It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that the "black mirror" of the popular anthology series Black Mirror was a screen, or rather, all the screens we surround ourselves with: phones, tablets, computers, TVs, and, increasingly, futuristic devices built by massive corporations that monitor our movements and preferences and words. We buy these black mirrors, welcoming them into our homes and lives and letting them -- true to their name -- reflect ourselves back to us. And as we know all too well, those reflections sometimes betray our darkest impulses. Unsettling reflections are not the black mirrors' fault. Gadgets are merely assemblages of wires and metal and glass. Devices don't have a point of view; they operate according to the input they receive, the algorithms and designs and patterns that power the software, written by humans and thus shaded and slanted by human biases.

HOLLYWOOD,: Academy Award winning special effects creator Dennis Muren (holding star) poses for ... [ ] photos with director James Cameron (L) and Star Wars creator George Lucas (R), who kneels next to Star Wars characters R2D2 and C3PO during a ceremony honoring Muren with a star on the famous Hollywood Walk of Fame 03 June 1999 in Hollywood, CA. Muren has won eight Oscars in the visual effects category including work on "Terminator 2", "Jurassic Park" and all of the Star Wars films. The release of the film "Dolittle" has landed with a thud. During its first week, the box office receipts came to a disappointing $29.5 million. Keep in mind that the film–which stars Robert Downey Jr.–cost Universal Pictures $175 million to produce.

If Sunspring is anything to go by, artificial intelligence in film-making has some way to go. This short film, made as an entry to Sci-Fi London's 48-hour film-making competition in 2016, was written entirely by an AI. The director, Oscar Sharp, fed a few hundred sci-fi screenplays into a long short-term memory recurrent neural network (the type of software behind predictive text in a smartphone), then told it to write its own. The result was almost, but not quite, incoherent nonsense, riddled with cryptic nonsequiturs, bizarre turns of phrase and unfathomable stage directions such as "he is standing in the stars and sitting on the floor". All of which Sharp and his actors filmed with sincere commitment.

Hollywood has been embracing digital technology and computational algorithms in order to movies for a while now, using CGI to de-age actors and enhance shots in other ways. Just recently, one Hollywood company announced its intention to use AI to analyze movie data and assist in making a decision regarding greenlighting projects. As reported by The Hollywood Reporter, the AI firm will be providing Warner Bros. a program intended to simplify aspects of distribution and give projections regarding pricing and possible profit. The system developed for Warner Bros. will utilize big data to guide decision-making during the greenlight phase of a project. The system can reportedly return analyses regarding star power for a given region and even predict how much money a film is likely to make in theaters and through other distribution methods. Cinelytic has reportedly been engineering and beta-testing their predictive platform for over three years, and in addition to Warner Bros, several other companies, such as Ingenious Media and Productivity Media, have partnered with the company.

Most people would assume creative industries like movies and TV would be immune from an artificial intelligence takeover. Filmmaking is, after all, the pursuit of telling human stories, capturing our essence of life and packaging it in something glittering, beautiful, and bold. In reality, tech has already transformed the movie-making business a thousand times over: you can make aging actors look young again, craft entire fictional worlds, and bring people back from the dead -- if only for a few hours. So the latest Hollywood adoption of technology should really come as no surprise, even though it's still a bit unsettling. On Thursday, The Hollywood Reporter reported that Warner Bros. has partnered with AI firm Cinelytic in order to make analytical and data-based decisions at the green lighting stage of production.

Warner Bros. has unveiled a wild new plan to use Cinelytic's AI technology to streamline the process of getting movies greenlit, Engadget reports. The aim is to make the process quicker and easier for executives, but it could influence which films actually make it onto the big screen. While the AI system won't have the final say on whether a movie goes into production or not, it will determine a project's financial risk. The system will analyze revenue potential, evaluate the value of a film's stars, and find an optimal release date. The move was reportedly reached in order to reduce "low-value, repetitive tasks" usually carried about by executives.

Warner Bros. is turning to artificial intelligence company Cinelytic to help decide which movies it should make Finally, Warner Bros. is acknowledging its continued reactionary decision making and mishandling of some of its most valuable IPs, and is partnering with an AI analytics firm to get a clearer picture of what works and what doesn't. Up until recently, the studio had made a series of blunders with its tent-pole DC superhero properties that garnered nothing but divisiveness among critics and fans, and led to its Avengers-style team-up film Justice League costing the studio more than $100 million. In addition, the rate at which new projects were being announced and shelved, the amount of directors signing on and then leaving in-development films, and the handling of relationships with big Hollywood names like Ben Affleck and Zack Snyder resulted in wave after wave of negative headlines. Big changes were clearly needed. After the financial failings of Justice League, WB appointed Walter Hamada as the head of DC Films, and under his leadership the studio has seen increased success with its DCEU titles, such as Aquaman, and more recently its standalone film Joker.

Warner Bros are going to start using artificial intelligence (AI) to help predict how successful their films could be. The platform will allow them to test profitability outcomes depending on different factors including casting, distributor and release date. Warner Bros. Pictures International - which is one of the "big six" in Hollywood - has signed a deal with LA start-up Cinelytic to use their project management system, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The forecasting tool was launched last year and offers a unique set of industry insights. It claims the platform is able to accurately predict box office returns using a variety of data.

Hollywood-based film studios are increasingly using AI as part of the decision-making process when ... [ ] commissioning and producing new films. For anyone who's ever thought Hollywood's output is formulaic and tired, the movie industry may be about to get worse. Major studio Warner Bros. has signed a deal with Cinelytic, which has developed an AI-powered system that can predict the likelihood of a film's success based on such factors as actors, budget and brand. Predictably enough, Warner Bros. will be using Cinelytic's software as part of the research process it undergoes when deciding which movies to commission. While it obviously can't measure how good a film will be artistically, Warner Bros. will likely use it during early production phases to separate ideas likely to succeed from those that most likely aren't.

Warner Bros. has become the latest studio to publicly embrace artificial intelligence. The movie division has signed a deal with Cinelytic to use the latter's AI-driven project management system that was launched last year. Under the new deal, Warners will leverage the system's comprehensive data and predictive analytics to guide decision-making at the greenlight stage. The integrated online platform can assess the value of a star in any territory and how much a film is expected to make in theaters and on other ancillary streams. Founded four years ago by Tobias Queisser, Cinelytic has been building and beta testing the platform for three years.