> 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.
> 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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!"...
>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.
You mean like AI assisted profiling of minorities? or AI assisted drone strikes? We are already there. Just not for the comfy cushy western peeps. Oh wait that republican self drove her tesla into a lake and died, so yeah- already there.
Self-driving cars already make the news when they crush pedestrians or plow themselves into trucks on the highway. Companies are still pushing/pursuing the tech. Why would the public response to LLM's be different?
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.
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.)
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.
That's a problem with lots of less common languages. The accuracy seems to scale with the number of github repos and SO questions. Most Swift code being in proprietary iOS/MacOS apps doesn't help it.
Also, Swift allows extensions of fundamental types. I often declare extensions of Int and Array. It’s fairly common to add computed properties and functions to basic APIs.
I’m pretty sure that a number of folks extended the API with this property (which is what I did, once I figured out how to address the issue. It just made sense to do so), and ChatGPT read that as a standard system call.
That’s likely to be an issue with more mainstream languages, as extension is a fairly common pattern, these days.
I think I may start tagging my extensions (like a naming prefix), to signal they are added after the fact. I do a lot of open-source work, so it’s likely to be used as training data.
Using agents improves this dramatically if you want to try again. Putting a linter, test runner and self reflection in the loop fixes a ridiculous number of LLM issues.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
> Despite my PhD being in NLP, they still seemed incredulous at my assertion.
I've the feeling the term "AI" erased in a lot people mind the fact text generation is a classical NLP text; they actually had no clue what NLP is in the first place. So we became to the current absurd situation where opinions of people with actual expertise and knowledge highly related to the thing are dismissed.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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!
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.
>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.
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.
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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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadIntegrity is refreshing.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Manning_(fictitious_writ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When it starts killing enough people to make the news.
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...
(This phenomenon is not unique to AI, it shows up in all areas of life.)
Frontier models are better than they were and "feel" fairly reliable, although all the AI problems of 2021-2022 conceptually do still exist.
It hallucinated an Apple API call. Not just that, but that nonexistent call was the entire fulcrum of its "solution."
I’m pretty sure that a number of folks extended the API with this property (which is what I did, once I figured out how to address the issue. It just made sense to do so), and ChatGPT read that as a standard system call.
That’s likely to be an issue with more mainstream languages, as extension is a fairly common pattern, these days.
I think I may start tagging my extensions (like a naming prefix), to signal they are added after the fact. I do a lot of open-source work, so it’s likely to be used as training data.
The more strict your requirements, the less reliable LLMs are.
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.
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).
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.
A rare human would easily admit their mistakes. Especially when their career and money and power is at stake.
I've the feeling the term "AI" erased in a lot people mind the fact text generation is a classical NLP text; they actually had no clue what NLP is in the first place. So we became to the current absurd situation where opinions of people with actual expertise and knowledge highly related to the thing are dismissed.
The error was "not doing it".
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.
Google is polluted with AI generated content but not this specific bit of AI generated content.
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.
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!
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41250283
https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/r311003consumer...