It was made for the 48-Hour Film Challenge at the Sci-Fi London festival.

NEW YORK – With its ubiquitous Phantom drones, Chinese manufacturer SZ DJI Technology Co. brought aerial photography to millions. Now, with dozens of competitors biting at its heels, the world's biggest producer of consumer drones needs to prove that its products are more than just glorified selfie sticks. "Right now, DJI is the king of the drones-are-cool market, they are not king of the drones-are-a-tool market," said Colin Snow, founder of Skylogic Research, which advises corporations using drones. "They've entered where they don't have a lot of experience." The nine-year-old company is developing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for agriculture and surveying as dozens of competitors inside China and around the world begin to flood the market with cheap drones, from 10 minitoys to sub- 100 camera carriers.

We're getting A.I. to do all sorts of weird and wonderful things these days, whether its on the small-scale of text prediction or captioning photos, to driving cars for us and beating people at board games. But what if we turned a neural network into a science fiction writer? The answer is that you'd get a complete mess in return. That is the premise behind Sunspring, a film starring Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch and directed by Oscar Sharp and written by... well, an LSTM recurrent neural network. Sharp and technologist Ross Goodwin fed the network a bevy of sci-fi scripts, from Ghostbusters 2 to Star Wars, and then gave it a selection of prompts to include in the screenplay it churned out.

So, what happens when you create artificial intelligence that can write a science fiction screenplay? Short film writer-director Oscar Sharp and producers Andrew Kortschak, Andrew Swett, and Allison Friedman, along with actor Thomas Middledtich (Silicon Valley), have crafted a bizarre, illogical, yet strangely fascinating experimental short. Sharp and his "technologist collaborator" Ross Goodwin built "Jetson," a little machine that can craft screenplays. Using text prediction software used on smartphones as a basis, hundreds of sci-fi TV and film screenplays, as well as some basic seeds from a sci-fi filmmaking competition, were fed into Jetson and the machine was given the green light. What materialised is Sunspring, a nonsensical short, but one that is nevertheless compelling, driving the mind to come up with possible meanings and conclusions.

Starring Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch and directed by Oscar Sharp, the short features a special script compiled by the neural network that even wrote a song unique to the film. After being fed scripts like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Watchmen and Aliens (as well as tons of others) it produced a nonsensical mess that actually works quite well in practice. The film was shot and edited in 48 hours, which is a feat considering how polished it looks in practice. As one character says "Well, I don't know anything about any of this, so..." You might get that feeling after viewing the film, but it's just like watching the insane ramblings of porn stars in Vernon Chatman's Final Flesh.

In the film, Goertzel emerges as part visionary, part mountebank. He can always attract partners and excite investors but he struggles to hit deadlines. A company he set up in New York "pissed away" 20 million (as his former business partner puts it.) There is an excruciating scene in the documentary in which he and his colleagues demonstrate their A.I. "child" robots to their Chinese investors in Hong Kong. The robots let them down.

This film is brought to you by the World Technology Network. Job displacement due to automation of ever increasing range of professions - from truck drivers and lawyers, to writers and financial analysts - is likely to be one of the greatest challenges of the next couple of decades. A 2013 Oxford study predicts that up to 47% of jobs could be lost in the United States - nearly twice the unemployment rate of the Great Depression. Why wait till it's too late? Let's talk about this elephant in the room now.

Real music signals are highly variable, yet they have strong statistical structure. Prior information about the underlying physical mechanisms by which sounds are generated and rules by which complex sound structure is constructed (notes, chords, a complete musical score), can be naturally unified using Bayesian modelling techniques. Typically algorithms for Automatic Music Transcription independently carry out individual tasks such as multiple-F0 detection and beat tracking. The challenge remains to perform joint estimation of all parameters. We present a Bayesian approach for modelling music audio, and content analysis. The proposed methodology based on Gaussian processes seeks joint estimation of multiple music concepts by incorporating into the kernel prior information about non-stationary behaviour, dynamics, and rich spectral content present in the modelled music signal. We illustrate the benefits of this approach via two tasks: pitch estimation, and inferring missing segments in a polyphonic audio recording.

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.