What would happen if a highly advanced artificial intelligence wrote a screenplay and it was made into a film? A couple of people decided to find out.

Director Oscar Sharp and technologist Ross Goodwin started by submitting a vast array of science fiction scripts, everything from Logan's Run to Blade Runner to War of the Worlds to The Avengers, into a LSTM (long short-term memory) recurrent neural network -- essentially an artificial brain that is theoretically able to perform skills ranging from speech recognition to music composition.

Next, they programmed a series of prompts into the network -- a bunch of items including dialogue, action, plot beats and other elements that were selected for use in the script.

The network dutifully delivered its script (no word on what it got paid, but we hope it got at least the Writers Guild minimum) and Sharp got to work. Working with three actors, including Silicon Valley star Thomas Middleditch, he shot and edited the short film Sunspring in 48 hours.

You can watch the rather surreal and frankly nonsensical results below. All I'll say is, while I don't think computers will be replacing human screenwriters anytime soon, I've seen worse ...

(via io9)