The National Digest

Coming Soon to Netflix: Movie Trailers Crafted by AI

The next movie trailer you watch on Netflix could be made by artificial intelligence.

Gregory Peters, chief product officer at Netflix, said in a July earnings call that the Los Gatos, California, company is investing in technology that can index characters and scenes in a movie “so that our trailer creators can really focus their time and energy on the creative process.”

It’s not the first time a tech company proposed taking artificial intelligence to Hollywood. In 2016, 20th Century Fox approached technology giant IBM to create the first “cognitive movie trailer” for its horror film “Morgan,” which is about a bioengineered human child who breaks free from her creators.

The machine learning system Watson assembled a trailer it considered “suspenseful” by analyzing the film visually to identify characters, objects and scenery, IBM scientists said at the time. It also consulted an internal database to identify emotions and interpret the mood of music to determine whether a scene was supposed to be eerie, frightening or tender.

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