No, you should not use AI to create texts in your work.

A new disaster joins the long, long, long list of messes created by workers in different fields who believe they can use Artificial Intelligence assistants (which, no, they are not intelligent) to replace some of their work.

On this occasion the disaster was triggered by the copywriter for the trailer of Francis Ford Coppola's new blockbuster, Megalopolis.

What to do when there are no positive reviews for your film.

The film had a preview at the last Cannes Film Festival, which did not make a very good impression in a large part of the critics. So the advertisers of Lionsgatethe production company in charge of the distribution of the film, saw that could not rely on positive reviews to promote the film ahead of its upcoming theatrical release. So they came up with a very good idea, expose the negative reviews that the famous director's previous works had elicited in his day, and contrast them with the fame and recognition, both public and critical, that these films enjoy today.

What not to do when there are no positive reviews for your film.

But the advertising creative on duty in charge of the task seems to have believed that tools such as ChatGPT can replace your job of going to Google to look for the original reviews. Instead of that task, which is not one that can take up more than a few hours in the morning, it seems that an AI assistant was asked directly. And of course, the AI did what it is programmed to do: create content out of the promt (indication) that you give it.

If you guide the AI that what you want is a string of negative reviews of a film, the AI will create them for you without any problems, and they will seem very credible. We saw in a previous article how Generative Artificial Intelligence used to work, therefore it is not a failure of the technology itself, but of how we use it..

Chronic laziness.

The sad part of the story is that the campaign would have been very creative and interesting if it hadn't been discovered within hours of the trailer's release (and a few hours later it disappeared from the Internet.) that the reviews appearing in the promotional piece had never been written by its supposed critics for the films cited. While it is true that the critics reviewed were not indulgent of the films, the phrases that appear as theirs in the trailer were never published. Those phrases were a complete invention of the AI.

When displaying reviews of «The Godfather«, ‘the now defunct trailer quoted Pauline Kael, from The New Yorker, which is shown on the screen as qualifying as «diminished by its artsiness», as long as the appointment «sloppy self-indulgent movie» appears on the screen signed by Andrew Sarris, from Village Voice, but those critics never actually wrote those sentences. Also shown was a quote from Roger Ebert rating «Drácula» as a «triumph of style over substance» when in fact the phrase appeared in his critique of the «Batman» 1989 and not in Coppola's film.

AI assistants (actually, LLMs, large language models) are supportive tools, not substitutes.

Let this serve, once again, as an example that don't believe what an AI assistant tells you when you make a query to it. Sorry, you might get lucky and what you get from the tool might actually be real, but there are many possibilities that there are inaccuracies, cross-references, or outright hallucinations, totally absurd creations but exposed in a way that makes them seem totally plausible.

It is the responsibility of the signatory to ensure that the facts stated in a text are true. If you do not want to end up being dismissed, as has happened in this case, in which the Marketing consultant Eddie Egan has seen his years-long contract with Lionsgate go down the drain.

Cover image by Fabian Gieske