Interesting that the AI is able to produce a meaningful storyline without fully understanding characters; makes me wonder how it would do at producing stories without any characters; such stories exist, bit SciFi feeling too.
> Interesting that the AI is able to produce a meaningful storyline without fully understanding characters
Does it? I think the actors and film makers did a pretty good job of creating a film with meaning and characters, despite not having much to work with. In fact a lot of the fun of this is watching the actors try to make something out of the word salad they've been given.
Also, this script appears to have been selected by a human actively looking to find apparently meaningful and original structure and sentiments from a long list of attempts by Benjamin, most of which clearly derived from the source texts
> For a while, Sharp said, Benjamin kept "spitting out conversations between Mulder and Scully, [and you'd notice that] Scully spends more time asking what's going on and Mulder spends more time explaining."
Can't help thinking that this reported response to questions about the film appears more meaningful - poignant almost - than anything in the actual script
> The world is still embarrassed.
> The party is with your staff.
> My name is Benjamin.
It reads a lot like Racter (I think I read that The Policeman's Beard is Half-Constructed actually involved a lot of human selection of amusing and interesting utterances).
I wonder where research on generating intelligible stories by computer is.
I think Roger Schank had some research on "scripts" in the 1980s, involving models of people's interactions and motivations. That might not have been very useful for AI in general, but maybe it's useful if you wanted to literally generate scripts for people to act out.
I'm sure you could make computer models of stories by combining models of scripts, tropes, and agents. I mean, a simple case would be something like The Sims, where the simulated agents act out simple stories autonomously and in response to prompts. You could probably make movies based on Sims stories already, although it's better at generating situations than dialogue!
Reminds me more of 1984's Winston Smith rewriting propaganda novels by changing the character names and moving scenes around but otherwise keeping things the same.
A whole line of narrative theory would say that the sequential action matters more than any character development. That goes against a lot creative writing class assumptions, but those classes might be wrong.
Does it? I think the actors and film makers did a pretty good job of creating a film with meaning and characters, despite not having much to work with. In fact a lot of the fun of this is watching the actors try to make something out of the word salad they've been given.
Edit: If you want to see the script unembellished by the cast and crew it's here https://www.docdroid.net/lCZ2fPA/sunspring-final.pdf.html
It's a damn thing scared to say. Nothing is going to be a thing.