A little bit ago, I wrote an entry that I titled “The Rules They Are A Changin’, in which I discussed some “sky is falling’ kind of thoughts about what happens to the economy when AI do almost all the work. The piece got a comment or two, both on the site and on the Facebook feed it went into. The comments were similar to what I hear when I talk to people about this: “Yes, Ron,” the comments all start, “but a computer will never be able to fully replace a human’s thinking. It will never be able to make art!”
This, of course, ignores the fact that they already are making art, oftentimes indistinguishable from that which humans do today, oftentimes … er… distinguishable?
In the later category one might include Sunspring, a fascinating 9-minute short SF film that was made off a screenplay written by an AI that had been feed a whole bunch of SF screenplays, and then prompted to write one of its own. I should note that the film was written and released well before my little note—but I’ve only now ran into it, so I’m only now talking about it. I’ll link to the film at the end of this blurb. You should watch it. It’s intensely interesting for all its aspects, both good and bad. It’s meta. SFnal in concept and content in a strangely delicious way (delicious to me, anyway, your mileage will certainly vary).
In other words, it’s a weird film. The kind of thing a college kid who’s a fan of Phil Dick and David Bowie might write while on an acid trip. But it’s also oddly beautiful, as I suppose such things can be. As with all screenplays, it is infused with the human aspect of the actors, so the entire product is not AI/CGI, but then this kind of fits part of the questions I asked in the piece I first wrote. What happens to us when the AI starts to write screenplays that are “better” than what we can write? or at least “similar enough” to what we can write to make them more attractive to the marketplace?
Do we become merely interpreters?
At least until AI constructs can learn to act?
Dunno.
And let’s be clear, Sunspring is in no way an indicator that human screenplay writers are on the precipice of getting run out of business tomorrow.
But in two years? Five? Ten?
Who knows? But, yes, friends, I do think the rules really
Regardless, here’s a really interesting foray into the idea that a computer can already come up with in 2016.