6 ms·

'Megalopolis' trailer's fake critic quotes were AI-generated

59 points by Xenoamorphous 2y ago

2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
> We offer our sincere apologies to the critics involved and to Francis Ford Coppola and American Zoetrope for this inexcusable error in our vetting process. We screwed up. We are sorry. Integrity is refreshing.
- krapp 2y ago
  If they had any integrity they wouldn't have used AI to begin with. They're just scrambling to correct the PR damage and hoping to avoid a lawsuit.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
  No, it is not integrity to say the obligatory words after getting caught. What a participation trophy.
wang_li 2y ago
[flagged]
uses 2y ago
> Sources tell Variety it was not Lionsgate or Egan’s intention to fabricate quotes, but was an error in properly vetting and fact-checking the phrases provided by the consultant On the one hand, it's surprising that none of the people involved in creating, publishing, and marketing this trailer raised an eyebrow. I don't know much about film history but I raised an eyebrow. And presumably, it took MANY people to make this trailer happen, and a good chunk went to film school or otherwise know enough to know that this was fishy. On the other hand, things like this likely get caught during production all the time and we just never hear about them.
- next_xibalba 2y ago
  I suspect all involved were aware of what was going on, and outsourcing the work to a consultant provides plausible deniability/a fall guy. This is not the first time in the history of film marketing that fake reviews have been used. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Manning_(fictitious_writer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Manning_(fictitious_writ...
  - uses 2y ago
    Nah, that assumes everyone was paying attention and was perfectly coordinated in a stupid pointless effort that was bound to fail. It's a lot easier to believe the official explanation. Which is that someone typed in a prompt like "what are some quotes from famous movie reviewers that were negative about francis ford coppola's films?" and just copy-pasted the output without understanding that LLMs can make things up. And everyone who should've caught it was lazy or just simply didn't second guess the work that was done fifteen steps prior in the pipeline.
    - nerdponx 2y ago
      When money is at stake, never attribute to incompetence what can be attributed to greed. Yes, maybe some dingdong did this because they were stupid, and nobody bothered to check their work. But then you have to ask yourself: Why was a dingdong assigned to this task? Why was nobody competent assigned to check their work? And then hopefully you understand what's happening.
    - kibibu 2y ago
      Also possible is somebody using them as place holders (and telling people as much), which were plausible enough that they slipped through.
  - add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
    What a great example of how AI is changing the world. Back then, people committed the act and Sony faced consequences. Today, some limp apology will get thrown onto the "sorry the AI got it wrong" pile and it will be forgotten with no consequences.
jfengel 2y ago
It sounds like a dumb idea from the get go. Even if the quotes were authentic, "They hated my previous work too" is a crummy gimmick. Coppola doesn't need a gimmick. He's famous and the film will sell some tickets just on his name. If the film sucks then it sucks. Don't make him look desperate in the process.
- brendoelfrendo 2y ago
  The funny thing is, if you're going to make up fake quotes... why even use an AI? Do you really need an LLM to try and mimic a particular critic's "voice" when you're only going to use one sentence? And if you don't intend to use the fake quotes, why not just use clearly identifiable placeholder text so no one mistakes the work for the finished version?
nsagent 2y ago
Was just talking with a microbiology researcher yesterday about ChatGPT. They use it for helping to write code for analyzing their lab data and they were surprised I said it's likely to lead them astray at times, especially if they don't know the code well enough to spot the errors it might generate. Despite my PhD being in NLP, they still seemed incredulous at my assertion. I truly think the general public have not been adequately warned that they cannot trust the outputs of LLMs. I wonder how long until that fact becomes commonplace.
- brendoelfrendo 2y ago
  It makes sense to me that the general public would have this impression now that AI is a product being sold to people. If you tell people "well, AI can make a SME's job easier and save them time, but they'll still need to understand the output and take the time to assess it for errors," it will rot on the shelves. Customers don't want to pay for an AI to make a SME's life easier, they want to pay for an AI so that they can stop paying the premium for for SMEs.
- krapp 2y ago
  >I wonder how long until that fact becomes commonplace. When it starts killing enough people to make the news.
  - Loughla 2y ago
    I'm calling it now; people will be informed of the mistakes AI makes when the first "fake news" story pops up that has inaccuracies due to ai analysis of data. Then it will be all downhill from there.
    - rolph 2y ago
      when it becomes a crime of misrepresentation, to call it AI when it is not AI but just a piece of code like any other.
    - spacecadet 2y ago
      We are already there! Humans misrepresent data on purpose in the media all the time in order to create misinformation and sway opinions. If anything AI creates deniability, "Oh our so and so used gpt, woops!"...
jccooper 2y ago
> an error in properly vetting and fact-checking the phrases provided by the consultant The error was "not doing it".
nox101 2y ago
I wonder how long it will be until they have the AI make up the quotes and then get approval from the reviewers similar to the way Luxottica designs sunglasses and then asks the various brands to pick from them. The brands themselves don't design the sunglasses they just sign off on designs by Luxottica.
reanimus 2y ago
What is with people treating LLMs like a search engine? All of this could have been avoided by just using Google.
- krapp 2y ago
  > All of this could have been avoided by just using Google. Unfortunately no, Google's results are now polluted with AI generated content, and Google search itself generates results with AI. It hasn't been possible to trust the results of any search engine since around 2020.
  - reanimus 2y ago
    Pretty sure it's entirely possible to find out what someone has said in a major publication about a major figure, actually.
  - COAGULOPATH 2y ago
    What he means is that if you search for "Diminished by its artsiness" + "Pauline Kael" you won't find any results (except for ones related to this news story). Google is polluted with AI generated content but not this specific bit of AI generated content.
    - strunz 2y ago
      Google is also polluted with sponsored content and ads framed as search results which are many times not at all what you're actually searching for. It's totally unreliable for finding things these days.
bananapub 2y ago
> Sources tell Variety it was not Lionsgate or Egan’s intention to fabricate quotes er...yes it was? he typed "WHAT ARE SOME QUOTES FROM FAMOUS FILM REVIEWERS ABOUT FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA’S MOVIES?" then copied the random text it generated and put it in to an email and sent an invoice for a jillion dollars to Lionsgate, who then put them in a trailer. that's obviously an intention to fabricate quotes, and any social acceptance of it is just ridiculous.
beloch 2y ago
GoDaddy has advertised, on TV, generative AI for social media comment creation as a part of their website services. Faking your reviews with AI is not a good idea. The makers of Megalopolis got caught, and you could too. Their efforts to spin and deny won't reverse the damage. Don't use AI for this. Don't even do this the old fashioned way!
- warkdarrior 2y ago
  The solution is not to get caught -- use a good-enough AI, put some human comments in (don't make it all AI-driven), and don't make it too unbelievably good.
- Loughla 2y ago
  >Faking your reviews with AI is not a good idea. The makers of Megalopolis got caught, and you could too. Their efforts to spin and deny won't reverse the damage. Let's see if anyone is talking about this in two weeks. Attention spans are so short, all you have to do is ride it out for a little bit.
- nerdponx 2y ago
  Is it really a bad idea? Is getting caught a bad outcome? Will this hurt their revenue at all? This is somewhat conspiratorial, but I think it's a deliberate enshittification strategy. Do something that's currently considered beyond the pale, accept some temporary reputation damage, walk it back. Then quietly and gradually start working your way up to doing increasingly bad things, and people will be OK with that, because at least it's not the really bad thing you did that one time. Eventually, the thing that was once beyond the pale is now the normal.
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  It’s illegal now. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41250283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41250283 https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/r311003consumerreviewstestimonialsfinalrulefrn.pdf https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/r311003consumer...
spacecadet 2y ago
No sympathy here. Ive been using AI for all sorts of tasks, but at the same time, going back and carefully reviewing the output or testing the code and making my own revisions. I think it's useful for giving it a request and doing something else while it creates a baseline. You still need to take that baseline and know what to do with it. Otherwise, blind leading the blind?
hindsightbias 2y ago
Great marketing. I hadn’t heard of this movie, now it’s controversial. Now we just need some mob threats like The Godfather.

59 points by Xenoamorphous 2y ago

> We offer our sincere apologies to the critics involved and to Francis Ford Coppola and American Zoetrope for this inexcusable error in our vetting process. We screwed up. We are sorry. Integrity is refreshing.

krapp 2y ago
If they had any integrity they wouldn't have used AI to begin with. They're just scrambling to correct the PR damage and hoping to avoid a lawsuit.
add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
No, it is not integrity to say the obligatory words after getting caught. What a participation trophy.

wang_li 2y ago

[flagged]

uses 2y ago

> Sources tell Variety it was not Lionsgate or Egan’s intention to fabricate quotes, but was an error in properly vetting and fact-checking the phrases provided by the consultant On the one hand, it's surprising that none of the people involved in creating, publishing, and marketing this trailer raised an eyebrow. I don't know much about film history but I raised an eyebrow. And presumably, it took MANY people to make this trailer happen, and a good chunk went to film school or otherwise know enough to know that this was fishy. On the other hand, things like this likely get caught during production all the time and we just never hear about them.

next_xibalba 2y ago
I suspect all involved were aware of what was going on, and outsourcing the work to a consultant provides plausible deniability/a fall guy. This is not the first time in the history of film marketing that fake reviews have been used. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Manning_(fictitious_writer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Manning_(fictitious_writ...
- uses 2y ago
  Nah, that assumes everyone was paying attention and was perfectly coordinated in a stupid pointless effort that was bound to fail. It's a lot easier to believe the official explanation. Which is that someone typed in a prompt like "what are some quotes from famous movie reviewers that were negative about francis ford coppola's films?" and just copy-pasted the output without understanding that LLMs can make things up. And everyone who should've caught it was lazy or just simply didn't second guess the work that was done fifteen steps prior in the pipeline.
  - nerdponx 2y ago
    When money is at stake, never attribute to incompetence what can be attributed to greed. Yes, maybe some dingdong did this because they were stupid, and nobody bothered to check their work. But then you have to ask yourself: Why was a dingdong assigned to this task? Why was nobody competent assigned to check their work? And then hopefully you understand what's happening.
  - kibibu 2y ago
    Also possible is somebody using them as place holders (and telling people as much), which were plausible enough that they slipped through.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
  What a great example of how AI is changing the world. Back then, people committed the act and Sony faced consequences. Today, some limp apology will get thrown onto the "sorry the AI got it wrong" pile and it will be forgotten with no consequences.

jfengel 2y ago

It sounds like a dumb idea from the get go. Even if the quotes were authentic, "They hated my previous work too" is a crummy gimmick. Coppola doesn't need a gimmick. He's famous and the film will sell some tickets just on his name. If the film sucks then it sucks. Don't make him look desperate in the process.

brendoelfrendo 2y ago
The funny thing is, if you're going to make up fake quotes... why even use an AI? Do you really need an LLM to try and mimic a particular critic's "voice" when you're only going to use one sentence? And if you don't intend to use the fake quotes, why not just use clearly identifiable placeholder text so no one mistakes the work for the finished version?

nsagent 2y ago

Was just talking with a microbiology researcher yesterday about ChatGPT. They use it for helping to write code for analyzing their lab data and they were surprised I said it's likely to lead them astray at times, especially if they don't know the code well enough to spot the errors it might generate. Despite my PhD being in NLP, they still seemed incredulous at my assertion. I truly think the general public have not been adequately warned that they cannot trust the outputs of LLMs. I wonder how long until that fact becomes commonplace.

brendoelfrendo 2y ago
It makes sense to me that the general public would have this impression now that AI is a product being sold to people. If you tell people "well, AI can make a SME's job easier and save them time, but they'll still need to understand the output and take the time to assess it for errors," it will rot on the shelves. Customers don't want to pay for an AI to make a SME's life easier, they want to pay for an AI so that they can stop paying the premium for for SMEs.
krapp 2y ago
>I wonder how long until that fact becomes commonplace. When it starts killing enough people to make the news.
- Loughla 2y ago
  I'm calling it now; people will be informed of the mistakes AI makes when the first "fake news" story pops up that has inaccuracies due to ai analysis of data. Then it will be all downhill from there.
  - rolph 2y ago
    when it becomes a crime of misrepresentation, to call it AI when it is not AI but just a piece of code like any other.
  - spacecadet 2y ago
    We are already there! Humans misrepresent data on purpose in the media all the time in order to create misinformation and sway opinions. If anything AI creates deniability, "Oh our so and so used gpt, woops!"...

jccooper 2y ago

> an error in properly vetting and fact-checking the phrases provided by the consultant The error was "not doing it".

nox101 2y ago

I wonder how long it will be until they have the AI make up the quotes and then get approval from the reviewers similar to the way Luxottica designs sunglasses and then asks the various brands to pick from them. The brands themselves don't design the sunglasses they just sign off on designs by Luxottica.

reanimus 2y ago

What is with people treating LLMs like a search engine? All of this could have been avoided by just using Google.

krapp 2y ago
> All of this could have been avoided by just using Google. Unfortunately no, Google's results are now polluted with AI generated content, and Google search itself generates results with AI. It hasn't been possible to trust the results of any search engine since around 2020.
- reanimus 2y ago
  Pretty sure it's entirely possible to find out what someone has said in a major publication about a major figure, actually.
- COAGULOPATH 2y ago
  What he means is that if you search for "Diminished by its artsiness" + "Pauline Kael" you won't find any results (except for ones related to this news story). Google is polluted with AI generated content but not this specific bit of AI generated content.
  - strunz 2y ago
    Google is also polluted with sponsored content and ads framed as search results which are many times not at all what you're actually searching for. It's totally unreliable for finding things these days.

bananapub 2y ago

> Sources tell Variety it was not Lionsgate or Egan’s intention to fabricate quotes er...yes it was? he typed "WHAT ARE SOME QUOTES FROM FAMOUS FILM REVIEWERS ABOUT FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA’S MOVIES?" then copied the random text it generated and put it in to an email and sent an invoice for a jillion dollars to Lionsgate, who then put them in a trailer. that's obviously an intention to fabricate quotes, and any social acceptance of it is just ridiculous.

beloch 2y ago

GoDaddy has advertised, on TV, generative AI for social media comment creation as a part of their website services. Faking your reviews with AI is not a good idea. The makers of Megalopolis got caught, and you could too. Their efforts to spin and deny won't reverse the damage. Don't use AI for this. Don't even do this the old fashioned way!

warkdarrior 2y ago
The solution is not to get caught -- use a good-enough AI, put some human comments in (don't make it all AI-driven), and don't make it too unbelievably good.
Loughla 2y ago
>Faking your reviews with AI is not a good idea. The makers of Megalopolis got caught, and you could too. Their efforts to spin and deny won't reverse the damage. Let's see if anyone is talking about this in two weeks. Attention spans are so short, all you have to do is ride it out for a little bit.
nerdponx 2y ago
Is it really a bad idea? Is getting caught a bad outcome? Will this hurt their revenue at all? This is somewhat conspiratorial, but I think it's a deliberate enshittification strategy. Do something that's currently considered beyond the pale, accept some temporary reputation damage, walk it back. Then quietly and gradually start working your way up to doing increasingly bad things, and people will be OK with that, because at least it's not the really bad thing you did that one time. Eventually, the thing that was once beyond the pale is now the normal.
toomuchtodo 2y ago
It’s illegal now. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41250283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41250283 https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/r311003consumerreviewstestimonialsfinalrulefrn.pdf https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/r311003consumer...

spacecadet 2y ago

No sympathy here. Ive been using AI for all sorts of tasks, but at the same time, going back and carefully reviewing the output or testing the code and making my own revisions. I think it's useful for giving it a request and doing something else while it creates a baseline. You still need to take that baseline and know what to do with it. Otherwise, blind leading the blind?

hindsightbias 2y ago

Great marketing. I hadn’t heard of this movie, now it’s controversial. Now we just need some mob threats like The Godfather.