philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

OpenAI’s GPT-3 Wrote This Short Film—Even the Twist at the End

Now there’s another feat to add to GPT-3’s list: it wrote a screenplay.

It’s short, and weird, and honestly not that good. But… it’s also not all that bad, especially given that it was written by a machine.

The three-and-half-minute short film shows a man knocking on a woman’s door and sharing a story about an accident he was in. It’s hard to tell where the storyline is going, but surprises viewers with what could be considered a twist ending.

The students that created the film used a tool derived from GPT-3 called Shortly Read to write the screenplay. They wrote the first several lines then let the AI take over.

According to media futurist and algorithmic filmmaker Alexis Kirke, we should get used to the idea of computers having a hand in our creative endeavors, especially when it comes to writing movie scripts. “A huge amount of experience has been codified by writers, producers, directors, script editors, and so forth,” he told Digital Trends. “Want to reduce the number of adverbs and adjectives in your script? There’s an algorithm for that. Want to ensure your characters’ dialog all sound[s] different from each other? There’s an algorithm for that. Want to generate alternative, less clichéd, rewrites of a page that keep its general meaning? There’s an algorithm for that.”

See the full story here: https://singularityhub.com/2020/10/23/an-ai-wrote-this-short-film-and-its-sort-of-fascinating/