Quick and Dirty Uses of an LLM
Crowd sourcing movie recommendations and turning them into an easily usable "good enough" list.
Last night on twitter I asked my friends to recommend some movies made in the last ten years. I got a number of great recommendations, but because it was a random twitter conversation it felt like a bit of a pain in the ass to turn the recommendations into more usable content.
No big deal, this is a easy task for an LMM.
This morning over coffee before my kids woke up, I copied and pasted the entire twitter conversation into ChatGPT and asked it to turn it into a list of films, including director, and organized by running time from shortest to longest. Whole thing, including my typing, took like six minutes.
Here’s the list:
Twisted Pair - Neil Breen - 89 minutes
Emily the Criminal - John Patton Ford - 93 minutes
The Nice Guys - Shane Black - 116 minutes
Florida Project - Sean Baker - 111 minutes
Parasite - Bong Joon-ho - 132 minutes
Creed - Ryan Coogler - 133 minutes
The Handmaiden - Park Chan-wook - 145 minutes
Portrait of a Lady on Fire - Céline Sciamma - 121 minutes
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood - Quentin Tarantino - 161 minutes
Everything Everywhere All At Once - Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert - 139 minutes
Mad Max Fury Road - George Miller - 120 minutes
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves - John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein - 134 minutes
Saint Omer - Alice Diop - 122 minutes
Burning - Lee Chang-dong - 148 minutes
Clouds of Sils Maria - Olivier Assayas - 124 minutes
Never Look Away - Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck - 189 minutes
Beau is Afraid - Ari Aster - (Duration not available yet, as the movie may still be unreleased or newly released)
Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched - Kier-La Janisse - 194 minutes
Moments Like This Never Last - Cheryl Dunn - (Duration not readily available)
The Monopoly of Violence - David Dufresne - (Duration not readily available)
Midnight Traveler - Hassan Fazili - 87 minutes
Donbass - Sergei Loznitsa - 121 minutes
Epicentro - Hubert Sauper - 108 minutes
Hypernormalisation - Adam Curtis - 166 minutes
In Bloom - Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Groß - 102 minutes
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World - (Duration not available)
I haven’t QA’ed this at all, probably some of the information is wrong. For instance, it claims not to know the length of Beau is Afraid, which may be because the movie was released after the last training run, or may be because it’s being lazy.
Skeptics of AI will jump on that “ah ha! It got the director of X wrong, AI is useless!”. This is a bad way to think.
Even if on the margins the system hallucinated, or got lazy, it took a confusing all over the place discussion and turned it into an actionable list to help me be less of a movie idiot and the whole thing took less than ten minutes.
It’s a small example, but this is the kind of thing I find myself using the system for more and more — the first roughed out version of something that is “good enough” to get me moving. Try experimenting like this yourself.