Warner Bros. will soon use an AI system to help greenlight films

Stop us if you’ve heard this one. Warner Bros. will soon use an AI system to “…enhance the greenlight process for film studios”. The AI will come courtesy of a partnership with Cinelytic Inc.,  a company which “…combines AI and cloud-based technologies to enable entertainment industry professionals to make faster, and better-informed, decisions throughout the content value chain.”

We’re going to hell for this

At this point there are all sorts of horrible things we could say about Warner Bros. We could lambaste them for not signing up the AI system before they attempted their ill-fated DC counterpart to the MCU. We could also point out that they could have hired South Park‘s Eric Cartman at a fraction of the cost. We’re kidding, of course. Based on the number of new Adam Sandler films available there, Netflix went and hired Cartman/Awesome-O.

Okay, seriously

In reality, Cinelytic’s tech won’t be making any major decisions about which films will be made. It’s more suited to the sort of task that takes up time and doesn’t require a lot of imagination. The announcement says that the AI will deal with “generating actionable insights for packaging, green-lighting, marketing and distribution decisions in real time”.

Basically, it’ll compile data into a format that humans (and movie executives) can use to make quicker, hopefully better movie-making choices. Which is a great thing. Maybe we can avoid a repeat of the whole digital moustache removal incident.