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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.
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.
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Everybody thinks everybody else's job is easy.
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.
Everybody thinks everybody else's job is easy.
I take it you've never seen Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe.
Not really. I think the guys around the corner building a highly efficient and flexible network stack have a tough job.
Making a trailer isn't that difficult. Just take all of the scenes that detail every bit of the plot and slap them together. Once you have something that removes any potential chance of enjoying the film then it can be called complete. In some cases, when the film is so incredibly terrible, it may be necessary to fabricate a trailer that has barely anything in common with the film. Sure, you probably should have made that movie instead, but then we wouldn't have done all of this blow.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
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...
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?"
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Hmm, no.
1 - you don't want your 'best' scenes in the trailer or people will go 'that film was shit, just watch the trailer'
2 - you don't want plot spoilers in the trailer
3 - your trailer will be targeted at specific audiences. Different elements from different scenes will appeal to different audiences
4 - you want to convey specific messages with a trailer, and so its creation is an inherently creative task to assure this
5 - trailers can be cut and edited differently to the film. E.g. cutting the middle from a scene to hide a plot spoiler
6 - trailers can use scenes not included in the film. Some directors shoot scenes for the trailer
7 - trailers need to make narrative sense in their own right. Shit, even people posting crap on Youtube do more than post a sequence of scenes from a film
8 - trailers can fuck with a film's running order to support the above
That's before you add in a trailer voiceover, interstitial text/images, the need for trailers to provide consistency between Cinema (three minutes of trailer) and TV (30 seconds), the need for trailers to keep consistency with other marketing and PR (cast interviews, written reviews, press releases, 'fluff' pieces, astroturfing, all the other shit the media industry do).
But sure, just fucking slap together a trailer. Go for it. You clearly have a sparkling career ahead of you.
Exactly that, instead of wasting and spending weeks in discussions about the trailers and possible trailers, they just accepted the trailer proposed by Watson. The discussion near the end about Watson creativity is pure marketing bullshit from IBM.
Achille Talon
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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?