We’ve come so far in artificial intelligence that it’s almost scary. Plenty of films have been made lately that investigate this idea, often presenting the ever-developing, boundary-pushing possibilities of technology as having chaotic effects.
Morgan is the latest film in this cycle. The sci-fi horror stars Kate Mara, Toby Jones, Michelle Yeoh and Paul Giamatti.
Since the film is about the potentials of AI, it only made sense to have an actual AI machine generate a trailer for it.
The end product, which is the first of its kind, is quite intriguing.
IBM’s Watson computer was tasked with making the scariest promotional trailer possible for the film. In the past, the computer has beaten human contestants in quiz shows, created bespoke recipes, and described the contents of photos.
In order to program Watson to understand what fear is, the research team at IBM got Watson to analyse 100 horror movie trailers, after which it calculated visual, audio and composition cues that signalled fear.
You can see the result here, after which there is a brief explanation of how IBM’s Watson computer carried out the task:
