GUEST COLUMN: Will Hollywood Officially Switch To Artificial Intelligence?

Remember classic Hollywood films in which someone like Mickey Rooney or Judy Garland gushed, "C'mon, gang, let's get a Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) Neural Network to put on a show"? Um, well, neither do I; but someday that could be the cliche our children remember. According to CBS News, filmmaker Oscar Sharp and his technologist collaborator Ross Goodwin have built a machine that can write screenplays. They fed the neural network (named Benjamin) hundreds of movie scripts and some prompts and it regurgitated a sparse script, which was turned into the short YouTube video "Sunspring". I'm sure a lot of you assumed that Tinseltown was already using artificial intelligence (AI) to crank out its endless sequels and knuckleheaded knockoffs; but, no, this is a new "thought experiment," as CBS calls it.