Let’s play the riddles. What do Kevin Macdonald and Lexus have in common? Yes, I am talking about Kevin Macdonald, the British film director and 1999 Oscar winner for Best Short Documentary for One Day in September, which chronicled the murders of Israeli athletes at the 1978 Munich Olympics. What if we introduce in the question or riddle to artificial intelligence (AI)? What relationship can there be between Macdonadl, Lexus and AI? Yes, anyone who has thought about what the Oscar-winning film director can bring to Lexus with artificial intelligence technology has been right. But I will explain.
For the first time in history an advertisement has been written by artificial intelligence, and filmed by the aforementioned British film director. And we have been in the exact place and time, at Social Media Week held in London on November 15 and 16, to see the live premiere of the spot for the new Lexus ES Executive sedan, which will go down in history not by integrating into its inside the best artificial intelligence technology, but for having been the first ad created from AI.
Sixty seconds of a commercial that began to go viral this week on social networks and European digital channels, in addition to movie theaters, of a vehicle that will not be marketed until the beginning of 2019. With Kevin Macdonald we were able to chat for a while on Thursday, November 15, and ask him about his experience with artificial intelligence. The director of The Last King of Scotland does not doubt that he would repeat and work with AI to complement it with the filming, and he tells us the amount of time that is saved with the use of artificial intelligence techniques to be able to feed and train the process of production of the spot with more than 15 years of award-winning luxury ads, or emotional intelligence about what connects most strongly with viewers.
Macdonald also told us that “the charmingly simplistic way in which artificial intelligence wrote the story was both fascinating in its interpretation of human emotion, and yet it was also both unexpected enough to give the film a clearly non-human feeling ”.
The film’s script and script have been created entirely with artificial intelligence, and built by project technology partners IBM Watson and Visual Voice. To specifically focus on the “intuitive” aspect of the film, the AI was trained with an experiment tailored led by MindX, the applied science division of the University of New South Wales in Australia, who explored what makes someone intuitive and how people with a high level of intuition respond to car ads.
And the result of the union of Lexus, IA and Macdonald is the story of a Takumi craftsman who completes his painstaking work to test the limits of how humans and machines can work together in perfect harmony. Carried out to the new Lexus ES sedan, this harmony between man and machine means that the car’s automatic emergency braking system proves its effectiveness in saving the lives of the vehicle’s occupants. Lexus safety systems, they say in the Japanese company, can recognize hazards and automatically initiate braking, steering and driver alerts to prevent an accident from occurring, or reduce the consequences if a collision occurs.
