Hollywood is producing more violent content than ever before, according to a study conducted by researchers at the University of New South Wales Phys.org published on Friday.
According to the American Psychological Association, current movie content has raised concerns that filmmakers are increasingly relying on violent scripts to score big at the box office and at the Oscars.
In recent years, action franchises such as The Avengers, Avatar, and Spider-Man have dominated ticket sales, while films with violent content like Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite have snagged Best Picture at the Academy Awards.
Researchers at the University of New South Wales in Australia have conducted a study to better understand the evolution of on-screen violence using content and dialogue from the past 70 years of film.
The AI models used data from the International Movie Database (IMdB) to divide 1,026 films into four broad categories: action (478), comedy (222), drama (285) and thriller (41), Phys.org reported.
The artificial intelligence
The LLMs were programmed to recognize general sentiments in dialogue, such as sadness, anger, anxiety, and optimism, as well as the frequency of word repetition. The models then analyzed and categorized emotions to eventually determine the degree of violence in each film.
"Our findings reveal significant temporal changes in movie dialogues, which reflect broader social and cultural influences," Chandra and Ren stated in their report, which was published by Cornell University’s online open-access repository, Arxiv.
"The results show a gradual rise in abusive content in recent decades, reflecting social norms and regulatory policy changes.”