It's one of the most difficult decisions a new parent can make – what shall we call our baby? Now, a huge analysis has revealed that names associated with intelligence are dying out, while those linked to beauty, elegance or strength are on the up. The study, carried out by The Economist, scrutinised the names of nearly 400 million infants born in Britain and the US over the last 143 years. Researchers used a large language model – the type of AI that powers the likes of ChatGPT – for their analysis. They fed it with an enormous amount of text taken from the internet and asked it to identify the five most common terms linked with each name.

The proliferation of creative video content has driven demand for textual descriptions or summaries that allow users to recall key plot points or get an overview without watching. The volume of movie content and speed of turnover motivates automatic summarisation, which is nevertheless challenging, requiring identifying character intentions and very long-range temporal dependencies. The few existing methods attempting this task rely heavily on textual screenplays as input, greatly limiting their applicability. In this work, we propose the task of automatic screenplay generation, and a method, ScreenWriter, that operates only on video and produces output which includes dialogue, speaker names, scene breaks, and visual descriptions. ScreenWriter introduces a novel algorithm to segment the video into scenes based on the sequence of visual vectors, and a novel method for the challenging problem of determining character names, based on a database of actors' faces. We further demonstrate how these automatic screenplays can be used to generate plot synopses with a hierarchical summarisation method based on scene breaks. We test the quality of the final summaries on the recent MovieSum dataset, which we augment with videos, and show that they are superior to a number of comparison models which assume access to goldstandard screenplays.

Ayad Akhtar's brilliant new play, McNeal, currently at the Lincoln Center Theater, is transfixing in part because it tracks without flinching the disintegration of a celebrated writer, and in part because Akhtar goes to a place that few writers have visited so effectively--the very near future, in which large language models threaten to undo our self-satisfied understanding of creativity, plagiarism, and originality. And also because Robert Downey Jr., performing onstage for the first time in more than 40 years, perfectly embodies the genius and brokenness of the title character. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. I've been in conversation for quite some time with Akhtar, whose play Disgraced won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013, about artificial generative intelligence and its impact on cognition and creation. He's one of the few writers I know whose position on AI can't be reduced to the (understandable) plea For God's sake, stop threatening my existence! In McNeal, he not only suggests that LLMs might be nondestructive utilities for human writers, but also deployed LLMs as he wrote (he's used many of them, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini included). To my chagrin and astonishment, they seem to have helped him make an even better play. As you will see in our conversation, he doesn't believe that this should be controversial. In early September, Akhtar, Downey, Bartlett Sher--the Tony Award winner who directed McNeal--and I met at Downey's home in New York for what turned out to be an amusing, occasionally frenetic, and sometimes even borderline profound discussion of the play, its origins, the flummoxing issues it raises, and, yes, Avengers: Age of Ultron. We were joined intermittently by Susan Downey, Robert's wife (and producing partner), and the person who believed that Akhtar's play would tempt her husband to return to the stage. The conversation that follows is a condensed and edited version of our sprawling discussion, but I think it captures something about art and AI, and it certainly captures the exceptional qualities of three people, writer, director, and actor, who are operating at the pinnacle of their trade, without fear--perhaps without enough fear--of what is inescapably coming.

Movie screenplay summarization is challenging, as it requires an understanding of long input contexts and various elements unique to movies. Large language models have shown significant advancements in document summarization, but they often struggle with processing long input contexts. Furthermore, while television transcripts have received attention in recent studies, movie screenplay summarization remains underexplored. To stimulate research in this area, we present a new dataset, MovieSum, for abstractive summarization of movie screenplays. This dataset comprises 2200 movie screenplays accompanied by their Wikipedia plot summaries. We manually formatted the movie screenplays to represent their structural elements. Compared to existing datasets, MovieSum possesses several distinctive features: (1) It includes movie screenplays, which are longer than scripts of TV episodes. (2) It is twice the size of previous movie screenplay datasets. (3) It provides metadata with IMDb IDs to facilitate access to additional external knowledge. We also show the results of recently released large language models applied to summarization on our dataset to provide a detailed baseline.

In order for large language model (LLM)-based assistants to effectively adapt to evolving information needs, it must be possible to update their factual knowledge through continued training on new data. The standard recipe for doing so involves continued pre-training on new documents followed by instruction-tuning on question-answer (QA) pairs. However, we find that LLMs trained with this recipe struggle to answer questions, even though the perplexity of documents is minimized. We found that QA pairs are generally straightforward, while documents are more complex, weaving many factual statements together in an intricate manner. Therefore, we hypothesize that it is beneficial to expose LLMs to QA pairs before continued pre-training on documents so that the process of encoding knowledge from complex documents takes into account how this knowledge is accessed through questions. Based on this, we propose pre-instruction-tuning (PIT), a method that instruction-tunes on questions prior to training on documents. This contrasts with standard instruction-tuning, which learns how to extract knowledge after training on documents. Extensive experiments and ablation studies demonstrate that pre-instruction-tuning significantly enhances the ability of LLMs to absorb knowledge from new documents, outperforming standard instruction-tuning by 17.8%.

A new top-grossing film that has received global recognition for its cinematic prowess is now being revered by the most successful director of the century. Oscar-winning director Steven Spielberg recently proclaimed Dune: Part Two as a'visual epic' in a new interview, calling it'one of the most brilliant science-fiction films I've ever seen.' Spielberg said his favorite scene in the Blockbuster was watching Timothée Chalamet - who plays Paul Atreides - ride a sandworm. Spielberg has also lavished praise on Denis Villeneuve who directed both Dune films, saying Villeneuve's name will be added to the list of sci-fi filmmakers who have built incredible and unique worlds. 'You have made one of the most brilliant science fiction films I have ever seen,' adding that it'is truly a visual epic and it's also filled with deeply, deeply drawn characters,' Spielberg told Villeneuve in the Director's Cut podcast: Dune: Part Two cleared 82.5 million in its opening weekend, surpassing Oppenheimer which brought in 82.4 million. Since its release, the film has grossed nearly 240 million at the domestic box office and 570 million globally.

'Oppenheimer' swept away the competition at the 2024 Oscars, receiving seven awards including earning renowned director Christopher Nolan his first golden man statuette. While this is the filmmaker's first major award-winning film, he has been producing movies since 1998 when he made Following - and has made 10 more since. We asked ChatGPT to rank his other 11 films dating back to 26 years to the'Following' and 2010 film'Inception' up through his his 2012 film'The Dark Knight Rises' and his 2020 film'Tenet.' Renowned director Christopher Nolan took home his first Oscar for his critically acclaimed film, ' Oppenheimer.' The historic film starred Cillian Murphy as J Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos lab that designed and built the world's first atomic bomb during World War II - he is often known as the'father of the atomic bomb' Oppenheimer swept the box office when it was released on July 21, 2023, reeling in a whopping 82.4 million in opening weekend, winning Nolan Best Picture and Best Director during Sunday's award show.

This wasn't the first year that the Academy Awards fell on the second Sunday in March, forcing the good citizens of Hollywood to manage their hair appointments and limousine pickups around the annual scourge that is daylight-saving time. Even so, the ninety-sixth annual Oscars ceremony wrought more than its expected share of havoc on schedules. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, hoping to broaden its reach among those with strict curfews and short attention spans, opted to kick off the show at the previously unheard-of time of 4 P.M. Or, as this year's host, Jimmy Kimmel, quipped in his opening monologue, "The show, as you know, is starting an hour early this year, but don't worry. It will still end very, very late." Such temporal dislocation was surely a good omen, not that any were needed, for Christopher Nolan and "Oppenheimer."

Is it just me, or has this Oscar season lasted five years? Maybe it's because the Barbenheimer phenomenon has been with us since the summer. Or maybe we've just heard one too many times that Bradley Cooper spent half a decade learning how to conduct for "Maestro." Whether you are a casual observer or an Oscar completist who is now cramming in a few more animated shorts, it all ends Sunday, with the ninety-sixth Academy Awards. Much is already known, or widely assumed: we're likely to hear the word "Oppenheimer" several times, Da'Vine Joy Randolph ("The Holdovers") is a shoo-in for Best Supporting Actress, and Jimmy Kimmel will be back to poke fun at Hollywood and move things along.

The sounds came out of my mouth with an unexpected urgency. The cadence was deliberate--more befitting of an incantation than an order: one large strawberry-lemon-mint Charged Lemonade. The words hung in the air for a moment, giving way to a stillness punctuated only by the soft whir of distant fluorescent lights and the gentle hum of a Muzak cover of Bruce Hornsby's "Mandolin Rain." The time was 9:03 a.m.; the sun had been up for only one hour. I watched the kind woman behind the counter stifle an eye roll, a small mercy for which I will be eternally grateful.