Thursday, September 1, 2016

IBM's Watson AI Goes to Film School

As of this week, artificial intelligence is one step closer to outpacing us intellectually and enslaving us all. What step has AI lately taken in its quest to dominate and ultimately subjugate mankind? It's started studying film.

If you keep up with what's new in cinema--or have recently undergone the odious experience of having to sit through thirty-second un-skippable YouTube ad--then you may know about the new sci-fi/horror/suspense movie slated to be released on September 2nd by 20th Century Fox, Morgan. If you don't, here's a little info: Morgan stars Kate Mara, better known for playing the blander version of Sue Storm, and Paul "Surely-I-Deserve-An-Oscar-Just-As-Much-As-DiCaprio" Giamatti. The eponymous Morgan is a girl artificially created by a team of scientists (what could possibly go wrong?), who raise her in their compound as some manner of experiment in human development. Everything's fine and dandy until Morgan grows into a teen and begins to kill people, which is of course a big no-no even if your parents never let you go out on the weekends.



Anyway, as a promotional stunt for its new movie about scientists trying to play God, Fox teamed up with a company that's been relatively successful at playing God, at least in terms of creating an intelligent entity. Technology giant IBM arranged for its artificial intelligence, Watson, to "watch" Morgan and create an original movie trailer for it. This is the first movie trailer ever created by an AI. Since Watson's already proved itself to be quite smart by seriously mopping the floor with the some of the world's best players of Jeopardy!, I guess everyone figured it wouldn't be too shabby at analyzing a film, picking out the most suspenseful bits, and putting it all in a trailer.

So how did an AI accomplish this? Well, the IBM team programmed a system to basically give Watson a crash course on what makes for a horror movie trailer creepy. This was threefold: First, there was  a visual analysis of things like scenery and people's facial expressions. Then there was an audio analysis of ambient sounds, music, and the emotion in characters' voices. Finally, Watson was made to analyze the entirety of a movie scene, including the location and lighting.

Watson was then fed the coding of Morgan and came up with ten scenes it determined to be the scariest. Lastly, it compiled what it deemed to be a good trailer into a single video, which you can watch here:




What do you think? Is Watson sufficiently savvy about what makes for an eerie trailer? Personally, I think it's fairly well-done. The slow "Hush, little baby, don't you cry," that plays slowly in the background was an especially nice touch. I've really got to hand it to IBM; they really designed an excellent program that taught Watson the ins and outs of trailer-making.

Now let's just hope this AI-made trailer for Morgan isn't as deceptive as the human-made trailer for Suicide Squad.

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