When Silicon Valley came back this season, viewers may not have known what to expect, but they certainly knew what not to expect. T.J. Miller's much-ballyhooed exit meant that the show would be without its most dependable (if incompetent) trickster. Since the HBO show's inception, Erlich Bachman had been the perfect agent of chaos: shortsighted, greedy, and insecure enough to constantly undercut the Pied Piper gang without being an actual antagonist. Couple his departure that with the show's increasingly how are they gonna get out of this--oh, they just did narrative curlicues, and even fans would have been forgiven for assuming the worst for Season 5. Is that how the newest batch turned out? The season, which wrapped up last night, felt as ripped-from-the-headlines as other years--this time cryptocurrency flameouts, Tesla, and Sophia the robot got the parody treatment--but it also added some new variables to the mix.

Both humans and robots make mistakes, but bots are quicker, cheaper, and don't require 401K retirement plans or medical insurance. As part of an international trend toward machine-written news reporting, Google is giving the United Kingdom's Press Association an $800,000 award to create robot journalists. The use of artificial intelligence is expected to help the overseas Press Association to churn out 30,000 additional articles every month. The award was announced on July 6. Lucy A. Dalglish, dean and professor at the University of Maryland journalism school, said that robots are spreading to newsrooms around the globe, especially to write stories about sporting events, which are data-driven stories.

Over recent years, we've seen artificial intelligence systems designed to write software, compose music, paint works of art, and even pen news articles, but the machines have been notably quiet in the medium of fiction storytelling. Designing an A.I. system that can write the screenplay for a movie, or compose a great novel, has posed a big challenge for researchers. So just how close are we to having machines pen our blockbuster films? In June, a bizarre short film entitled Sunspring premiered. Filled with incoherent non-sequiturs and inexplicably surreal tangents, the film could be considered either a compelling dream-like fugue or an amateurish mess.

"We see H pull a book from a shelf, flip through it while speaking, and then put it back. H: In the future with more unemployment, young people are forced to sell blood. That's the first thing I can do." And so begins the script of Sunspring – a romance, mystery, sci-fi film written by an artificial intelligence algorithm that named itself Benjamin. Benjamin is the brainchild of filmmaker Oscar Sharp and technologist Ross Goodwin, who decided to employ a long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network to compete in the 48-Hour Film Challenge at Sci-Fi London.

Why not ask AI to do the job? Sunspring, a short film that debuted today on Ars Technica, displays many of the sci-fi tropes that fans of the genre know and love, from shiny metallic costumes to creepy biotechnology. There's just one difference: The nine-minute film was written by an artificially intelligent system named Benjamin, and, in a strangely satisfying way, it makes very little sense. Their banter, layered with an undertone of foreboding, is premised on the idea that "in a future with mass unemployment, young people are forced to sell blood." Benjamin ingested that prompt, which also serves as the film's opening line, and generated the brief script (plus some song lyrics, for good measure).

Writers, prepare to be made obsolete. An artificial intelligence program has written a sci-fi screenplay, which real-life actors have turned into a nine minute film. Sunspring was made by director Oscar Sharp for the annual Sci-Fi London film festival, written by a recurrent neural network that called itself "Benjamin." The film, which debuted on Ars Technica on Thursday, is equal parts bizarre, emotional and intriguing. Sunspring stars Thomas Middleditch (from Silicon Valley) as a character called H, who pines after Elisabeth Gray, who also plays a character called H. Humphrey Ker seems to be the second H's partner, and he's called C, but even that's not entirely certain.