26 Sep Tubi is Using ChatGPT to Give You Better Movie Recommendations [The Verge]
BY DAVID PIERCE
September 26, 2023 | Tubi’s library of streaming content is huge. And kind of impenetrable. You can watch its many always-on channels or watch something the service’s homescreen recommends, but more likely than not, you’re going to spend too much of your TV-watching time scrolling the same endless rows of posters until your eyes cross. Just like every other streaming service.
Or maybe, Tubi thinks, ChatGPT can help you find what you’re looking for a little faster. Tubi is launching a feature called Rabbit AI that lets you ask for content any way you can think of. Search for “movies like Hidden Figures,” and you’ll get up to 20 recommendations; search “horror movies about high school,” and Rabbit AI will hopefully find what you’re looking for.
This isn’t a particularly new idea — some of ChatGPT’s most useful plug-ins are ones like What to Watch and TMDB that tap into movie and show databases to help you get recommendations — but Tubi is among the first to build AI-powered search right into its platform. It’ll even suggest prompts to get users started who might not know what they’re looking for. ChatGPT does have an occasional tendency to hallucinate and invent movies that don’t exist, but in this case Tubi is able to constrain the data to only the relevant content. And if it does make something up, it’ll be pretty obvious pretty fast.