Some two years ago we published an article that tried to answer the question of when will we see the world's first AI movie director? In this article I stated that "It seems certain that the first AI directed movie will be either a cartoon or animated film." Well, two years on, it was brought to my attention, rather embarrassingly, that some people feel that by the time I even wrote that article that we had already seen the first AI directed film. I noted in that article that the "first ever AI generated script that was turned into a movie called Sunspring (2016)", a real milestone for artificial intelligence. Well, it turns out that it was an evolution of the same artificial intelligence system that, only two years later in 2018, did in fact'direct' a movie.

Ars is excited to be hosting this online debut of Sunspring, a short science fiction film that's not entirely what it seems. You know it's the future because H (played with neurotic gravity by Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch) is wearing a shiny gold jacket, H2 (Elisabeth Gray) is playing with computers, and C (Humphrey Ker) announces that he has to "go to the skull" before sticking his face into a bunch of green lights. It sounds like your typical sci-fi B-movie, complete with an incoherent plot. Except Sunspring isn't the product of Hollywood hacks--it was written entirely by an AI. To be specific, it was authored by a recurrent neural network called long short-term memory, or LSTM for short.

What if I tell you that an entire short sci-fi film has been written by an AI bot built on LSTM recurrent neural network, and it has even received positive reviews and critics, Surprised?! well, I'm sure you are because that's what I felt watching "Sunspring" for the first time, I mean I know it can't be compared to Steven Spielberg's or Alex Garland's screenwriting quality but no wonder if in the next few years AI bots will compete against them in the Academy Awards. Indeed, we should no longer be surprised by what artificial intelligence is capable of in order to flip our world upside down, making it a better, "easier", and most comfortable place to live in. From all of the AI subfields, in my opinion, NLP has the coolest and most exciting applications. One of them is text generation that we should have a deep look at it. In this article, I will briefly explain how RNN and LSTM work and how we can generate texts using LSTM in Python.

What if I tell you that an entire short sci-fi film has been written by an AI bot built on LSTM recurrent neural network, and it has even received positive reviews and critics, Surprised?! well, I'm sure you are because that's what I felt watching "Sunspring" for the first time, I mean I know it can't be compared to Steven Spielberg's or Alex Garland's screenwriting quality but no wonder if in the next few years AI bots will compete against them in the Academy Awards. Indeed, we should no longer be surprised by what artificial intelligence is capable of in order to flip our world upside down, making it a better, "easier", and most comfortable place to live in. From all of the AI subfields, in my opinion, NLP has the coolest and most exciting applications. One of them is text generation that we should have a deep look at it. In this article, I will briefly explain how RNN and LSTM work and how we can generate texts using LSTM in Python.

If Sunspring is anything to go by, artificial intelligence in film-making has some way to go. This short film, made as an entry to Sci-Fi London's 48-hour film-making competition in 2016, was written entirely by an AI. The director, Oscar Sharp, fed a few hundred sci-fi screenplays into a long short-term memory recurrent neural network (the type of software behind predictive text in a smartphone), then told it to write its own. The result was almost, but not quite, incoherent nonsense, riddled with cryptic nonsequiturs, bizarre turns of phrase and unfathomable stage directions such as "he is standing in the stars and sitting on the floor". All of which Sharp and his actors filmed with sincere commitment.

Sunspring debuted at the SCI-FI LONDON film festival in 2016. Set in a dystopian world with mass unemployment, the movie attracted many fans, with one viewer describing it as amusing but strange. But the most notable aspect of the film involves its creation: an artificial-intelligence (AI) bot wrote Sunspring's screenplay. "Maybe machines will replace human storytellers, just like self-driving cars could take over the roads." A closer look at Sunspring might raise some doubts, however.

Ross Goodwin has had an extraordinary career. After playing about with computers as a child, he studied economics, then became a speech writer for President Obama, writing presidential proclamations, then took a variety of freelance writing jobs. One of these involved churning out business letters--he calls it freelance ghostwriting. The letters were all pretty much the same, so he figured out an algorithm that would generate form letters, using a few samples as a database. The algorithm jumbled up paragraphs and lines following certain templates, then reassembled them to produce business letters, similar but each varying in style, saving him the job of starting anew each time. He thought he was on to something new but soon found out that this was a well-explored area.

From winning at Go to passing eighth grade level multiple choice tests, AI is making rapid advances. But its creativity still leaves much to be desired. On September 4, 2019, Peter Clark, along with several other researchers, published "From'F' to'A' on the N.Y. Regents Science Exams: An Overview of the Aristo Project " The Aristo project named in the title is hailed for the rapid improvement it has demonstrated when it tested the way eighth-grade human students in New York State are tested for their knowledge of science. The researchers concluded that this is an important milestone for AI: "Although Aristo only answers multiple choice questions without diagrams, and operates only in the domain of science, it nevertheless represents an important milestone towards systems that can read and understand. The momentum on this task has been remarkable, with accuracy moving from roughly 60% to over 90% in just three years."

Financial marketers have to crank out a lot of content -- blogs, ad copy, social media posts, web content, and more. Everyone grinding out content would like to have more help. Would you hire the writer who put together the following paragraph on Search Engine Optimization? "Search engine marketers find and rank on websites by making sure they have content relevant to other visitors. In order to have useful content, try clicking on links in a newspaper, magazine, book or website. Do that, and now you will have found good links in other sites that you would now like to link to in a future article. To promote it more, list it in your blog, which will then promote it much more on the web."

First it was age-old board games and boring office jobs, but now it seems robots are gearing up to take over Hollywood. Following up the stunning success of its debut short movie from last year, Sunspring, the script-writing artificial intelligence Benjamin is back with yet another sci-fi flick. Directed by Oscar Sharp and starring Baywatch icon David Hasselhoff, It's No Game takes us to an alternate reality where, in midst of heated writer's strike in Hollywood, AI script writers have gradually began to replace human ones. Using an advanced nanobot technology, producers have found a way to channel the inner thoughts and mannerism of the AI writers directly to human actors, causing them to act out borderline non-sensical lines put together by various algorithms trained on Shakespeare, Aaron Sorkin and Golden Age Hollywood movies. Accompanying Hasselhoff in It's No Game's cast are Flesh and Bone's Sarah Hay, The Walking Dead's Thomas Payne as well as Tom Guinee.