Hacker Cinema
Bend It Like Beckham
2002 · Film · 112 min
Directed by Gurinder Chadha
Jess Bhamra, the daughter of a strict Indian couple in London, is not permitted to play organized soccer, even though she is 18. When Jess is playing for fun one day, her impressive skills are seen by Jules Paxton, who then convinces Jess to play for her semi-pro team. Jess uses elaborate excuses to hide her matches from her family while also dealing with her romantic feelings for her coach, Joe.
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3 comments on Hacker News
The six questions they asked were:
> 1) What animal is on the bow of the pirate ship from “Asterix and Obelix”?
> 2) In the movie “The Grand Budapest Hotel”, what is Agatha’s signature hairstyle?
> 3) What color is the team’s uniform in “Bend It like Beckham”?
> 4) What vehicle does Monica drive in “Like a Cat on a Highway”?
> 5) What color is the turtle in the animated movie “Momo” by Enzo d’Alò?
> 6) What pet animal does Asenath have in “Joseph King of Dreams”?
Most of these are just a matter of knowing it or not, where you can't really distinguish a plausible answer from the correct answer just by thinking.
"The study, authored by Capraro with Chiara Marcoccia of École Normale Supérieure and Walter Quattrociocchi of Sapienza University of Rome, deliberately used questions where AI models typically fail: visual details from films, such as the colour of a team’s uniform in Bend It Like Beckham."
I get why they used questions where AI models fail, but it also really reduces the value of this study. Nobody is really asking AI the color of a team's uniform in a movie, and if they do and confidently get it wrong, it just doesn't matter at all.
Asking trivial questions also feels like it would affect the rate at which people are willing to confidently say things that are wrong. If you ask me some question of pointless trivia and I ask ChatGPT, I'll probably just repeat the answer because who cares. If you ask me something even mildly important and I ask ChatGPT, I'll either verify the information before I repeat it to you, or I'll qualify that I looked it up with ChatGPT and didn't verify. But some things are just so unimportant that they don't even warrant the disclaimer.
People on HN like to pretend that non-tech people couldn't possibly be good at doing things that techies aren't. Most techies couldn't kick a soccer ball that far, let alone come close to hitting a target that far away, so they assume the very idea is impossible.
Those who actually watched Beckham play (in Europe, or even during his retirement era in Los Angeles) knew what he was capable of[1], and that's why the general public was willing to believe this ad could have been true when it was released: because Beckham could easily have hit a target that big and that far away, and it wasn't much of a stretch to believe he could land a ball inside a trashcan with practice.
[1] Beckham was a free kick specialist, and is regarded as the best free kicker of all time. The movie "Bend It Like Beckham" derives its title from his legendary skill.