A supercomputer made it using artificial intelligence—and it’s surprisingly good
Not satisfied with designing arguably sub-par burritos or beating the pants off of Ken Jennings on Jeopardy!, IBM Watson can now add film editing to its LinkedIn profile: The supercomputer has generated a trailer for the sci-fi drama Morgan. Truly an artificial-intelligence-of-all-trades, Watson has also shown that it (or should we be saying he? she?) can describe images and replace your oncologist, sort of.
The Morgan trailer looks no different stylistically than any other manmade movie trailer, which was the idea when 20th Century Fox tasked Watson with the project. How the supercomputer got to the final product sounds pretty similar to the process a human film editor might go through, too: After analyzing the movie—along with thousands of other horror and sci-fi movies—to see which kinds of moments created suspense, Watson selected 10 scenes for a total of six minutes of footage.
But in a bit of news that is probably a relief to anyone who’s not quite ready to bow down to our supercomputer overlords, a human editor ultimately stitched together the scenes to tell a story.
Image via YouTube, Morgan
In total, Watson’s process took 24 hours, which is an incredible improvement on the 10-to-30 days it usually takes to complete a trailer from start to finish. By blending human creativity with the efficiency of artificial intelligence, filmmakers might be able to drastically cut production times and costs in the very near future.
Check out the video above to see the trailer, as well as behind-the-scenes footage. We’ll let you decide for yourselves if it’s any good—though the meta factor of a machine putting together a trailer for a sci-fi movie is admittedly pretty damn cool.
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