It seems like not only production workers and customer service representatives are in danger of losing their jobs but Hollywood scriptwriters as well. An artificial intelligence algorithm has created a script for a short film that stars Baywatch icon David Hasselhoff.
Benjamin is a scriptwriting artificial intelligence created by Ross Goodwin, a researcher at New York University, who created it over the course of one year. This was not the first time Benjamin wrote a movie script. The first one was last year when it wrote the short sci-fi film called "Sunspring" by learning a dozen of the 80s and 90s sci-fi scripts.
This time, Benjamin wrote another short film called "It's No Game" starring David Hasselhoff, Sarah Hay of "Flesh and Bone," Thomas Payne, and Tom Guinee of "The Walking Dead." The movie's plot is not far from reality - it takes place in an alternate reality Hollywood where all the scriptwriters went on strike and AI took over their job.
In one scene, Hay who plays a movie producer, tells scriptwriters-on-strike Guinee and Payne that it doesn't matter whether they will quit their jobs because an artificial intelligence can do better. She then used "Sunspring" as an example saying that it got a million hits despite being written by an AI.
Unlike the previous script, Ross Goodwin trained Benjamin using six different models and sourcing dialogues from Shakespeare, Golden Age Hollywood movies and television series like Baywatch and Knight Rider.
According to Ars Technica, using the dialogues from these classic movies and television series, the algorithm learned to create long sentences that are based on "learning rules from a corpus of writing."
The only sequence which Benjamin did not write was the ballerina scene. It was written by another algorithm called context-free grammar which was trained to write short phrases from words.
Watch the short film below:
