This wild, AI-generated film is the next step in "whole-movie puppetry"

Two years ago, Ars Technica hosted the online premiere of a weird short film called Sunspring, which was mostly remarkable because its entire script was created by an AI. The film's human cast laughed at odd, computer-generated dialogue and stage direction before performing the results in particularly earnest fashion. That film's production duo, Director Oscar Sharp and AI researcher Ross Goodwin, have returned with another AI-driven experiment that, on its face, looks decidedly worse. Blurry faces, computer-generated dialogue, and awkward scene changes fill out this year's Zone Out, a film created as an entry in the Sci-Fi-London 48-Hour Challenge--meaning, just like last time, it had to be produced in 48 hours and adhere to certain specific prompts. That 48-hour limit is worth minding, because Sharp and Goodwin went one bigger this time: they let their AI system, which they call Benjamin, handle the film's entire production pipeline.