Replicant Drama: Warner Bros. Took Down a Computer's Reconstructed BLADE RUNNER Footage
This is hard to understand at first, but once you do understand it, it's super trippy! It took a couple reads of this Vox article to figure out why people are freaking out that Warner Bros. took down another computer's copy of Blade Runner, but once I got it (I think), I realized it was actually pretty awesome and meta to the film!
First, the story.
Warner Bros. issued a typical DMCA notice (a takedown notice for a piece of content that contains the studio's intellectual property) on a video that used a considerable chunk of Blade Runner, and it was taken down. The problem? It wasn't Blade Runner, but another computer's encoded "deep learning" of Blade Runner.
Reading about "deep learning" alone will give you a headache, but the long and short of it is a way of showing us how computers learn and observe. The video in question was uploaded by Terrence Broad, who ran an experiment to "teach" an autoencoder to watch a film and identify it without human aid.
Basically what he did was show the program two films (Blade Runner and A Scanner Darkly) six times. After the program "learned" what the film looked like, he would have it recreate what it had seen on screen through encoding and cross referencing it with other images.
The end result is an inside look at how a computer "watches" and recognizes a film:
The final video is a series of images and "thoughts" of a computer that look similar to Blade Runner, but it is not Blade Runner. It looks like it, and it certainly seemed like it to the Warner Bros. legal team (initially, anyway...they ultimately reinstated it), but it's actually something entirely different. That's not a poorly visualized copy on the right side of the video...that's organically created by a computer via watching the film!
Kind of like how replicants are different from humans, right? Or are they? SEE?! PRETTY TRIPPY! I really don't have a good way to end this because my head kind of hurts trying to make heads or tails of this...so here's the Scanner Darkly footage as well!