Hours after it was launched, Lionsgate pulled a trailer for Megalopolis that was clearly “gunning for the haters” with a choice of adverse quotes about director Francis Ford Coppola’s earlier works. That’s as a result of stories like this one from Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri confirmed that critic quotes within the trailer lambasting movies like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now had been fabricated.
“Lionsgate is instantly recalling our trailer for Megalopolis,” a Lionsgate spokesperson said in a statement to Variety. “We provide our honest apologies to the critics concerned and to Francis Ford Coppola and American Zoetrope for this inexcusable error in our vetting course of. We screwed up. We’re sorry.”
That each one led some folks to immediately wonder whether or not the quotes might have been generated by a software like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Chatbots, and ChatGPT particularly, will create quotes in responses to queries full with citations and even pretend URLs for content material that by no means existed. A well-known instance is a case earlier this yr the place a lawyer cited judicial decisions that did not exist. The lawyer admitted utilizing ChatGPT for his analysis and mentioned he was “unaware of the chance that its content material could possibly be false.”
We’ve requested Lionsgate if it used a generative AI software as a part of the creation of the trailer however haven’t heard again.
Selection additionally stories that one in every of its staffers was falsely quoted within the trailer over their evaluation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and {that a} Roger Ebert quote attributed to his Dracula evaluation was truly from a evaluation of the 1989 Batman.