Arguably artificial intelligence has no place in creating art, which is a uniquely human experience. But it seems that both IBM and 20th Century Fox thoroughly disagrees. A new trailer for a film dubbed Morgan has been put together by the IBM Watson supercomputer, and it’s riveting.
Not giving away too much of the story while keeping viewers interested to see more, the Morgan trailer is one of the most uncomfortable trailers I’ve seen in ages.
No ad to show here.
Morgan, starring Kate Mara and Anya Taylor-Joy, tells the story of a lab experiment gone wrong, and a corporate analyst’s endeavour to solve the problem.
Artificial intelligence’s taste in film, at least in Morgan’s case, is remarkably unsettling if not scary
On the surface, it sounds like the same drear hogwash we’ve seen in horror movies before, but the Watson trailer does give the flick a certain degree of reality. Prior to constructing the trailer, IBM explains that Watson collected data from over 100 horror movies, picked out pieces that made each successfully scary.
According to the video, Watson was then given Morgan to chop and dissect, and the below trailer is the end result.
How IBM is building a smarter planet with the cloud
Most people have heard of Watson — IBM’s smart computer that famously beat the quiz show Jeopardy! back in 2011. Fewer know that Watson is only one of tens-of-thousands of IBM solutions distributed across the globe. Read more…
So, yes, you’ll get a slew of horror movie tropes — dark scenes with soft voices, scenes of rage with a lack of accompanying audio, and lots and lots of reflections. But oddities like imbalanced audio channels and mirrored images of the protagonist over the antagonist gives the trailer that “fear” factor.
While it’s not exactly the world’s greatest trailer, it is incredibly scary to think that artificial intelligence helped bring this Morgan trailer together.
Have a look at Morgan‘s machine-made trailer below.
