IBM's Watson AI creates trailer for AI movie 'Morgan'

If you haven't heard about it yet, there's a new sci-fi thriller movie coming called Morgan, which focuses on a robot with advanced artificial intelligence (AI) that — to no surprise — rebels against its human creators. Appropriately, movie studio 20th Century Fox turned to IBM's Watson, a supercomputer AI capable of analyzing human personalities and emotions, researching cancer, and powering self-driving busses, to create its own version of the film's trailer.

While the AI in Morgan quickly learns new abilities to use against human and subsequently goes out of control, IBM researchers first needed to teach Watson about movie trailers. They did this by feeding it over 100 horror movie trailers that were cut into different scenes and moments, and then allowing Watson to perform analyses on aspects such as visuals, sound, and composition in order to understand what makes up a trailer and what viewers find scary.

After this, Watson was given the full movie Morgan to dissect, and managed to come up with six minutes of video featuring 10 scenes. While the scenes were still put together by a human editor in order form a coherent story, the result is the first ever AI-produced movie trailer:

IBM explains that Watson's involvement reduced the trailer-making process down to just 24 hours, whereas it usually takes humans alone between 10 days to a month to make a trailer on their own. Let's just hope Watson didn't learn any techniques on how to rebel while working on the footage.

SOURCE: IBM