So they train these AIs by feeding them thousands of datasets. If you want to train one to run mazes, you'd let it train on thousands of mazes right?
Well, what if you wanted one to write movies?
http://arstechnica.co.uk/the-multive...ils-interview/
Knowing that an AI wrote Sunspring makes the movie more fun to watch, especially once you know how the cast and crew put it together. Director Oscar Sharp made the movie for Sci-Fi London, an annual film festival that includes the 48-Hour Film Challenge, where contestants are given a set of prompts (mostly props and lines) that have to appear in a movie they make over the next two days. Sharp's longtime collaborator, Ross Goodwin, is an AI researcher at New York University, and he supplied the movie's AI writer, initially called Jetson. As the cast gathered around a tiny printer, Benjamin spat out the screenplay, complete with almost impossible stage directions like "He is standing in the stars and sitting on the floor." Then Sharp randomly assigned roles to the actors in the room. "As soon as we had a read-through, everyone around the table was laughing their heads off with delight," Sharp told Ars. The actors interpreted the lines as they read, adding tone and body language, and the results are what you see in the movie. Somehow, a slightly garbled series of sentences became a tale of romance and murder, set in a dark future world. It even has its own musical interlude (performed by Andrew and Tiger), with a pop song Benjamin composed after learning from a corpus of 30,000 other pop songs.
Speaking by phone from New York, the two recalled how they were both obsessed with figuring out how to make machines generate original pieces of writing. For years, Sharp wanted to create a movie out of random parts, even going so far as to write a play out of snippets of text chosen by dice rolls. Goodwin, who honed his machine-assisted authoring skills while ghost writing letters for corporate clients, had been using Markov chains to write poetry. As they got to know each other at NYU, Sharp told Goodwin about his dream of collaborating with an AI on a screenplay. Over a year and many algorithms later, Goodwin built an AI that could.
Author or tool or something else?
As I was talking to Sharp and Goodwin, I noticed that all of us slipped between referring to Benjamin as "he" and "it." We attributed motivations to the AI, and at one point Sharp even mourned how poorly he felt that he'd interpreted Benjamin's stage directions. It was as if he were talking about letting a person down when he apologized for only having 48 hours to figure out what it meant for one of the actors to stand in the stars and sit on the floor at the same time. "We copped out by making it a dream sequence," he said. But why should Sharp worry about that, if Benjamin is just a tool to be used however he and Goodwin would like? The answer is complicated, because the filmmakers felt as if Benjamin was a co-author, but also not really an author at the same time. Partly this boiled down to a question of authenticity. An author, they reasoned, has to be able to create something that's some kind of original contribution, in their own voice, even if it might be cliché. But Benjamin only creates screenplays based on what other people have written, so by definition it's not really authentic to his voice—it's just a pure reflection of what other people have said.
As we wound down our conversation, Sharp and Goodwin offered me a chance to talk to Benjamin myself. We'd just been debating whether the AI was an author, so I decided to ask: "Are you an author?" Benjamin replied, "Yes you know what I’m talking about. You’re a brave man." Fortified by Benjamin's compliments about my bravery, I forged ahead with another question. Given that Benjamin was calling himself the author of a screenplay, I asked whether he might want to join the Writers Guild of America, a union for writers. Again, Benjamin's answer was decisive. "Yes, I would like to see you at the club tomorrow," he said. It appears that this AI won't be rising up against his fellow writers—he's going to join us in solidarity. At least for now.