Originally published at: Megalopolis trailer withdrawn due to fabricated movie critic quotes - Boing Boing
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Not for nothing but this looks like the plot of The Fountainhead with a digital backlot ala Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
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So is Coppola going to be happy or sad if critics oblige with some genuinely bad reviews of this new film? It feels like he’s just trying to start a fight with them preemptively.
Reminds me of a certain low point in M. Night Shyamalan’s career when he wrote a cocky, hateful know-it-all movie critic into The Lady in the Water just so the monster could ravage the critic before the real critics ravaged the movie.
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Is this another relying upon AI disaster?
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What really puzzles me is that it would apparently be necessary to pull together random fabrications.
Maybe this is just me; but when I feel hard done by I tend to have specific instances that bothered me to ruminate on, which I’d think would be even easier in the case of literal critics who put their criticism in writing, neatly categorized by project, as a matter of professional practice.
It just seems wild that someone would both feel strongly enough to dedicate a nontrivial percentage of the trailer to public airing of grievance and not have the specific grievances close at hand (especially if you are specifically focusing on critical judgements that are regarded as having aged poorly, harsh release reviews of films now considered classic, that sort of thing; where much of the pleasure of feeling vindicated would involve tracking the shift in tone from certain peevish initial responses to the warm, nostalgic, retrospective consensus).
Is fixating on specifics rather than nursing a vague sense of general grievance just not how people do it? Is that what he used to do but it gets harder as you get older? Was the broad general idea that this guy’s films sometimes draw more flak on launch than is reflected in the eventual judgement handed off to random implementation minions without any personal stake in the matter who just googled frantically and Lionsgate is actually not lying in phrasing the retraction as though it was their mistake?
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Sounds bloody wretched anyway.
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The standard practice is for a whole different group of people to cut the trailers together. Usually the director would have nothing to do with it. Perhaps Coppola has been thrown under the bus by the marketing execs. Either way it seems likely this film is a complete dud.
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No one is blaming Coppola for the bad quotes in the trailer. In fact, the studio apologized to Coppola for the mistake. From the article:
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People need to get it through their heads that ChatGPT is not a search engine. Of course, the actual search engines are now incorporating AI to summarize search results, so I guess it no longer matters. Shit, I just realized what probably happened. Whoever was tasked with finding some quotes by movie critics probably did just Google it, but then pulled the quotes from the AI summary at the top. Jesus, AI has ruined search.
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How long until the other companies pushing AI to the market have small print like MS (assuming they haven’t already)?
[…]
In an update to the IT giant’s Service Agreement, which takes effect on September 30, 2024, Redmond has declared that its Assistive AI isn’t suitable for matters of consequence.
“AI services are not designed, intended, or to be used as substitutes for professional advice,” Microsoft’s revised legalese explains.
[…]
The search engine’s terms also since at least February 2023 – when Bing received its AI injection – have included a disclaimer about the general unreliability of Online Services: “The Online Services are for entertainment purposes; the Online Services are not error-free, may not work as expected and may generate incorrect information. You should not rely on the Online Services and you should not use the Online Services for advice of any kind. Your use of the Online Services is at your own risk.”
[…]
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If you want to see the trailer, but missed out because you weren’t quick enough, there’s a huge ecosystem on Youtube of channels which steal trailers and repost them. So…
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Who could have predicted that using tools for generating plausible fakes to answer questions might have negative consequences? 
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I’m assuming that “don’t let the now destroy the forever” was supposed to sound considerably more profound than it in fact does.
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And (eventually) human analytical/critical faculties.
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Given the clusterf@€& involved with the trailer quotes, it sounds like a prescient warning about generative AI…
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The irony that they appear to have been found out using an unloved technology based on easily searchable text by people searching for the text they used really does demonstrate William Goldman’s famous quote about Hollywood.
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I always skip the A.I. summary in the results. It’s a waste of time.
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Yeah, this quote is better: “Do not lose time on daily trivialities. Do not dwell on petty detail. For all of these things melt away and drift apart within the obscure traffic of time. Live well and live broadly. You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead.” - Emily Prime
From the (probably) much better sci fi movie,
World of Tomorrow by Don Hertzfeldt
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wait, you could discern a plotline in there?
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