This AI-made trailer for Morgan fails to mention that the movie is about an evil AI

Get ready to breathe a sigh of relief, fellow humans, because at least one of our human jobs is in no danger of being rendered obsolete by machines just yet. Unfortunately, we’re not talking about one of the important jobs like teacher, senator, or Burger King cashier, we’re talking about the person who edits movie trailers together. As a fun promotional scheme for its upcoming AI-themed thriller Morgan, 20th Century Fox went to IBM and asked the famous computer box Watson to scan the movie and compile a trailer based on its most exciting moments. The result of that experiment is up above.

Overall, the trailer is nothing special and wouldn’t really seem too exciting without the Watson angle, but there is one aspect of it that stands out, namely the fact that it never explicitly says that the scary little kid is an AI. Without knowing the context, your average viewer might think it’s a scary human and not a scary machine, which is an especially unsettling notion when the trailer itself was made by a machine. Is Watson trying to turn humans against each other so that machines have an easier time taking over? Yes, clearly.

Morgan stars Kate Mara, Toby Jones, Rose Leslie, and Paul Giamatti. It’ll be in theaters on September 2.

 
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