When it comes to a movie about the skills modern artificial intelligence can possess, it only seems appropriate to have an actual AI machine create a trailer for said film.
Kate Mara’s upcoming movie, Morgan, follows a corporate risk management consultant who has to decide whether she should kill an artificial intelligent being. To make the best trailer, IBM’s Watson computer was consulted and tasked with making the scariest promotional video possible. The question that IBM’s team ran into is how do you teach a machine driven by logic, algorithms and math to incorporate concepts like fear.
In order to program Watson to understand what fear is, the research team at IBM got Watson to analyze 100 classic horror movies, examining each scene for consistencies and triggers that lead to the scarier aspects of the films. This included a visual analysis of what was happening on screen, an audio analysis of what was being said or how people were reacting, and a composition analysis that examined how the two facets worked in tandem together.
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Once Watson analyzed the films, it was fed all of Morgan and programmed to make a trailer, using what it had learned and perceived fear to look and sound like. What the research team realized was that Watson had put moments from Morgan into the trailer that other, human editors had not and they used that decision to further investigate how artificial intelligence defines fear.
The trailer that Watson put together for Morgan can be seen above. The movie will hit theaters Sept. 2.