Last Monday we showed you the reactions of the robots EDI and FACE to the trailer of Morgan, a horror and science fiction film that Fox is releasing in theaters today. Morgan's promotional campaign is running at full speed, and this time they decided to contact IBM Research so that Watson, the famous system that crushed the best Jeopardy! players live, could analyze different scenes from the movie and create and create its own trailer. The result is... better than expected.
You remember Watson, right? It trained for a long time to compete in a Jeopardy! match against two true titans of that show, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. Later we reported that IBM aims to bring some of Watson's functions to to a smartphone, and its latest news presents it fighting serious diseases. But what else can Watson do? Fox gave it a very special task: Create the trailer for a movie. Although we've previously seen artificial intelligences writing scripts, working with video is a much more complex process and prone to errors. However... this is what Watson did:
Once again, Fox decided to use Morgan's trailer as part of the experiment, and I must admit Watson's scene selection is quite good. It doesn't overdo spoilers, nor does it introduce alternative music or strange effects. In fact, Watson had access to the entire film, analyzed the most outstanding moments, classified them under different factors (fear, tenderness, happiness), and chose the visual order. The final editing stage still requires human intervention, but the pure and hard processing behind the trailer was done by Watson.
Needless to say, this kind of experiment makes us wonder how far artificial systems are from creating original content... art, so to speak. We've been closely following the expressions of various neural networks, and one of them even managed to reconstruct the Blade Runner trailer. At the end of the day, it all comes down to training. Watson's advantage was having a complete copy of the movie, but that doesn't take away its merit.
20th Century Fox on YouTube
