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The film studio 20th Century Fox has called in IBM Watson, the supercomputer, to create the trailer for its upcoming AI horror/thriller, Morgan. AI inception.

IBM Watson has done many things; beat human contestants in quiz shows, created bespoke recipes and described the contents of photos. Now it has become the first-ever AI to produce a film trailer for the new sci-fi film.


IBM researchers fed Watson more than 100 horror film trailers cut into separate moments and scenes. It performed a series of visual, sound and composition analyses on each scene to get an idea of how to create the dynamics of a trailer. Watson then processed 90 minutes of Morgan to find the right moments to include in the trailer.

Once the supercomputer finished processing Morgan, it isolated 10 scenes – a total of six minutes of video. Although a human editor was still needed to patch the scenes together to tell a coherent story, the AI shortened the process down to only 24 hours when it typically takes around 10 to 30 days to complete a trailer.

It’s fitting that IBM Watson’s first trailer is about a lab-created AI. Named Morgan, the humanoid defies nature with her superhuman qualities. After 'she' has a ‘tantrum’ when one of the scientists is viciously attacked, a ‘corporate troubleshooter’ is called in to decide whether or not to terminate Morgan. The film is released today in the UK.