It's no secret that Amazon is enjoying the life of using generative AI to push more stuff out and stay hip with its competition, but its latest venture into the matter probably should've been ironed out a bit more with more human input. Video Recaps is a new service Amazon is a new service Amazon is dabbling in, letting people get a refresher for shows like Reacher or The Girlfriend complete with dialog snippets and AI narration. Unfortunately, AI will AI, which means that it got key story details wrong with its latest introduction to the Fallout show.
Overall, the idea of a recap is smart, especially with shows that end on cliffhangers and take a year or more to continue. While this Video Recaps thing is only in beta testing, it kinda shows that Amazon is putting basically all faith in its AI getting everything right all the time without having at least one person keeping an eye on stuff to make sure the key plot points are actually key plot points found in the season, including flashbacks that the AI thinks are set in the 1950s, but it's actually supposed to be 2077.
To make matters worse, Amazon's also offering this same recap thing for live events, including sports. Now, there's already a text version of this, X-Ray Recaps, which is also AI-powered that does its best to recap a series spoiler-free. Prime Video's VP of technology labeled its Video Recaps project as a groundbreaking gen AI thing, using it as a way to prop up the streamer's "ongoing commitment to innovation," when it started not too long ago.
“Video Recaps marks a groundbreaking application of generative AI for streaming. This first-of-its-kind feature demonstrates Prime Video’s ongoing commitment to innovation and making the viewing experience more accessible and enjoyable for customers.”
The Fallout show's second season sees the cast leave behind Californa for the Mojave Wasteland with new cast like Macaulay Culkin, Justin Theroux, and Kumail Nanjiani. Besides the new cast, though, we can still expect Ella Purnell, Aaron Moten, Walton Goggins, Kyle MacLachlan, Moisés Arias, and Frances Turner to return to their roles.
It'll launch new episodes on a weekly basis starting this Wednesday until early February. With all that said, it's also confirmed that Season 3 has been greenlit, meaning Amazon is confident in the show's numbers even before it begins airing later this week. Now, the best way of actually getting a recap, though, in our mind at least, is just watch it yourself; it'll be a lot more enjoyable than watching an AI lie to your face.
Official blurb:
"Based on one of the greatest video games of all time, Fallout is the story of haves and have-nots in a world in which there’s almost nothing left to have. 200 years after the apocalypse, the gentle denizens of luxury fallout shelters are forced to return to the incredibly complex, gleefully weird and highly violent universe waiting for them above."