Tubi's AI Wants to Give You Better Movie Recommendations

Screenshot: Tubi

Streaming platform Tubi has announced a new way to search for movie recommendations today: Rabbit AI. The new “chat feature” uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 to let users search for movies and TV show recommendations in a more conversational manner, allowing for hyper-specific recommendations from text like, “I want to see funny movies about sharks.”

You can then add the resulting recommendations to your watch-list if you’d like, and they will be shared across your devices.

How to use Rabbit AI to search for movies on Tubi

Right now, Tubi’s GPT-powered streaming recommendation tool is being beta-tested for users of the iOS version of Tubi’s app, with plans to roll it out fully in the coming weeks.

To check out Rabbit AI in its beta form, visit the App Store and download Tubi, then click the “explore” button and proceed to pretend you’re talking to the clerk at a cool video store. Make sure you make an account if you want to share the recommendations across your devices.

If you subscribe to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus, you can mess around with the RabbitAI plugin starting today too.

Can an AI really make a good movie recommendation?

I am an unashamed fan of Tubi because I like discovering surprises within its quirky, out-of-left-field selection of movies and shows, but its large catalog is made up mostly of things you’d never watch in a million years, which can present a challenge. But finding a needle in a virtual haystack of roughly 60,000 movies and TV shows is the kind of problem for which AI was created. Traditional recommendation algorithms work (roughly) by finding things that are similar to what you already like. They’re great at this, but if you’re looking for something entirely different from what you already enjoy, a more nuanced search could yield interesting results.

Being able to search for something like “Westerns that were not made in the United States or Italy” could map out a new rabbit hole to fall into, as would being able to type something like, “show me the opposite of the kinds of movies I usually like” into an AI-powered search bar. As the service has just launched, I haven’t had a chance to dig into the technology, but I’m eager to see whether it lives up to the possibilities I’m imagining.