Questioning the Effectiveness of an AI Bot Designed to Recommend Horror Movies

Summary

The movie Totally Killer is at the center of controversy due to its inaccurate recommendation by the AI bot Pix for users seeking non-slasher movies.

The AI bot's effectiveness is being doubted due to its inaccurate movie recommendations, as it suggests graphic films despite explicit requests for non-violent options. Users express criticism towards both the marketing and functionality of the Pix app.

Totally Killer is embroiled in a unique controversy as it has been incorrectly associated with a new AI bot called Pix. Pix is designed to suggest movie and television titles to users, but it mistakenly featured Totally Killer, a slasher throwback starring Kiernan Shipka, as a recommended film. The Hollywood Reporter highlighted this error in an article featuring a user requesting scary movies without slashers, yet Pix still recommended Totally Killer. This has raised doubts about the accuracy of the AI, especially after our website conducted a test requesting Halloween movies without gore, but received recommendations for notably gory films like Scream VI, Bones and All, and Prey. Read some of the reactions to this post below:

Nickrob shared the key art image and a snippet from Wikipedia, confirming that Totally Killer is indeed a slasher film. He expressed astonishment at the fact that the marketing team hadn't even proofread their own key art.

Slayboy chimed in, highlighting the obviousness of the film's slasher genre by pointing out its name, "Totally Killer," in a cheeky manner. This prompted a response from Lesnick Sans Visage, who criticized the article for also recommending M3GAN as one of the five non-slasher films, deeming it as nothing short of foolishness.

Defining the Horror Genre Can Be Hard (But Not That Hard)

On Lesnick's personal webpage, there is a tweet that says, "You can now acquire PIX, an app that is incredibly dumb to the point that it doesn't even function properly in its own demonstration of how it should work. I understand that the individuals who developed this app lack knowledge about movies, but shouldn't The Hollywood Reporter be aware of this?"

Defining horror and its various subgenres can be challenging for both humans and AI. Take slasher movies, for example, which are typically characterized by specific tropes such as a silent or masked serial killer, a survivor known as the final girl, and a group of victims either sharing a certain attribute or isolated in a single location. Nevertheless, not all slashers incorporate these tropes, and many films outside this subgenre have incorporated one or more of them, like the original Terminator and the Julia Roberts thriller Sleeping with the Enemy.

The video tag is not supported by your browser. A historical tendency among filmmakers and fans has been to downplay the association of certain classic movies with the horror genre, stemming from the belief that horror is considered less prestigious. This sentiment has prompted the emergence of the term "elevated horror," often used to describe horror films with a more artistic focus, like The Babadook and Hereditary. However, this concept predates the popularization of the term, as exemplified by the fact that The Silence of the Lambs, an Oscar-winning film about a serial killer, is often categorized as a "psychological thriller."

The horror genre is known for its nuanced nature, making it challenging to categorize a diverse range of titles. However, a film like Totally Killer, with its evident slasher elements incorporated into the title itself, is more straightforward to classify. Although certain horror movies contain tropes that exist in ambiguous territory, characteristics such as "gory" can be relatively easier to evaluate, at least within a specific scale. Perhaps certain aspects of this genre still require human perception to be accurately recognized, considering the advancements in technology available at the time of writing.