I suspect all involved were aware of what was going on, and outsourcing the work to a consultant provides plausible deniability/a fall guy. This is not the first time in the history of film marketing that fake reviews have been used. [1]
Nah, that assumes everyone was paying attention and was perfectly coordinated in a stupid pointless effort that was bound to fail.
It's a lot easier to believe the official explanation. Which is that someone typed in a prompt like "what are some quotes from famous movie reviewers that were negative about francis ford coppola's films?" and just copy-pasted the output without understanding that LLMs can make things up. And everyone who should've caught it was lazy or just simply didn't second guess the work that was done fifteen steps prior in the pipeline.
When money is at stake, never attribute to incompetence what can be attributed to greed.
Yes, maybe some dingdong did this because they were stupid, and nobody bothered to check their work. But then you have to ask yourself: Why was a dingdong assigned to this task? Why was nobody competent assigned to check their work? And then hopefully you understand what's happening.
What a great example of how AI is changing the world. Back then, people committed the act and Sony faced consequences. Today, some limp apology will get thrown onto the "sorry the AI got it wrong" pile and it will be forgotten with no consequences.
It's a lot easier to believe the official explanation. Which is that someone typed in a prompt like "what are some quotes from famous movie reviewers that were negative about francis ford coppola's films?" and just copy-pasted the output without understanding that LLMs can make things up. And everyone who should've caught it was lazy or just simply didn't second guess the work that was done fifteen steps prior in the pipeline.