The paper is about how to iteratively tweak your rendering pipeline to achieve a certain look. It makes sense that the director of the movie would be involved in that process.
I did. They describe using a Keras implementation, written by someone else, of style transfer, which was invented by someone else, to achieve a particular artistic effect. They use a pre-trained model. They don't even have to buy any hardware, since they used AWS GPU instances. It's a case study, nothing new has been accomplished here.
Do I also get a Verge writeup if I publish a PDF to arxiv about how I compiled and installed tensorflow? The only reason we're talking about this paper is because the name of a Hollywood actress is on it, and because it has the AI buzzword.
Look at the title: "Kristen Stewart co-authors AI paper". 113 points.
The paper itself was submitted earlier, under its actual title, which does not mention Kristen Stewart: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13443107 6 points! The paper is not very interesting. The only thing that makes it newsworthy is the coauthor.
My question was directed at "salem" who stated "No, they actually did write parts of the paper.". That statement seemed like it should have reasoning behind it...