Watson Made A Movie Trailer, Proving Computers May Be Capable Of Creating Art

IBM's supercomputer is so smart that it can create a trailer for the film Morgan by studying human emotion. Cue the doomsday music.

Morgan, a science fiction movie about artificial intelligence, opens Friday in theaters.

In the film, scientists create a synthetic human being named Morgan, who, despite being a miraculous achievement in AI, eventually starts to exhibit violent tendencies. It stars Kate Mara, who recently sat down for a Q&A with BuzzFeed. It is also the directorial debut for Luke Scott, whose brother Ridley Scott directed Alien, Gladiator, and several other classics.

As an experiment, IBM's Watson was tasked with creating a trailer for the film, analyzing 100 other movie trailers and using the information to create a new one.

Via upload.wikimedia.org

In other words, an intelligent supercomputer studied a movie about another intelligent supercomputer. Is it possible for something to be more meta?

Watson compared the visuals, audio, framing, lighting and tone of voice from the actors in each of the 100 trailers it watched, using the information to create a profile of a typical film teaser.

Motion Picture Association of America

Afterwards, Watson "watched" Morgan and singled out the scenes it deemed trailer-worthy. It studied the emotional qualities of the film, determining which scenes were scary or touching.

The result? A trailer that might even be better (or at least creepier) than the one humans put together, done in a fraction of the time. Watch it below:

youtube.com

It should be noted that an IBM employee, filmmaker Zef Cota, was required to step in and edit the trailer together. Still, a typical movie trailer takes months to put together, and the Watson-Cota filmmaker tag team did it in a single day.

The Morgan experiment is proof that computers understand certain subtleties of human emotion, and how they play into art.

IBM

John Smith, the IBM fellow in the video, even goes as far as to ask, "Will computers be able to create art?"

So, yes, we may be one step closer to the day when computers take over the world and decimate our species.

TriStar Pictures

(Side note: John Smith is exactly what I would call myself if I was a computer disguised as a human being, plotting the destruction of the human race.)

In the meantime, maybe Hollywood should contract Watson to think of some new movie ideas. Morgan seems pretty damn similar to Ex Machina, which came out last year:

youtube.com

Oh, and Transcendence, which came out two years ago:

youtube.com

Maybe filmmakers keep making these AI fear-mongering movies because they're scared computers will take their jobs. Conspiracy!