I think the machine learning part in that is massively exaggerated, perhaps to avoid personal responsibility. Detecting the patterns in commercially successful movies hardly requires complex pattern recognition algorithms. I would claim that most movies made in the past decades were copying ideas that had turned out to be
successful earlier.
Maybe machine learning can add some tiny extra on top of the recipe, but I think it's still the producers who are to blame for the lack of creativity.
> I think the machine learning part in that is massively exaggerated,
You are right of course. I said that in half-jest. It is like at work where every product/project is working on something next generation. Irritates the hell out of me. So in morning meetings I so often ask "Are we fixing it now or it will be part of our next gen product?"
Not just the producers but the overall strategy. Right now, these media companies are competing on quantity because it's a numbers game and a marketing gimmick to showcase your "vast" collection, however mediocre.
This is what machine learning, pattern recognition will get us.
I watched one show in Amazon prime. One shocking thing I noted besides repetitive plots every few episodes, is that one character say something and after few minutes or next episode another character spoke exactly same sentence in different situation. And it happened so many times I thought I knew what is about to be said.