Unanimous AI Predicts Oscar Winners

Who does artificial intelligence think will win at the Oscars?

By Lulu Chang February 27, 2016

oscar predictions screen shot 2016 02 27 at 7 36 56 am — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Awards in Tinseltown may be something of a crapshoot, but that doesn’t mean that they’re totally unpredictable. At least, not with the advent of artificial intelligence systems. In honor of the impending Oscars, Unanimous A.I. pooled the ever-perceptive general populace, and has come up with its predictions for the six major award categories.

So who are the big winners?

For Best Picture, the AI predicts that The Revenant will take home top honors, and Leonardo DiCaprio will finally end his unfortunate streak with a Best Actor award. Director A.G. Iñárritu will win for his role in the film as well, the system projects.

Brie Larson will score Best Actress for her work in Room, while Kate Winslet’s acting in Steve Jobs will win her Best Supporting Actress. And finally, Sylvester Stallone is expected to walk away with some hardware for Creed.

“The secret behind these results,” Dana Hershman of Unanimous UI has told Digital Trends, “is the platform’s (UNU) algorithm, which makes it possible for users to leverage their natural human intuitions, emotions, and sensibilities to come to conclusions on just any topic in 30 seconds or less.”

While this may sound a bit like crowdsourcing, the swarm intelligence methods the AI employs does not depend upon votes, polls, or surveys to aggregate opinions. Rather, swarming tech lets an entire group “think together and draw conclusions based upon their combined knowledge and intuition.” Ultimately, the idea is that many minds are better than one.

In order to come to its Oscars results, UNU used the expert minds of 50 participants, all of whom maintained different levels of knowledge on the various awards and nominees in the running for the prestigious Oscar. And according to Hershman, “The results showed that these users chose just as accurately as prediction engines like Microsoft Bing and experts who have spent long hours crunching data.”

In fact, she says, UNU managed to out-class “99 percent of Super Bowl gamblers in Vegas in predicting 20 proposition bets.”

So if you’ve got an Oscars pool going, it might be worth it to check out some of UNU’s predictions this year. They seem to be pretty solid.

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