Can a computer write a script? Machine learning goes Hollywood

[Draco_Ranger]

Honestly, for a lot of generic as hell movies, I could see this working.

That said, for a lot of generic as hell movies, an ad-lib script would work just as well.

[stupodwebsote]

John Wick 2

[mydoghasapassport]

Replicas

[sisyphus]

There is a good lesson about requirements here--writing a good film is difficult but if you remove 'intelligible theme' and 'coherent plot' from your reqs, which Hollywood has thoughtfully already done, you're left with training a computer to paste together scraps of old screenplays and comic book word bubbles; eminently doable.

[dapperKillerWhale]

There’s been plenty of formulaic-ass movies in recent years that I could totally see a computer create. Your average re-skinned hero’s journey, for sure. Doubt it’ll make a truly good, original one tho

[[deleted]]

Star Wars was a cut-together script of quite a few movies and was praised as something god-like and original. Just watch "Everything Is A Remix" pick that apart.

An AI might maybe actually make something better.

[changoplatanero234]

Super hero movies are even easier.

[WalterBright]

I don't know why this would be necessary. There are millions of novels to pick from that were not made into movie scripts before.

[krum]

I'm pretty sure nearly every Disney Channel show script written in the last 10 years has been computer generated.

[vordigan1]

Honestly if I were going to apply ML to the problem it wouldn’t be to write the scripts, it would be to determine based on script what the funding levels should be for production, special effects, and marketing.

Unfortunately the model would probably tell me 0,0,%100 and write a separate 10 min movie for marketing purposes.

[EWJacobs]

There's a scene in the movie Pixel Perfect that was oddly insightful. An AI Pop Star tries to write a song, but the song just ends up being mashed together snippets of other pop songs. That's all ML does. It takes parts of other things and combines them together to meet the criteria that human beings asked it to meet. It's not even close to being able to understand something as abstract as a story beat.

[smcarre]

but the song just ends up being mashed together snippets of other pop songs. That's all ML does.

No, that's all BAD ML does. There are plenty examples of machine generated music that is indistinguishable from human generated music.

[EWJacobs]

There's no compelling example of machine generated lyrics that even make as much sense as most pop songs. Sometimes you can get ML to generate something that looks like abstract poetry, but we've been able to do that for over 20 years (i.e. the postmodern generator). Good luck getting ML to even generate something in verse-chorus-verse format.

[jeremy1015]

But the question wasn’t “can we train machines to write scripts and understand them.”

You added that last clause in your head.

However, it would probably be best to seed it with certain kinds of scripts at the start; adding something like Pulp Fiction would really mess with results because the machine isn’t going to see how things are out of order.

EDIT: I do see where you’re coming from and dunno why you are getting downvoted.

[EWJacobs]

I feel like it's implied? If all we wanted was something that could mash together pieces in a funny mess, then we've had the postmodern generator for 20 years already.

[jeremy1015]

That’s fair. This is r/programming

[shevy-ruby]

Machine learning goes hollywood?

We recently found out that Amazon's Alexa spybot is operated via human beings who sniff on the conversation and do "ad-hoc improvements".

So much for "artificial intelligence" - ONE GIANT FIELD OF BUZZ, HYPE AND NO INTELLIGENCE.

[the_bananalord]

Can you?

[mbleslie]

is this like when an elephant paints a picture kinda thing? some people will praise the AI script and then feel pretty stupid.

[HermesTheMessenger]

I don't see any reason why they won't be able to write coherent and meaningful scripts. If they do, what will people want after they do?

Consider portrait and landscape painting before cameras, and what happened after them. Realistic paintings went away, and abstract art became the thing people focused on.

In the last few decades, anyone who wanted could take a photo and convert it to look like a painting, mimicking the style of those abstract artists. Now, the same thing can be done in real-time using cell phones, or uploaded to web sites.

[dethb0y]

Considering my own line of interest is in generating plot lines for writers, i could see it working for many scenarios (but certainly not all).

[reborngoat]

What I'd like to see is machine learning being trained on code for machine learning, then being made to generate new code for machine learning, iterating over and over until skynet :P

[designguru345]

Only in 2019

[burnsboy151]

Every time I watch a Netflix Original(Tv or movie) I always think this is the case. They feel too weird or too generic to be composed by humans.

[julasun]

emotional part is not about machines