The first Japanese short film whose script was made almost entirely by an artificial intelligence | VIDEO

The artificial intelligence Furukoto has made a name for himself in the cinema with his work as a screenwriter in “Boy Sprouted”, the first Japanese short film written by an AI, which shows the potential of this technology in the seventh art.

The short, about 26 minutes long, is part of the program of the Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia, one of the largest film festivals in the region, which this 2022 is celebrated under the motto “meta cinema” and whose opening ceremony will be the day 7.

Tomatoes are the common thread of “Boy Sprouted”a short halfway between suspense and terror centered on a boy’s aversion to this fruit and his mother’s efforts to get him to eat it, without imagining that the little boy has a plant sprouting from his back.

Furukoto, an AI developed by a Japanese firm, cultivated this idea by itself taking some basic concepts as a starting point, such as tomatoes and sprouting, the director of the short film, Yuko Watanabe, tells the Efe agency, who is sure that this project “will become part of the history of cinema”.

“I was frankly surprised, because It was something a person could have written.”Watanabe says he thought when he read the script, which he tried to respect as much as possible while maintaining coherence.

AI vs. HUMAN

The adaptation of the script took about three months, although 93% of the text is the work of the AI ​​itself and the remaining 7% of the human team, especially some changes of scenery, dialogues and other details.

Watanabe, 41, points out that it took a lot for him to translate the script into the image so that it would be able to convey something.

“When a work of art is created, the author thinks of some meaning or message. As much as some say it’s nonsense, it has meaning. But an AI has no body and no mind, so they have no intention when it comes to doing anything. This is the big difference with a human”, explains the filmmaker.

“As much as you ask what something means or why it should be a tomato, there is no answer,” says producer Ryohei Tsutsui (44), who assures that the project, which he describes as “very Zen”, made him change his vision. about cinema and reconsider what a film is.

Furukoto composes the text by selecting appropriate sentences from a large number of possible sentences and using self-developed technology and an artificial short-term neural network (LSTM) to generate the potential sentences.

The learning of this AI is based on “deep learning” and is nourished by the millions of freely accessible documents in university and research networks, explains the leader of the Furukoto development project, Hiroki Tawada, from the company Ales.

Tawada, 42, says that in his current state Furukoto would be able to write a feature film in three days. Why then did it take three months to adapt the script for “Boy Sprouted”?

“We made many edits to the script until the last version because I asked for the opinion of many people,” he says, including Professor Hitoshi Matsubara, an eminence in artificial intelligence.

“Boy Sprouted” can now be viewed “online” and will be available in the festival’s online catalog until June 20.