First AI written film seeks crowdfunding
A Kickstarter campaign has been launched to make "Impossible Things", the world's first feature-length film co-written by artificial intelligence. The campaign, started by Greenlight Essentials, hopes to raise CAD30,000 ($22,800) to continue the project which began five years ago. To appeal to a target audience of women under 25, the AI algorithm suggested plot points featuring both ghost and family relationships in addition to a piano scene and a bathtub scene to be included in the trailer. Previous attempts to use AI in storytelling have so far proved critically unconvincing.

A Kickstarter campaign has been launched for the world’s first feature-length film that will be co-written by artificial intelligence.

The horror film Impossible Things will be partly written by software that has analysed successes in the genre. The software uses that data to formulate a script that utilises successful plot points . The goal: engineer a hit film.

Jack Zhang, who founded the Canadian data analysis company Greenlight Essentials, is seeking CA$30,000 (£17,300) to make the project, which has been in development for five years. “A little over 85% of movies made today don’t make a profit [at the] box office, which is the result of a mismatch between the movies being produced and audiences’ tastes,” said Zhang in a press release. “We used [artificial intelligence] to generate the premise and the key plot points of the film. Before a single word was written, our AI told us that if we wanted to match audience taste, we needed to make a horror film that featured both ghost and family relationships, and that a piano scene and a bathtub scene would need to be used in the movie trailer to increase the likelihood that our target audience would like it.”



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The script and trailer have been constructed to appeal to women under the age of 25, a key demographic for the horror film genre. The plot follows a family who move to a remote country house to recover from the death of a child. But the mother and daughter soon start to experience terrifying visions that pit them against each other.



Artificial intelligence has already been used to create a short film, Sunspring. Critical response to the sci-fi drama was mixed, however. CNet’s Amanda Kooser responded: “Some day, neural networks may get better at imitating the art of coherent storytelling, but we’re not there yet.”