The 20th Century Fox Company is promoting a new movie entitled Morgan, a story that has to do with a corporate risk management consultant that finds herself in the task of deciding whether to kill an artificial intelligent being. This event offered the perfect opportunity to let the trailer be created by an AI machine.
IBM stood up for the challenge. They consider their computer named Watson perfect for this task. Watson has done many things; beat human contestants in quiz shows, created bespoke recipes and described the contents of photos. Now it was about to become the first-ever AI to produce a film trailer for the new sci-fi film.
Watson computer were assigned to make the scariest promotional video possible. In order to do so, the IBM’s team had to program Watson, a machine driven by logic, algorithms and math to incorporate the concept of fear. Thereby, Watson was requested to examine more than 100 horror movies and analyze what was happening on screen, the audio of what was being said and how people were reacting.
The next step was ask Watson to make the trailer of Morgan while relying on what he had learnt of how fear look and sound like. The research team realized that Watson had selected several scenes into the trailer that other, human editors had not and they used that decision to further investigate how artificial intelligence defines fear.
Watson isolated 10 scenes – a total of six minutes of video. Although a human editor was still needed to patch the scenes together to tell a coherent story, the AI reduced the process to only 24 hours when it typically takes around 10 to 30 days.
The trailer is now available online and the movie had its debut last September the 2nd.
