So, all those faked review quotes from the Megalopolis trailer that got pulled last week were apparently AI, after all. Not only that, but the person who was in charge of the materials for the trailer, Eddie Egan, has been removed from the movie’s marketing team.
That’s all according to Deadline, which reported on Friday that the AI-ness of it all was confirmed in an investigation after the fact. Neither Egan nor Megalopolis studio Lionsgate meant to fake the quotes, which had purported to be critical notes from contemporaneous reviews of Megalopolis director Francis Ford Coppola’s past films.
According to some of the trailer’s quotes, critics had called The Godfather a “sloppy, self-indulgent movie,” while Apocalypse Now was “an epic piece of trash.” But as Vulture noted when it first reported on the quotes’ spuriousness, the actual reviews the quotes were attributed to not only didn’t say those things, but often were actually written in praise of the movies.
It’s easy to see how this could have happened. AI’s casual, confident delivery of falsehoods is well documented at this point; even the companies that make AI products end up with factual errors in their own presentations.
That reality not being well-understood has led to people like former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s own attorney submitting court documents that referenced multiple non-existent court cases. Lawyers for a Columbian airline fell into the same trap, and Fugees rapper Pras Michél lost a federal conspiracy case when his lawyer submitted an AI-generated closing argument.
