as told to Jason Lederman / illustration by Peter Oumanski
THE BENJAMIN BUTTONHow to Program a Screenwriter
OSCAR SHARP,DIRECTOR;ROSS GOODWIN,TECHNOLOGIST
When director Oscar Sharp entered Sci-Fi-London’s 48 Hours Film Challenge in 2016, he
had to write, shoot, and edit a movie in two days. To up his creative game, Sharp enlisted
technologist Ross Goodwin to build what might be the irst script-writing artiicial intelli-
gence. This recurrent neural network, which eventually named itself Benjamin, spat out the
four-page screenplay that became the seven-minuteSunspring. Then things got weird.Writing
Benjamin churned out a
jabberwocky of a script.
Although it contained no
character information,
the actors interpreted the
tale as a love triangle.2
Learning
To train a neural network
that writes text one
letter at a time, Goodwin
fed it nearly 1,000 sci-fi
scripts, including The
X-Filesand Blade Runner.1
Screening
Audiences loved that an AI
had written the script—
though some considered it
mere word salad. Out of
more than 100 competitors,
Sunspring made the top 10.4
Walking and talking
For Sharp’s next project,
Goodwin trained Benjamin
to write like screenwriter
Aaron Sorkin. Its latest
line: “The president wants
to do it for me.”5
Staging
Sharp needed to make sense
of some very odd actions:
For a character “taking
his eyes from his mouth,”
the director had the actor
spit out a prop eyeball.
3
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