The dangerous film critiques quoted in Lionsgate’s Megalopolis trailer have been largely made up

Hours after it was launched, Lionsgate pulled a trailer for Megalopolis that was clearly “gunning for the haters” with a collection of unfavorable quotes about director Francis Ford Coppola’s earlier works. That’s as a result of experiences like this one from Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri confirmed that critic quotes within the trailer lambasting movies like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now have been fabricated.

“Lionsgate is instantly recalling our trailer for Megalopolis,” a Lionsgate spokesperson mentioned in an announcement to Selection. “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 instantly surprise whether or not the quotes could have been generated by a device 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 12 months the place a lawyer cited judicial choices that didn’t exist. The lawyer admitted utilizing ChatGPT for his analysis and mentioned he was “unaware of the likelihood that its content material may very well be false.”

We’ve requested Lionsgate if it used a generative AI device as a part of the creation of the trailer however haven’t heard again.

Selection additionally experiences that one in every of its staffers was falsely quoted within the trailer over their evaluate of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and {that a} Roger Ebert quote attributed to his Dracula evaluate was really from a evaluate of the 1989 Batman.