[HN Gopher] 'Megalopolis' trailer's fake critic quotes were AI-g...
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'Megalopolis' trailer's fake critic quotes were AI-generated
Author : Xenoamorphous
Score : 45 points
Date : 2024-08-23 20:38 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (variety.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (variety.com)
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| No, it is not integrity to say the obligatory words after
| getting caught. What a participation trophy.
| uses wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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_writ...
| uses wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| 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.
| nox101 wrote:
| As person making the video, you just get handed some text in
| email that says "add these quotes"
|
| There's no "show me the proof that these are legit". It's
| assumed
|
| I wouldn't expect anyone to check. One person in the chain made
| them up. Everyone after that took them as legit.
|
| > On the other hand, things like this likely get caught during
| production all the time and we just never hear about them.
|
| I seriously doubt it's anyone's job to check this. Most of
| society runs on trust. Things would grind to a halt if every
| person needed a chain of trust all they way down.
| axus wrote:
| After the quotes were added, did no one watch the video for
| quality problems before releasing it to the public? Maybe
| they didn't have any power to send it back to editing.
| jfengel wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >I wonder how long until that fact becomes commonplace.
|
| When it starts killing enough people to make the news.
| Loughla wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!"...
| krapp wrote:
| >We are already there! Humans misrepresent data on
| purpose in the media all the time in order to create
| misinformation and sway opinions.
|
| That isn't really the same thing. I was thinking of
| something more along the lines of "AI designed car
| randomly explodes" or "AI doctors misdiagnose patients
| and mix up prescriptions." The AI equivalent of the
| Therac-25[0]. Something a lot worse than "sometimes the
| media lies," which we already know, and something
| explicitly the fault of AI confabulation and automating
| away humans at what should be necessary stopgap or
| validation steps for the sake of streamlining or cost-
| cutting.
|
| >If anything AI creates deniability, "Oh our so and so
| used gpt, woops!"...
|
| Luckily, that doesn't seem to be the case. In every story
| I've seen where people have tried to blame AI they didn't
| get away with it, because the AI is just a tool and the
| human beings are still legally responsible. People still
| try though.
|
| [0]https://hackaday.com/2015/10/26/killed-by-a-machine-
| the-ther...
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Unless they are having GPT come up with the calculations and
| doing the statistics, I doubt that. They likely just need help
| writing the code, not the math.
| nerdponx wrote:
| I think there's a certain level of denial involved in this as
| well. There is a category of person who really wants AI to
| become a Big Life-Changing Thing. Maybe they are older and
| remember the early iPhone or the heady days of home computing
| in the 90s. Or maybe they are young and just eager to be part
| of the next big thing. Or they're lazy/busy and eager to avoid
| the hard work of editing/proofreading/revising. Or they think
| they are smarter than everyone else, and that the caveats only
| apply to regular people, but not them. In any case, there ends
| up being a kind of emotional attachment to the AI usage, which
| gets in the way of them considering evidence that it can be
| unreliable.
|
| (This phenomenon is not unique to AI, it shows up in all areas
| of life.)
| COAGULOPATH wrote:
| My experience is the opposite: laypeople are excessively
| pessimistic on LLM progress ("AI is so dumb. It tells you to
| put glue on pizza and eat rocks)", usually due to a remembered
| anecdote that's either years old or reflects worst-case
| performance (only egregiously bad AI mistakes make the news).
|
| Frontier models are better than they were and "feel" fairly
| reliable, although all the AI problems of 2021-2022
| conceptually do still exist.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I figured that out, the first time I submitted a Swift question
| to ChatGPT, where I would normally have used StackOverflow.
|
| It hallucinated an Apple API call. Not just that, but that
| nonexistent call was the entire fulcrum of its "solution."
| muzani wrote:
| I think there's a segment of society that blindly believes
| anything data backed. This is pretty frequent in product and
| marketing too. The article here shows some people who blindly
| trusted their marketing teams.
|
| And while everyone here are going to laugh at those chumps who
| use data driven stock price indicators or LLM code generators,
| they'll throw a fit if you tell them that the data on calories
| and vaccines aren't always that accurate either.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > I truly think the general public have not been adequately
| warned that they cannot trust the outputs of LLMs.
|
| to the contrary, every company now advertises using "AI" (the
| latest handle for LLMs) to "solve X" with maybe some small
| print somewhere about the side effects, much like medication
| advertising
|
| Did you see Google's ad during the Olympics? No mention of
| hallucinations that I recall (also probably the stupidest use
| case for LLMs they could have thought up; pretty shocking).
| aidenn0 wrote:
| One use of AI is to do something that you couldn't do yourself.
| In many cases that means it can successfully bullshit you.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| I'm hearing of pressure for LLM-generated science-related apps,
| such as auto-generating workflows from natural language English
| for "non-coder scientists". It sounds wonderful, but unless the
| user 1) sees the workflow being generated, and 2) has the
| necessary skills to discern whether that workflow will generate
| the desired results, and 3) has the ability to modify the
| workflow/pipeline manually or continue prompting the LLM until
| it spits out the correct workflow (see #2), then it's not only
| useless, but dangerous.
| minkles wrote:
| Oh you have no idea how badly this is going to go over time.
|
| I watched a presentation by some psychology researchers last
| year where they were presenting their paper for applications of
| LLM technology in early-therapy diagnostics. They were
| literally throwing patients at it. I showed one of the
| enthusiastic followers, a high ranking PhD in the field, how
| easy it was to get it to give me suicide advice and she was
| absolutely horrified and totally unaware of the possibility
| this could happen.
|
| All these things were missing in the associated paper of
| course. Gotta keep those grants flowing.
| jccooper wrote:
| > an error in properly vetting and fact-checking the phrases
| provided by the consultant
|
| The error was "not doing it".
| nox101 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What is with people treating LLMs like a search engine? All of
| this could have been avoided by just using Google.
| krapp wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Pretty sure it's entirely possible to find out what someone
| has said in a major publication about a major figure,
| actually.
| COAGULOPATH wrote:
| 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.
| bananapub wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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.
| spacecadet wrote:
| 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?
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