Hm...
The Big Reveal wasn't so big with me, but then I'd experimented with Markov Chains for generating text. That's really all Big Semi is (and I really hope that there is no mathematician in the audience who will dispute that, since it is wrong in every possible sense).
Learning algorithms are nothing new, and the time will come when that will be the "creative process" for many big productions, but probably not indie films.
Also, to those of you who questioned the generation time: Sophia walked past many closed doors. Who's to say that there wasn't a movie theater behind every single one? If Big Semi can try out 20 iterations of a movie every two hours (and it really is every two hours because the computer doesn't need to rest and analyze data, it can happen in parallel) then in a 24 hour period (people can work night shifts too) you get 240 iterations. In a month 7,200 and in a year 87,600. That means that in just over a year you can go through 100,000 generations of process and produce the best movie ever, every summer.
Add to that the fact that she saw one hallway on one floor of one building in what was described as a "campus" and we're probably dealing with hundreds of millions of iterations a year.
The idea doesn't shock me at all, and I'm not frightened by it. There will always be people who will want to make their own personal art, just like the eReader didn't kill (and probably won't) print. It's just another step of our social development.
Probably the thing I liked most about this story is that until the very end, and even now, I don't know what Sophia chose. She's still a bit of a mystery to me, and her internal debate seemed to be pretty well balanced.
And finally, Alasdair.
Congratulations on the new job, and extra kudos for stepping up to the challenge. I'll bet you don't have much more spare time than Mur.
This time, I've finally figured out what bothers me about Alasdair's readings/endcaps. It's not his accent, I'm fine with that. It's his volume modulation. He speaks at different volumes in the same sentence, and it is very hard for me to track, especially when there is ambient noise (and there always is).
I may invest in some expensive noise-cancelling headphones or just skip the preamble and endcap. Please don't take it personally, Alasdair.