“The Scientist of the Holy Ghost”: Sunspring and Reading Nonsense

Abstract

Sunspring (Oscar Sharp, 2016) is the first film written entirely by an artificial intelligence program.Like many experimental films, Sunspring is fascinating not in spite of but rather because of its incoherence.While the vast majority of scholars and journalists simply dismiss incoherent AI output as a sign of poor programming ability, I am interested in how incoherence functions within Sunspring for what it suggests about the relationship between the current reading methodologies in the humanities and how they intersect with the algorithmic technologies and culture that surround us.Sunspring (Oscar Sharp, 2016) is the first film written entirely by an artificial intelligence (AI) program.Filmmaker Oscar Sharp and AI researcher Ross Goodwin created this nine-minute short for the Sci-Fi-London 48 Hour Film Challenge.Every year, this festival provides a few prompts, including some lines of dialogue and a couple of props, that producers must use to make a film in forty-eight hours.To write the script for Sunspring, Sharp and Goodwin input dozens of science fiction film and television scripts into their AI program and told it to generate a script that mimicked them. 1 These scripts varied widely and included, among many others, the entire run of The X-Files (Fox, 1993-2002, 2016, 2018) and Star 4 This habit is pernicious in academia as well; see Frances Ferguson, "Now It's Personal: D. A. Miller and Too-Close Reading," Critical Inquiry 41, no. 3 (2015): 52, https:/

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