A trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis was released yesterday, and it makes an attractive initial pitch: the trailer features negative reviews supposedly written about some of Coppola’s most notable films at the time of their release, adding excerpts from The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and Dracula to Bram Stoker. Training
The speech acknowledges that critics will likely criticize Megalopolis when it hits theaters, but states that, as with Coppola’s other beloved classics, critics will eventually be and Megalopolis will walk among the giants of cinema for years to come.
Unfortunately, this ploy poses a pretty big challenge: none of the critical quotes shown in the trailer about The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula are authentic. They are all made up.
Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri appears to be the first to report that the quotes in the trailer were fake. To do this he underwent some detective journalistic work, that is, he simply read the reviews “cited” in the trailer.
For example, Ebiri is that the trailer for Megalopolis “quotes” famed film critic Pauline Kael as saying that The Godfather is “diminished in its artistic side. “This quote seems in his review. In fact, Kael praised The Godfather, writing, “It’s a bicentennial image that doesn’t insult intelligence. “It’s an epic vision of corruption in the United States. »
Likewise, Roger Ebert called Bram Stoker’s Dracula a “triumph of taste over substance. ” Rather, he said this about 1989’s Batman.
So what happened here? For now, we don’t know how Lionsgate, the distributor of Megalopolis, invented several false quotes attributed to some of the most prominent critics in film history, the company apologized and removed the trailer from its YouTube page (it is still to be found on another place).
However, Internet sleuths have a hard time as to how Lionsgate picked up those fake quotes. The company literally built them from scratch using AI.
Mike Isaac, a technical reporter for The New York Times, inserted the “negative film critic quotes about The Godfather” into ChatGPT and won some of the negative “quotes” featured in the trailer.
When asking ChatGPT where they got those quotes, the AI said that it necessarily rewrote some not-unusual reviews of The Godfather in critics’ voices, since their reviews of The Godfather are not found online.
While the use of AI hasn’t been proven through Lionsgate, many find it to be the most credible theory as to why the Megalopolis trailer cites things that don’t exist.
Movie buffs and AI critics alike found that, once again, ChatGPT (supposedly) resulted in a first “oopsie. “
Judging by the rumors surrounding Megalopolis, long-term film critics most likely won’t want to use an AI generator to come up with negative quotes about the film.
Adam is a journalist, critic and the current, reigning and undisputed universal champion of Know Your Meme. He has written for several music blogs and has sincerely argued at events that vaporwave is the most important music genre of the 21st century. him at the Know Your Meme workplace listening to the biggest hits of Babymetal and Sugar Ray. Please do not touch his shoulder if he has the headphones on, as he is very scared.
You can shout out to him on Twitter @AdamEDowner.
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