Yep, you heard it right, a movie trailer has been made without humans and by Artificial Intelligence. It is the work of IBM’s Watson (again), which besides being able to do awesome things like describe photos, win game shows, and diagnose cancer, it can now add movie trailer making to its skills arsenal.
See also: Google’s Artificial Intelligence Has Now Learned To Talk
According to The Next Web, 20th Century Fox handed over the reins to the supercomputer to create a trailer for the upcoming sci-fi drama Morgan. In order to give the computer an idea of what sort of trailer to create, it was fed over 100 horror movie trailers and learned which scenes were scary and which weren’t. Once the system had been trained, the entire Morgan movie was fed into the system and Watson pulled out the scenes it deemed suitable to use in a trailer. The scenes were then stitched together by a human to assemble the trailer.
What is amazing about this is that it normally takes between 10 and 30 days to create a trailer, but Watson reduced that time to 24 hours which is a huge time saving improvement.
I think artificial intelligence really excels at tasks such as this one whereby they assist humans in completing a task but getting the computer to complete the end-to-end process is a lot more tricky. There have been previous attempts to create full length movies by artificial intelligence but they have turned out to be a bit weird, so I think Steven Spielberg’s job is safe for now 🙂
Check out the movie trailer below that was created by Watson and let me know if you think it’s convincing in the comments.