"Megalopolis" Trailer Pulled After Revelation That Its "Critic Quotes" Were AI-Generated Fakes

"We screwed up. We are sorry."

Critical Error

A trailer for Francis Ford Coppola's upcoming sci-fi epic "Megalopolis" was pulled by distributors after it was called out for featuring made-up quotes from famous film critics, Variety reports.

In a subversion of the plaudits that trailers usually cram in, the "Megalopolis" one painted Coppola — one of the most celebrated American filmmakers of all-time — as a "misunderstood" genius by showing us a wry Greatest Hits of critics panning his now legendary movies when they were first released, like "The Godfather" and "Apocalypse Now."

Except few, if any, of the negative quotes attributed to the likes of The New Yorker's Pauline Kael and The Village Voice's Andrew Sarris were real.

Bilge Ebiri first called out the fake quotes at Vulture on Wednesday, and in the chaos that ensued, many noted that ChatGPT — or a similar large language model — appears to be the source of the quotes, in what is one of the more embarrassing debacles caused by AI hallucinations.

Mega Sloppy

Kael, for example, is quoted in the trailer as admonishing "The Godfather" for being "diminished by its artsiness." Not only did she never say that, Ebiri notes, but Kael was in reality a major admirer of the movie and wrote it a glowing review.

Internet sleuths who prompted ChatGPT to cook up negative quotes about "The Godfather" and Coppola's other movies found that the chatbot returned similar sounding fake-reviews, claiming in one case that Kael called the gangster epic "almost comic in its heavy-handedness."

Based on those findings and our own testing, it appears that simply asking for a negative quote is enough for ChatGPT to fabricate history and attribute whatever it makes up to any critic, regardless of what they actually said. Telling the chatbot that the quotes aren't real causes it to try amend the error by offering up more fake quotes.

How did a major distributor, Lionsgate, let this happen? Some speculate that a marketer set on the "critics-were-wrong" shtick simply asked ChatGPT for negative reviews of Coppola's movies to avoid doing the legwork of poring over old newspapers and magazines — and then never bothered to check the responses it confidently coughed up.

Apocalypse... How?

The trailer has now been removed from YouTube, Twitter, and elsewhere, where it amassed millions of views prior to being taken down.

"We offer our sincere apologies to the critics involved and to Francis Ford Coppola and American Zoetrope for this inexcusable error in our vetting process," Lionsgate, which is distributing the film in the US, told Variety.  "We screwed up. We are sorry."

Screwed up is right. As the refrain for our AI age goes, ChatGPT is not a search engine — nor is any other LLM — and it can easily be a spreader of misinformation, as this episode and others have shown.

This doesn't augur well for "Megalopolis," which has already proved divisive with critics. But Coppola has been here before: "Apocalypse Now" was once anticipated to be his next great opus, which also had a potentially ruinous budget with his own money on the line, and a controversial production to top things off.

Unlike the Vietnam picture, though, "Megalopolis" didn't manage to bag a Palme d'Or when it premiered at Cannes. It also didn't have a dumb chatbot sabotaging its marketing campaign. The horror.

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