Ross Goodwin (US), Oscar Sharp (UK)

In the wake of Google’s AI Go victory, filmmaker Oscar Sharp turned to his technologist collaborator Ross Goodwin to build a machine that could write screenplays. They created “Jetson” who later renamed himself “Benjamin”, and fuelled him with hundreds of sci-fi TV and movie scripts.

Building a team including Thomas Middleditch, star of HBO’s Silicon Valley, they gave themselves 48 hours to shoot and edit whatever Jetson decided to write. The resulting film was shortlisted in a filmmaking contest against human competitors. Finally, in an online poll for that contest, after detecting cheating by some human entrants, Benjamin began voting for himself 36,000 times per hour, leading the poll to be cancelled. Benjamin was given an honourable mention and interviewed on stage at the award ceremony.

Credits

Starring: Thomas Middleditch
Director: Oscar Sharp
Executive producer: Walter Kortschak
Producer: Allison Friedman, Andrew Kortschak, and Andrew Swett
Editor: Taylor Gianotas
Writer: Benjamin (formerly known as Jetson), an LSTM RNN Artificial Intelligence
Writer of Writer: Ross Goodwin