Skynet may be capable of taking over the world, but will it be able to write an award-winning screenplay? At this point, the answer appears to be a resounding ‘no’, at least in the amusing case of Sunspring, a script written by an LSTM recurrent neural network named Benjamin (formerly Jetson) that had been fed a steady diet of hundreds of science fiction screenplays in preparation for its attempt. Directed by Oscar Sharp and starring Elisabeth Grey, Thomas Middleditch (of Silicon Valley), and Humphrey Ker, the 9-minute short film was created in the space of 48 hours for the annual Sci-Fi London Film Festival and attempted to bring to life both the script and the stage directions as written by the AI. The results are nonsensical, entertaining, frequently hilarious, and given a curious weight through the excellent performances of all actors involved. Elisabeth Grey’s monologue at the close of the film is especially powerful, the (weirdly sexual?) gibberish infused with a strange poignancy through her emotional and nuanced delivery.

See the film here.