Hacker News Reader

Comment by uses | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

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.

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]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Manning_(fictitious_writ...

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.

Also possible is somebody using them as place holders (and telling people as much), which were plausible enough that they slipped through.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com