"Sunspring," short film written by artificial intelligence, is strange and hilarious

Filmmaker Oscar Sharp and his technologist collaborator Ross Goodwin wanted to build a machine that could write screenplays. They took hundreds of sci-fi TV and movie scripts, including "Jurassic Park," "Frankenstein" and "Minority Report," and fed them into an artificial intelligence Long Short-Term Memory (LTSM) neural network named Benjamin. They provided the AI with some prompts to help it get started, such as the title "Sunspring," a setting in a future with mass unemployment where young people are forced to sell their blood, and an opening scene in which a man pulls a book from a shelf. Then it was up to the AI system to spin the rest of the story. The resulting script was then filmed with the help of three actors, including Thomas Middleditch from HBO's "Silicon Valley," and edited into the weird, disjointed short film "Sunspring."