Category: Film

Sci-Fi Film Written by AI is Still Fundamentally Human

Image by Pond 5
Image by Pond 5

Back in June, ArsTechnica hosted the online debut of a short film called Sunspring. Directed by Oscar Sharp and featuring the actors Elizabeth Gray, Humphrey Ker, and Thomas Middleitch, the film was made for the Sci-Fi London film festival according to guidelines for the 48-Hour Film Challenge, and it placed in the top ten out of hundreds of entries.  What is most distinctive about Sunspring, though, is its screenwriter Benjamin. No last name.  At least not one he’s told anyone yet.  You see, Benjamin is an AI.

Writer Analee Newitz describes Sunspring as the product of Sharp’s own fascination with artificial intelligence, which led to his friendship and collaboration at NYU with researcher Ross Goodwin. Listed in the film’s credits as Writer of Writer, Goodwin is the chief architect of the AI—an LSTM recurrent neural network—that would eventually name itself Benjamin. “To train Benjamin, Goodwin fed the AI with a corpus of dozens of sci-fi screenplays he found online—mostly movies from the 1980s and 90s. Benjamin dissected them down to the letter, learning to predict which letters tended to follow each other and from there which words and phrases tended to occur together,” writes Newitz.  The whole process itself is very interesting, and I recommend reading her article to learn more.

The finished film is definitely engaging, though I would not personally subscribe to the descriptions hilarious and intense as stated in Newitz’s headline. But to each his own, and headlines are headlines.  What Sunspring emphasizes for me, of course, is not a contemplation of machine intelligence but the significance of human interpretation. Benjamin’s absurdist script is a list of non-sequiturs, both in dialogue and stage direction, making the film project an experiment that almost asks the question, “Can we make a watchable movie based on the screenplay of a madman?”  The answer is of course you can.  Because cinema is very much an interpretive medium—both for makers and viewers. We can’t help but interpret; it’s what humans do.

The distinction between Sunspring and the oeuvre of human-crafted, experimental, non-narrative cinema—sometimes comprising stream-of-consciousness writing akin to Benjamin’s composition of algorithmic probability—is subtle to the point of nitpicky. Sunspring is odd, yes, but barely so if one is familiar with a film like Daisies or Hallelujah the Hills or the works of David Lynch.  The difference, of course, is that Sunspring’s absurdity—at least at the script stage—is accidental while these other works are not. Having said that, though, artists do make instinctive choices all the time that defy literal analysis, and audiences make poignant meaning from of these expressions that were never intended or even considered by their authors.

Sunspring’s script is humorously absurdist, though presumably not in a manner of which its author could possibly be aware.  The experience of watching the finished product shares strands of comedic DNA with the same mechanism that makes the Bad Lip Reading series work—because it’s funny when a real person or a character says something absurd in an earnest manner.  When BLR has Mitt Romney on the 2012 campaign trail say to a supporter “Thank you for the bench,” the same comedy chromosomes are at work as when Sunspring’s Humphrey Ker says, “We’re going to see the money.”  Benjamin has no idea why these things are funny, but they are funny in a non-literal way that is indisputably human.

Sunspring may represent a baby step toward the expectation that an AI will inevitably write a traditional, narrative screenplay for a major motion picture.  As I wrote in a very early post, a comparison between human-only, formulaic script development and machine-made or assisted, formulaic script development may prove to be indistinguishable.  Instead of leading down that path, however, Sunspring reminds us that cinema is often most compelling when convention and formula are broken.  And giving the responsibility to an AI of writing the blueprint for a film is certainly one way to achieve broken conventions—not unlike the artist who might experiment with narcotics to break down barriers to his or her subconscious.  Naturally, the more an AI resembles or reflects us, the more we assume its destiny is to replace us.  This is always the two-part conversation, right? There’s the gadget question that asks what an AI can accomplish, but there’s also the existential question that asks at what point we can say the AI has an identity, which is really a reflexive inquiry about our own existence.

So, here’s a hall-of-mirrors thought exercise:  might a more advanced AI than Benjamin have written a very different screenplay for the film The Enigma Code about the life and work of Alan Turing?  Personally, I like certain things about that film but was ultimately disappointed because I felt the work neglected an opportunity to explore the narrative in which the father of AI—the inventor of the Turing Test to determine the “identity” of the machine—was a man who literally had to pretend to be someone he was not.

So, if Benjamin’s great-grandson were the co-writer of a biopic about Alan Turing, might “he” bring a unique empathy for Turing’s duality given the AI’s own centaur-like existence?  And if so, wouldn’t we have to call that writing?  I think we would. On the other hand, absent the capacity for empathy or the existential question, the script is just barely structured words on a page that, as in Sunspring, only humans can interpret has having any meaning at all.

Motion Picture Unions Opposed to FCC Set-Top Proposals

Photo by ponsulak Pond 5.
Photo by ponsulak Pond 5.

As noted several times on this blog, it takes a lot of highly skilled people to make a film or TV show, and these people generally do not own any copyright interest in the works they help make or any equity in the production companies.  Motion pictures and television production is a project-to-project business. Crew members and performers are not full-time employees of either studios or production companies and may go months between jobs; they’ve been “gig-economy” workers since long before anyone thought that term was a new thing.

Just like most labor in the United States, today’s motion picture craftspeople are the beneficiaries of hard-fought rights—many negotiated decades ago—to share in the financial rewards of successful products they do not own.  Films and TV shows are mostly made by middle-class, freelance workers whose average, annual incomes comprise not only day rates and overtime, but also residuals and health and pension benefits.  These terms are negotiated and managed for most crew and performers by the unions DGA, SAG-AFTRA, and IATSE. These unions are opposed to the FCC “Set-Top Box” proposal because, as it stands, the proposal would break the licensing structure on which their compensation packages are based.

To be a sustainable workforce, performers and crew members generally need to remain on the net-positive side of several averages—average number of days worked, average number of shows worked that succeed, and average number of shows that succeed in the market overall.  By taking the macro view of the ways in which these workers are compensated over time, it’s very much a rising-tide-raises-all-boats paradigm.  The successful show that Props Master A works on feeds the health and pension program of Make-up artist B, who might work a show that doesn’t make it. The spread of investment across multiple shows keeps the pool of skilled labor generally sustained among the various gigs and periods of unemployment between gigs.

Photo by sokolodv Pond 5.
Photo by sokolodv Pond 5.

It should be clear to anyone that if you disrupt the means by which labor is compensated, labor has a habit of not working.  And as stated in previous posts on this subject, the FCC proposal cannot be called a consumer-focused plan to introduce better and cheaper TV options if the plan simultaneously kills the means of production. This is exactly what the proposal can do by enabling companies like Google to create a parallel, commercial video service without licensing any of the programming.

It’s Not About Boxes

FCC Chairman Wheeler emphasizes the amount consumers spend renting set-top boxes from cable companies, and then “digital rights” groups like EFF and Public Knowledge echo the sentiment that this proposal is about innovative technology (just like the VCR) that will give consumers more flexibility in viewing options for programming that we’re already paying for. And it will unleash us, they say, from the rental boxes owned by the cable companies.  But the rental fees thing is a smokescreen for what’s really going on because the box rental part of our cable bill isn’t the biggest line item; there’s nothing in the proposal that would technically lower the cable bill; we’re free right now to go buy boxes and not rent from the cable providers; and the new licensing market is already providing consumers with viewing options way “beyond the box.”

The big talking point that is most likely to confuse consumers is that the new box Google wants to sell us would only make programming available for which “we are already paying” via the Multichannel Video Programming Distributors (e.g. cable companies).  This is the central reasoning why supporters of the proposal claim that it does not implicate a copyright infringement, and it’s the kind of talking point that will sound reasonable to consumers.

But this reference to our subscription fees completely misrepresents how the producers—and therefore all the labor represented by the unions—get paid for the programs they make.  Our subscription fees to MVPDs do not pay to produce multi-million-dollar TV shows; they never could.  The license fees paid by the MVPDs to the producers are what pay for production, and those licenses are predicated on a complex variety of ways the MVPD expects to exploit its limited or exclusive access to the content.

The simplest and most obvious example is advertising. If, under the FCC proposal, the MVPD that has licensed programming is forced to deliver that programming free of charge to Google, which may then re-distribute the content however it wants and then advertise against the programming from its own ad services, the MVPD’s ad revenue will go down almost immediately.  So, when a new slate of shows is produced, the MVPD’s incentive to pay current market-value license fees is diminished while Google, which captured part of the ad market, isn’t paying anything at all.  Secondarily, new-market distribution channels like Hulu would see no incentive to license programming under such a regime, which gives lie to the notion that this entire proposal is about competition to benefit consumers rather than what it is, which is a government giveaway to Google.

I never quite understand why it should be hard to recognize that less is less—that if license fees for programs go down or if new channels for licensing are cut off, there can be no result other than less production or production of lesser quality. And the FCC proposal would appear to create exactly these conditions—possibly more quickly than people think.  The producers and MVPDs aren’t blind.  If the FCC proposal were to pass, they’ll revise their business strategies immediately, and that could include producing a lot less work within just a couple of years.  At a time when we’re clearly seeing a Golden Age of the small screen in quality writing and production—and in flexibility of viewing options—it is unfathomable that the FCC would advocate unraveling the licensing regimes that have made all this bounty possible.

What’s in it for Google?

I know I’ve repeated Google in this post despite the fact that there are other manufacturers hoping to sell boxes under the FCC proposal.  But if the value of getting into this line of business is predicated on advertising and data mining—which it has to be—it’s pretty hard to imagine that Google would not very quickly dominate this space and become the only game in town.  I understand Radio Shack, for instance, plans to make boxes, but as that company doesn’t have an online ad business or a data mining business, their boxes would presumably serve Google’s pipelines for a piece of the revenue.  If that’s how this would shake out, the “competition in boxes” story is pure illusion.

If the producers, the MVPDs, and the unions are all correct that this plan can only undermine the means of production and inevitably reduce production quantity, quality, or both, what does even Google—let alone the rest of us—gain in the long-run?  When variety of quality content is reduced, then advertising value is reduced and so is data mining value.  Google has a long track record of earning revenue by exploiting works it hasn’t licensed; but in this case, its parasitical model can actually limit the means by which the company typically generates revenue.  So, what’s the long-term plan here?  It’s hard to say. But it’s not hard to see in the short term how this proposal is bad for creators in the film industry and bad for consumers who want to see great television continue to thrive.

Box Office Revenues Say Little About Piracy

Once again the MPAA has announced a profitable year for American motion pictures, and once again some of the usual suspects have seized upon this announcement to declare the studios hypocrites for ever saying that piracy causes real harm to the industry. Certainly, it’s easy enough to keep writing this same, careless article all the time. Cory Doctorow cobbled together a 100-word jab for BoingBoing; TorrentFreak reported essentially the same premise with a little less snark; and Ruth Reader managed to tap out this little sneer on Mic.com, complete with obligatory reference to SOPA, under the unforgiveably misleading headline The Movie Industry Just Admitted Piracy Isn’t Curbing Its Massive Profits.  

I know this may be hard to imagine, but the question of piracy’s harm to the filmed-entertainment industry overall is considerably more complex than a measurement of how the top-grossing motion pictures are doing at the box office.  But before expanding on this subject (again), let me repeat the following theme as a matter of principle:  Whether piracy siphons $100 or $100 million out of the legitimate market, it’s money that belongs to the people who do the work. Sadly, this is not a sufficient rationale for many, so we have this silly conversation instead, speculating about how innocuous piracy is or isn’t.

The annual report released by the Motion Picture Association reveals worldwide box-office sales of $38.3 billion, up 5% from 2014.  And that’s good news.  But the only thing we can actually  conclude from the information in this report is that audiences around the world—and especially in Asia-Pacific—are going to theaters in numbers large enough to make the big movies profitable regardless of piracy. This isn’t all that revelatory, of course—unless you actually thought nobody would go to the theater to see the new Star Wars—but to the the above-named pundits and their ilk, these revenues appear to make the studios out to be Chicken Littles.  How can they be so aggressive about piracy when they’re clearly doing just fine?  But if anyone took the time to look at the report and to learn something about the whole industry, they could not justifiably jump to the conclusion that piracy is fundamentally harmless.

Ruth Reader notes that MPAA CEO Chris Dodd, in an address to CinemaCon this week, stated that the industry projects a $1.5bn estimated annual loss at the box office due to piracy.  This number may seem negligible next to $38 billion, but it’s worth noting that this estimate applies only to US box office, which makes the number considerably more significant relative to the $11.1 billion in sales for the US and Canada.

But assuming the $1.5 billion is accurate and still seems trifling to some readers, let’s look at it from a slightly different perspective that considers all of the 708 films included in the report.  Of these, 561 films were non-MPAA member, independent features.  And let’s imagine that 10% of that $1.5 billion could have been divided among the best 100 of those indies. That would be $1.5 million per movie, which any independent filmmaker will tell you can be life-and-death money.  In fact, Adam Leipzig of CreativeFuture used exactly that expression in this article when he noted the conservatively estimated $1.83 million the film Boyhood lost to piracy last year.  Of course, we cannot definitively say where money not spent might have gone, but by the same logic, it doesn’t make sense to blithely assume that because Jurassic World and Inside Out did great, piracy isn’t an issue across the broader market.

The fact is we can’t know exactly how much is lost due to piracy, but we can conservatively project that a relevant portion of the illegal market would be recaptured if piracy did not exist. Out of a universe of hundreds of millions of pirate site visits every month, if just 20 million consumers worldwide were to switch from illegal home-viewing channels to legal ones and spend just $13/month on filmed entertainment, that would add up to about $8 billion per year. And to put that in perspective, the top 25 grossing films of 2015 earned about $6 billion at the box office.  Or spread $8 billion across 500 idependent titles, and it would be $16m in sales per title.  I’m not suggesting revenue spreads evenly like that; of course it does not. But that’s the point. The top-grossing products may consistently earn enough to overwhelm the effects of piracy, but the smaller products—indie features, TV programs, documentaries—which operate on smaller margins are naturally going to be affected more acutely by any loss.  In fact, producer Martha De Laurentiis recently made a pretty good case for saying that piracy may have played a role in cancelling the popular series Hannibal.

Still, I realize that the pundits’ main premise, however unexamined it may be, is that the studios are the big whiners who want to fight piracy, and the studios are the ones who seem to be doing well.  But even if that logic were sound, readers should not be fooled into thinking it’s exclusively the studio execs who have a problem with piracy.  They’re just the ones who make the headlines, the ones who have the resources to try to address piracy, and the ones who are the most frequently vilified in this context. The indie filmmaker who loses money to piracy feels quite strongly about the issue, too; she just doesn’t have the muscle to do much about it.  As such, the indie filmmaker’s best hope for mitigating large-scale piracy is the costly effort being made by the studios. This is one of many reasons why “fans” cannot presume to separate the individual filmmakers from the major companies; they are co-dependent in a variety of ways.

Finally, while the temptation to bash the studios on the piracy issue will remain SOP for the lazy reporter, at least the peanut gallery might consider its own hypocrisy when criticizing these companies for producing exactly the films that consistently top the Most Pirated lists year after year.  Of the few words Cory Doctorow could be bothered to share with us on this subject, he spent some of these accusing the studios of clinging to “high-risk tentpole economics”.  In other words, the studios’ making money with tentpole films is grounds for calling them hypocrites about piracy, but then the studios should also be lambasted for making tentpole films, which is partly a response to piracy.  I know I’ve raised this issue before, but a threat of any loss in value to any commodity will drive investors to safety.  So, if you promote piracy and at the same time blame investors for producing the kind of big-spectacle fare that can earn revenue in spite of piracy, you kinda sound like you don’t know what you’re talking about.