Who is that actor on the screen? Emacs/LLM/Fun Redux

I’ve got a cold, so I futzed around a bit more with this…

To try to answer that eternal question that we all ask ourselves when we watch a move — who’s that, then? — I poked at ChatGPT to see whether it could tell me. And the answer was “kinda”, but it didn’t really want to, so the results were a bit hard to use in practice.

However, because Google dropped the “don’t be evil” motto (obviously), Gemini has no scruples whatsoever about identifying people. Which means that I can get it to output data in a more useful manner.

I asked it to return most famous movies, and also the IMDB ID. This means that I can display the actor headshot to see whether the answer is correct. I have to create an OSD overlay for mpv, which led me to further mpv fun:

Eurmh… Yeah, yeah, I should read the ImageMagick manual, but from bitter experience I know that it’s not super helpful on the “raw” formatting stuff.

OK, I’ll ask Google:

What? RBGA? Swap? That sounds suspiciously wrong, but I tried it anyway, and it was wrong.

That one was actually right! Except that it didn’t have -background transparent, so it didn’t really transpere (that’s a word).

There. I fixed it!

Oh, I love the helpful mpv error messages…

Anyway, after futzing around with this a bit more, I got it to work:

OK, what with all the back and forth between Gemini and IMDB, it takes several seconds to get the data. And…

That’s not a picture of Jane Russell. That’s Geoffrey Rush:

It’s kinda fascinating that Gemini gets the hard stuff right (identifying Jane Russell), but is bad at mapping that to imdb IDs. After testing some more, it seems to get the right ID about half of the time, and the rest of the time, it’s just a random person? Let’s try again.

Err… Let’s try again:

OK, Gemini isn’t very good at IMDB IDs. I’m really looking forward to all companies and gummints firing everybody and just relying on LLMs. That’s going to be so much fun…

Anyway, perhaps I should just ditch that LLM part and look it up in IMDB myself:

The problem is, of course, that there’s oodles of people with the same name in IMDB. I could filter for famousness, though. Hm…

Yup. But I don’t know whether this is better than the LLM’s guesses… People aren’t consistently named anyway (“Michael Fox” and “Michael J. Fox”, etc).

And showing both images would be annoying (and take even longer).

Oh well.

But looking it up in imdb works for Jane Russell, at least. So there you go.

And now I’m going to dedicate myself to feeling sorry for myself again. *cough* *cough*