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Kore-eda's “Sheep in the Box” Falters, ChatGPT-Scripted

7/24/2026

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Summary

Story summary

Director Hirokazu Kore-eda released the sci-fi drama “Sheep in the Box” in Japan.
The film follows a couple who adopt a robot boy modeled on their late son.
He consulted a robotics expert who warned about overheating and ran the screenplay through ChatGPT, a fact he told The Verge before the U.S. debut.
Critics describe the script as underdeveloped and lacking the subtle emotional depth of his earlier works.

History

Historical Context

OpenAI, founded in 2015, released GPT-3 in 2020 after the 2019 GPT-2 model showed human-like text generation, paving the way for the 2022 launch of ChatGPT. ChatGPT’s rapid adoption—over 100 million users in two months by January 2023—prompted AI-generated film script experiments, a practice now evident in Kore-eda’s “Sheep in the Box.”

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Story summary

Director Hirokazu Kore-eda released the sci-fi drama “Sheep in the Box” in Japan.
The film follows a couple who adopt a robot boy modeled on their late son.
He consulted a robotics expert who warned about overheating and ran the screenplay through ChatGPT, a fact he told The Verge before the U.S. debut.
Critics describe the script as underdeveloped and lacking the subtle emotional depth of his earlier works.

1 / 2