Watch Sunspring: An AI-Written Sci-Fi Movie Starring Thomas Middleditch

It's a confounding short science fiction film, with dialogue that often jumps around and doesn't always make much sense, but it's also shockingly coherent, with a throughline, a story of pain and regret. That's shocking for one reason: an artificial intelligence wrote the entire movie. Using technology comparable to predictive text on your smartphone, filmmaker Oscar Sharp teamed with Ross Goodwin to build a screenplay-writing computer. Goodwin's resulting piece of technology, an LSTM RNN Artificial Intelligence named Benjamin, was given hundreds of scripts from science fiction film and television. The AI read stories like 12 Monkeys, Blade Runner, the Alien films, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Ghostbusters, Interstellar, Looper, The Matrix, Star Wars, and The X-Files, then wrote a screenplay.