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IBM Watson Created The First-Ever AI-Made Movie Trailer For 'Morgan' (popsci.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Popular Science article: For a film about the risks of pushing the limits of technology too far, it only makes sense to advertise for it using artificial intelligence. Morgan, staring Kate Mara and Paul Giamatti, is a sci-fi thriller about scientists who've created a synthetic humanoid whose potential has grown dangerously beyond their control. Fitting, then, that they'd employ the help of America's AI sweetheart IBM Watson to build the film's trailer. IBM used machine learning and experimental Watson APIs, parsing out the trailers of 100 horror movies. It did visual, audio, and composition analysis of individual scenes, finding what makes each moment eerie, how the score and actors' tone of voice changed the mood--framing and lighting came together to make a complete trailer. Watson was then fed the full film, and it chose scenes for the trailer. A human -- in this case, the "resident IBM filmmaker" -- still needed to step in to edit for creativity. Even so, a process that would normally take weeks was reduced to hours.
I did not think trailers take weeks to create. They do not look that good.
The trailer was alright. Given a human helped edit what Watson came up with, I wonder how much work they did or how different the final trailer is from Watson's trailer. Given how formulaic film trailers are already, it makes sense that Watson could learn this pattern and then reproduce it given footage from the film; ensuring that the scenes used hint at a premise without being straight-up spoilers would probably require a human editor.
That said, the film currently has a 48% rating on Metacritic, and apparently isn't that great from a sci-fi or thriller point of view.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Its a little disingenuous to say that Watson "created" the trailer. The only thing Watson did was run a pattern recognition algorithm to figure out which clips in the movie were tense, happy, scary, etc. Then a human editor sorted through all of the clips, picked the good ones and put them in sequence to create a trailer that actually had narrative instead of just being a hodge podge of disjoint clips.
Pattern recognition is getting better which is the first step to creating an AI... but Watson, and AI in general is still very far off from creating a computer program that is capable of original thought.
movies will be reviewed by AI based system replacing critics, and will be shown in the movie theatre to an audience of robots.
So humans will have more time to do something interesting, live viewing old b/w movies at home, while robots are elsewhere at the movie...
bullshit.
I watched this trailer for "Morgan", and I gotta admit - I just don't get it.
It was just a bunch of people standing with one knee in the air.
#DeleteChrome
It is misleading to say 'IBM Watson' did it. Watson is nothing but a bunch of cobbled API that do nothing that could not be done with APIs from other vendors.
Notably, Watson is not 'intelligent' and the APIs do not include any off-the-shelf conversational agent you can talk to, or for that matter any creative component
that could produce a movie or trailer. Sure, it's good marketing, but it's dangerous to succumb to that imprecise hype, because it creates unreasonable expectations
about what's possible.
Kudos to the developers of the application that uses some Watson APIs to create a trailer by exploiting knowledge implicit in existing movies from the horror domain, that's neat. Whatson had no agency in it.
... why all the recent movies are basically the same thing with slightly different skins?
Here's your answer.
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
Harnessed reverberation, bass voice and predictable plot the US audience loves so much.
AI for brilliant mediocrity. Yay!
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Resistance is futile, but who cares? Just entertain us.
Greatly disappointed by the lack of humorous or insightful comments, but maybe they exist without visibility or sufficient positive moderation. Not surprised, but that's how slashdot has evolved. I don't see the joke in the topic, so I'll go for insight, such as it was. Kudos to you if you can see a joke in this topic.
This article is a good example of how Watson can be leveraged to cut out the humans. Where the studios used to need a significant number of people to do the work, now a single editor with this leverage will probably be able to keep up with all the movies they want to make, and use the leftover time to make more trailers to pick from for each movie, to boot.
I think it's part of the big secret plan of today's so-called IBM. "Respect for the individual" was the OLD idea. The new goal is "Replace the individuals". A few transient employees brought onboard as briefly required. The only question will be "Who can do the work most cheaply?" Actually, there might be one question before that: "Can Watson to do this work without needing any human being?"
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
It would be very interesting to know how much human editing was done on the final trailer.
Well, from the Youtube video description:
Utilizing experimental Watson APIs and machine learning techniques, the IBM Research system analyzed hundreds of horror/thriller movie trailers. After learning what keeps audiences on the edge of their seats, the AI system suggested the top 10 best candidate moments for a trailer from the movie Morgan, which an IBM filmmaker then edited and arranged together.
Obviously this is just a brief explanation, but to me this implies the "Ai system" did little more than suggest 10 moments from the movie to string together. The human editor then actually did all the work of editing the clips, choosing the order, etc. That implies a HUGE amount of freedom on the part of the human -- if I can use a 1-second clip or a 20-second clip from a particular "moment" (perhaps edited as many movie clips in trailers are?) and I can put the order however I want, then most of the actual "filmmaking" is done by the human here.
It would be interesting to see a comparison with a randomly chosen set of "moments" from the film. Could a skilled filmmaker make a reasonable trailer from them too? I'd bet with this flexibility that it could be done in a lot of cases. Not that this AI did nothing, but how much value did it really add?
"Recognising tense happy and scary is interesting in itself."
It didn't do that. The computer analyzed 100s of horror movie trailers and then selected parts of the movie that where the similar to the trailers.
"It would be very interesting to know how much human editing was done on the final trailer"
After the computer selected bits of the movie, which of those bits were used, edit points, and everything else was done by humans.
If its a learning algorithm, that learns how to make a trailer by looking at other trailers, then there's about a 60% chance it played Peter Gabriel's Solsbury Hill at some point in the trailer.
Only the one question then: what happens when Watson is fed the film a second time? Does it produce the same trailer as the first time?
If so, it's totally useless.
No one's interested in an algorithm to creativity. It quickly becomes an expression of nothing at all. I believe we used the term "formulaic" to insult any such "creative" process.
And no, random different isn't any better.
This is intended to be art, people. If it doesn't express creativity, then it simply isn't art.
I'll give you that Watson, as a process, is art -- absolutely. But I'm not seeing the process, I'm seeing the resulting trailer.