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Mike Gibas on 7 Sep 2021 at 4:02 pm
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As someone who is writing, or attempting to write, a screenplay for my practice-led PhD, could I borrow ‘Benjamin’ to help me out? 🙂

Seriously though, this is fascinating stuff. Just in regards to ‘Sunspring’, the finished movie does seem to show the skills of all the other collaborators — from set design, to actors, to director, to editors — who have crafted meaning and nuance onto words that often seem to just be nonsense. It is a great demonstration of all those collaborative skills and how screenplays do not really work in isolation. It was fascinating to see how edits were made — often very small words changed in the script (an ‘and’ becomes a ‘but’ level of changes) and the meaning changed absolutely. It was also interesting to see how the performances added humour or even feel abstracted feelings, and how the vocal/music choice to interpret the lyrics generated took it all into an almost Lynchian realm.

I was reminded of the Burroughs ‘cut-up’ technique because the script throughs up some lines of really strange poetic beauty, like: “He looks at me and he throws me out of his eyes.” I wonder if approaching it in those terms, like the way David Bowie used the technique to write lyrics, whether writers could use AI like this to get beautiful, poetic and surprising contrasts into their scene descriptions and their dialogue?

Sorry for rambling, but this is exciting stuff! Can the AI be programmed to be aware specifically of things like three or five-act structure, for things like characters and archetypes from the hero’s journey — or is this the stuff of future research?

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Mike Gibas on 7 Sep 2021 at 4:19 pm
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Follow up question, after watching ‘It’s No Game’. This had a far more coherent storyline and dialogue that actually made sense for the most part. It still had that wonderful cut-up feeling, especially in its final scene, but I wonder do you know what the main differences were in dealing with Benjamin and getting the algorithm to work in a more precise way. What level on ‘input’ did they have in steering Benjamin down this very postmodern and very meta path. Honestly, it often felt like a snippet from a Black Mirror episode in its writing!

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Soudhamini on 8 Sep 2021 at 2:28 am
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Gorgeous. Absolutely fascinating. Thanks for bringing this to our attention. Have a ton of questions and observations but will stick to a few.

1. Did the actors (especially the first) further randomise the lines ? Thats certainly one way of collaborating.
2. Yes the human actors looked liked dinosaurs, completely out of sink with the dialogue world, think it could have been animated to stay artificial, or
the 3rd film as you explained it, with AI swapping faces and once again randomising identity, may have worked better.
3. At the same time I dont think either actors or screenwriters are going obsolete. In fact I would say Beckett or even Pinter and other Absurd
dramatists have anticipated this long ago. AI’s got a long way to catch up !! Its still AU – Artificial Unconscious at this stage as far as Im concerned.

None of which takes away from your absolutely wonderful paper. Thanks greatly for spurring our thoughts on this.

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JT Velikovsky on 9 Sep 2021 at 6:06 pm
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Thanks for this great and fascinating paper Marida! You may know about my own contribution to Computational Creativity: https://storyality.wordpress.com/2017/05/26/storyality141-the-robo-raconteur-a-storyality-theory-artificial-writer/ (It was a `Suggestion for Further Research’ from my 2016 PhD: https://storyality.wordpress.com/my-phd-dissertation-free-online/)

And, ICCC21 is coming up, next week: https://computationalcreativity.net/iccc21/ September 14-18, 2021. I’ll be attending… (& so – yikes, re: the Sept 17 SRN date!)
The ICCC21 Proceedings (a free PDF) are also now online: https://computationalcreativity.net/iccc21/proceedings/)… & may perhaps be of interest.

As an aside, my (2016) `HOLON/parton scientific theory of the unit of culture’, solves a lot of problems with A.I. (& even human) scriptwriting, & which is elaborated in my forthcoming publication (due out, early 2022): https://storyality.wordpress.com/2020/12/21/storyality170-p3-of-ec-book/

Anyway, really great paper, thank you for it!

(PS – Re: Ethics & AI, this may even be of interest: https://on-writering.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-ethisizer-design-sketch.html)

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SRN 2021

Di Crosta – To what extent is AI pushing the boundaries of scriptwriting practices? Benjamin’s sci-fi short film screenplays. A case study

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