The bad movie reviews quoted in Lionsgate’s Megalopolis trailer were mostly made up

Hours aft it was released, Lionsgate pulled a trailer for Megalopolis that was intelligibly “gunning for the haters” with a enactment of antagonistic quotes astir manager Francis Ford Coppola’s erstwhile works. That’s due to the fact that reports similar this 1 from Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri showed that professional quotes successful the trailer lambasting films similar The Godfather and Apocalypse Now were fabricated.

“Lionsgate is instantly recalling our trailer for Megalopolis,” a Lionsgate spokesperson said successful a connection to Variety. “We connection our sincere apologies to the critics progressive and to Francis Ford Coppola and American Zoetrope for this inexcusable mistake successful our vetting process. We screwed up. We are sorry.”

That each led immoderate radical to immediately wonder whether the quotes whitethorn person been generated by a instrumentality similar OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Chatbots, and ChatGPT specifically, volition make quotes successful responses to queries implicit with citations and adjacent fake URLs for contented that ne'er existed. A celebrated illustration is simply a lawsuit earlier this twelvemonth where a lawyer cited judicial decisions that did not exist. The lawyer admitted utilizing ChatGPT for his probe and said helium was “unaware of the anticipation that its contented could beryllium false.”

We’ve asked Lionsgate if it utilized a generative AI instrumentality arsenic portion of the instauration of the trailer but haven’t heard back.

Variety besides reports that 1 of its staffers was falsely quoted successful the trailer implicit their reappraisal of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and that a Roger Ebert punctuation attributed to his Dracula reappraisal was really from a reappraisal of the 1989 Batman.