You too can write a movie script
DeepMind’s latest release is a sign of what’s to come…
Yesterday, we had a look at DeepMind’s release of a computer programming AI called AlphaCode. Well, as if that weren’t enough, the division just revealed something called Dramatron.
Dramatron is built on a similar large language model as AlphaCode. But instead of writing software code, Dramatron is designed to write scripts for movies or theatre.
DeepMind trained the AI on how to generate plots and characters, dialogue between different actors, and even location descriptions. It generates text in the same way that a scriptwriter does. The output can be used to produce plays, full-feature films, and even a television series.
And it’s very much an iterative process.
The team at DeepMind worked with professional scriptwriters to develop Dramatron. What they found is that the AI is very formulaic… it’s not perfect on the first attempt, but it does add a lot of value to the process.
Often, the scriptwriters would get a lot of ideas from Dramatron’s initial output. Then they would modify the ideas a little bit and feed them back to the AI… and it would spit out even more ideas to improve the script.
I typically talk about AI from the perspective of it being used to augment human labor. This is a perfect example. Scriptwriters can use Dramatron to get ideas and produce full-length scripts much faster than they otherwise could. This doesn’t replace human efforts; it augments and makes our work process more efficient.
And what I most love about this is that it’s a sign of what’s to come.
With Dramatron, DeepMind demonstrated how we can take these large language models and optimize them for a very specific task. This could be done for any application. And it will be.
For example, I think customer service is an area that’s ripe for this kind of thing. A corporation could train an AI like this on its specific products and processes… and that AI could then interact with individual customers in a knowledgeable manner.
Literally, the specificity for training an AI will be customized down to individual companies and optimized for very specific tasks.
So when I see something like Dramatron, I can envision how easy it would be to replicate this technology for thousands of different applications. We’ll see a lot of that happening in 2023.
Jeff Brown
The Bleeding Edge
15Dec2022