Warner Bros. Will Use A.I. to Help With ‘Green-Lighting’
Have you ever seen a movie that felt so impersonal, so generic, so shamelessly formulaic that you felt like it was dreamed up by a computer? In the very near future, that could very well be true.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Warner Bros. has signed a deal with a company called Cinelytic which will make them the “latest studio to publicly embrace artificial intelligence.” In short, Cinelytic’s technology uses artificial intelligence to help make business decisions:
THR claims the system will “give [executives] better dollar-figure parameters for packaging, marketing and distribution decisions, including release dates.” As the article notes, Warner Bros. is far from the first studio doing this. STX has a deal with the same company, and Netflix has made no secret of the fact that it uses data analytics and algorithms to help it determine what sorts of original content to create.
(UPDATE: Warner Bros. sent ScreenCrush a press release after the initial publication of this article, which claims that the company intends only to “leverage the power of Cinelytic to inform decision making around content and talent valuation to support release strategies.” It also states that “the platform reduces executives’ time spent on low-value, repetitive tasks and instead focuses on generating actionable insights for packaging, green-lighting, marketing and distribution decisions in real time.”)
Personally, I’m waiting for the moment hackers crack fancy algorithm whatsit and make it tell Warners executives that the best way to maximize profits is to release the Snyder Cut.
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