Automatic on the Road

An AI car rewrites the American road trip

Automatic on the Road follows technologist Ross Goodwin as he embarks on a cross country journey with a creative writing artificial intelligence embedded in a car. The experiment is simple yet conceptually ambitious. The AI system is tasked with composing its own version of the archetypal American literary road trip while physically retracing the route once travelled by Jack Kerouac decades earlier. As landscapes shift from city streets to open highways, the machine continuously generates text, attempting to transform raw sensory input into narrative meaning.

The documentary film raises essential questions about authorship and originality in an era shaped by machine learning. What does it mean to create, and can creativity exist without human consciousness? Through observation and reflection, the film situates this technological experiment within a longer cultural tradition of American road storytelling.

Produced by Oscillator Media and Dolby Laboratories in collaboration with Google Artists and Machine Intelligence, the film is also notable for its groundbreaking sound design. It became one of the first documentary music scores conceived and mixed in Dolby Atmos surround, expanding the sensory dimension of nonfiction cinema. Automatic on the Road premiered at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz and received a nomination for Best Documentary Short at the RiverRun Film Festival.