HBO Max Will Use AI To Spoil the Best Scenes in Its Series and Films

As the saying goes, “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” That’s basically been the unofficial motto of AI for the last couple of years — doing things no one asked for, solving problems that didn’t exist. I don’t need AI to connect my TV to every device in my house so I can get text notifications mid-Tom Cruise freefall. I don’t need AI adjusting the speed on my fan — Low, Medium, and High have worked perfectly fine for decades. And I certainly don’t need AI in my camera app telling me what I’m looking at. I know what I’m looking at. That’s why I’m taking the damn picture.

And now, Max (soon to be HBO Max again, because branding is hard) is trotting out yet another AI “innovation” no one asked for: autoplaying video previews. In the coming weeks, when users hover over a GIF of a show or movie, AI will scan the content for “stand-out scenes” and use them as previews.

“This AI-driven technology will enable us to identify Drop-in Moments for the vast catalog of content on Max and significantly reduce the manual time needed to curate previews,” said Avi Saxena, Warner Bros. Discovery’s chief technology officer, in a press release that probably wrote itself.

Sounds fine — right up until the AI chooses a “stand-out scene” that turns out to be a beloved character getting killed off, Haley Joel Osment figuring out Bruce Willis is dead, or Gandalf plunging to his doom. (Actually, I’m good with that last one.)

It’s yet another feature nobody wants, all so Warner Bros. Discovery can slap an “AI-powered” label on something that was already working just fine. Just play the trailer, man. It’s right there, already approved by marketing, and most of them spoil half the movie anyway. Isn’t that enough?

Besides, if we just wanted to watch stand-out scenes, we’d watch reels.