Earlier this month, Amazon revealed a new feature that aims to use AI to recap its Prime Video shows.
The tool, now deployed in beta form, generates everything from narration, dialogue, and music to summarize key plot points, allowing fans to quickly catch up on their favorite shows.
At least, that was the idea. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the AI tool has already made an enormous mess by bungling up the details of a hit show, suffering from the common shortcomings of the tech we’ve become all too familiar with.
As GamesRadar reports, the recap of Season 1 for the company’s popular series “Fallout” show was riddled with errors before being taken down by Amazon last week. For instance, the recap assumed that flashbacks from the perspective of the character Cooper Howard — also known as the Ghoul, played by actor Walton Goggins — were set in the 1950s, even though the show and the flashbacks are set in 2077 and the 2060s, respectively.
The AI also claimed that the Ghoul offered actor Ella Purnell’s Lucy MacLean a “die or leave with him” offer in an attempt to hunt down her father, even though they share the same motives and intentionally joined forces to pursue him, as Gizmodo points out.
Put simply, the AI bungled up the absolute basics by completely misrepresenting the motivations of the show’s core ensemble.
The incident once again highlights how AI slop is infiltrating almost every aspect of our daily lives. Even the task of recapping “Fallout” — which is returning for its second season this week and was painstakingly crafted by a passionate crew in honor of the eponymous video game series that it’s based on — isn’t safe.
The news comes after Amazon quietly pulled AI-generated English dubs for several anime shows, including “Banana Fish,” and “No Game, No Life” earlier this month. Fans were furious after finding the soulless dubs to be “hilariously bad.”
Not only were the dubs severely lacking, but many netizens also accused Amazon of cutting corners by blindly replacing human voice actors with dubious AI.
“Amazon’s choice to use AI to dub Banana Fish is a massive insult to us as performers,” famed anime voice actor Daman Mills tweeted at the time. “AI continues to threaten the livelihoods of performers in EVERY language (yes even Japanese performers who are also incredibly vocal on this topic).”
The company’s latest attempts to lazily recap its own shows haven’t fared much better. As The Verge reported last week, Amazon has since taken down a number of different recaps, including the ones for “Fallout” and other Amazon Prime series such as “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan” and “Upload.”
The feature, dubbed Video Recaps, launched last month as part of an early beta. It purportedly “analyzes a season’s key plot points and character arcs to deeply understand the most pivotal moments that will resonate with viewers,” according to an official press release.
“Then, the AI finds the most compelling video clips and pairs them with audio effects, dialogue snippets, and music,” the company claims. “These are all stitched together with an overarching AI-generated voiceover narration to deliver a theatrical-quality visual recap.”
But given the resulting mess, Amazon still has a lot to prove to justify the existence of its sloppy recapping tool.
“All it would have taken is one person to watch it from start to finish to realize it wasn’t correct,” one Reddit user argued. “Just one person who knows the story of the first season. They didn’t even need to know the lore of the games.”
“Just the first season,” they added. “But they can’t even do that.”
More on Amazon: Amazon Quietly Pulls Disastrous AI Dubs For Popular Anime After Outcry
