Cultural Reverse Engineering; Creative Oppurtunity and Artificial Intelligence

Just over a month ago filmmaker Oscar Sharp and technologist Ross Goodwin effectively realized a screenplay written by an AI that calls itself Benjamin. The film is called Sunspring. Here's a link.
The way Benjamin works is easy to sum up: the AI gets fed lots of sci-fi scripts, and then the AI spits one back out based on all the ones it just absorbed. Benjamin's core functionality is actually similar to the way auto-correct works on most phones--after a user enters a lot of words or phrases the software can learn to predict what the user might be trying to say. So now take that concept and apply it to a film and that's (basically) what happened. 

Sunspring fascinates me because there are moments in watching Sunspring where one feels the same as if one is watching any other sci-fi film. This is because, while the film has no central purpose or significance, the elements and tropes we know and love are found abundantly within Benjamin's script. As movie watchers I think we are conditioned, over-time and indirectly, to respond uniquely to certain types of interaction and dialogue, and in Sunspring there are powerful moments such as these. For example, when "H" is standing next to himself, "H2", who is sitting on the stairs, it is easy to feel surprise and wonder because a duplicated character is a common way to reveal time-travel in a film. Except there isn't time-travel in Sunspring, we just react as if there might be, and that's a strange disconnection. But in this disconnection there are patterns, we see the summation of a genre, and we can easily glean from this summation that which most-effectively characterizes a genre.

To talk about an entirely different AI for a second, what's happening with Google Deepmind is incredible. The team made a piece of software called AlphaGo that reigned victorious when pitted against Go champion Lee Se-dol. It got good at Go similarly to how Benjamin learned to write a script, they showed it a lot of games of Go. The most interesting part is not that the AI won though, it's how the AI one that is so fascinating. Lee Se-dol says AlphaGo used moves and strategies he never would have thought of, and that when he used these moves against other human players he had winning results. 

I am very excited to see what happens when AI is taught to write songs or books or any other artistic medium laden with convention, not because I want AI to do these things for us as that would be entirely devoid of meaning and punch gaping holes in our cultural fabric, but because I want the songs AI writes to teach us how to write better songs, and the scripts it writes to teach us about what makes a good script. I'm wondering if we can't use what AI creates to learn what makes up a given thing, and then turn to make our own, perhaps deciding what to keep, what to avoid, and what creative solutions or connections we haven't thought of yet.