Amazon may want to spend some bottle caps on a better “Fallout” recap.
Prime Video took down an AI-powered look back at the first season of “Fallout” Friday ahead of the Dec. 17 premiere of Season 2. The incident comes a month after Amazon announced in November that Prime Video would begin its “X-Ray Recaps,” which use AI to cull key plot details from previous seasons of television.
But this AI wasn’t as good at identifying details as Amazon would hope. Several fans noticed that the AI misunderstood or misrepresented key details of “Fallout,” a series adapting the popular post-apocalypse RPG video franchise created by Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky.
“Video Recaps mark a groundbreaking application of generative AI for streaming,” Gérard Medioni, vice president of technology at Prime Video, said in a November statement. “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.”
One such detail was a choice that The Ghoul (Walton Goggins) gives Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell): to stay behind or follow him on a quest to find Lucy’s dad, Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), in New Vegas. Viewers pointed out that the AI recap says The Ghoul said Lucy could “die or leave with him,” implying (against what actually happens in Season 1) that he would kill her if she didn’t follow.
The X-Ray Recap was also confused by the setting of a pre-apocalyptic world in “Fallout” Season 1. Because the retro-futuristic design of the environment makes it look as if scenes before the nuclear bombs fell take place in the 1950s, the text-to-speech recapper states that these scenes are set in ’50s America. In reality, they take place in the year 2077.
Clearly, the AI recaps are going to need to invest more stat points in charisma, intelligence or perception if they wish to be a functional option for future seasons and series.
Amazon has since pulled the X-Ray Recap from Prime Video, so “Fallout” fans will need to wait a bit if they want a quick catch-up for Season 1. In the meantime, you can read TheWrap’s breakdown of the latest trailer for the post-apocalyptic series.
“Fallout” Season 2 premieres Wednesday, Dec. 17 on Prime Video.
