Stephen L. Carter, Columnist

Coming to the Multiplex: Movies Written by Machines

Maybe not this weekend, but a new film written by artificial intelligence shows promise for the technology.

April 28, 2017 at 4:32 PM UTC

Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of law at Yale University and author of “Invisible: The Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster.”

Get your popcorn ready.
Photographer: Abdullah Doma/AFP/Getty Images

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If you’re looking for a good movie, I suggest that you try “It’s No Game.” If you’ve never heard of it, that’s okay. The film, just released this week, is a bit less than eight minutes long. It tells the story of a pair of Hollywood writers who learn that they are going to be replaced by an artificially intelligent algorithm that generates screenplays. By now I’m sure you’ve guessed the kicker: “It’s No Game” was itself written by an artificially intelligent algorithm that generates screenplays. Although the algorithm is still crude, we may be looking at the future.

The algorithm is called Benjamin -- it chose its own name -- and is the brainchild of director Oscar Sharp and Ross Goodwin, an AI researcher who is a graduate student at New York University. Their idea was to feed a neural network lots of sci-fi screenplays and teleplays to give it a feel for dialogue, setting and plot, and then switch on the bot and see what came out.