This short sci-fi movie starring David Hasselhoff was written by an AI

First it was age-old board games and boring office jobs, but now it seems robots are gearing up to take over Hollywood. Following up the stunning success of its debut short movie from last year, Sunspring, the script-writing artificial intelligence Benjamin is back with yet another sci-fi flick.

Directed by Oscar Sharp and starring Baywatch icon David Hasselhoff, It’s No Game takes us to an alternate reality where, in midst of heated writer’s strike in Hollywood, AI script writers have gradually began to replace human ones.

Using an advanced nanobot technology, producers have found a way to channel the inner thoughts and mannerism of the AI writers directly to human actors, causing them to act out borderline non-sensical lines put together by various algorithms trained on Shakespeare, Aaron Sorkin and Golden Age Hollywood movies.

Accompanying Hasselhoff in It’s No Game’s cast are Flesh and Bone’s Sarah Hay, The Walking Dead’s Thomas Payne as well as Tom Guinee.

To crank out the script for the movie, Benjamin’s creator Ross Goodwin trained the AI according to six different models, sourcing dialogue lines from classic movie and television titles like Knight Rider and Baywatch.

The 💜 of EU tech

The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!

Unlike last time however, Goodwin fed the AI solely with subtitle files, and not raw scripts, in order to avoid the uncanny stage directions and character names from Sunspring.

Here’s how Ars Technica summed up the process:

Put simply, the algorithm learns to create long sentences based on learning rules from a corpus of writing. In this case, the corpuses were comprised of dialogue taken from several collections of films and television series. Only the ballet sequence was written by a different algorithm, called context-free grammar, which uses basic rules to generate short phrases from words.

Watch the full movie in the video section above.