AI Identifies Social Bias Trends in Bollywood, Hollywood Movies

New method can analyze decades of films in a few days. Babies whose births were depicted in Bollywood films from the 1950s and 60s were more often than not boys; in today's films, boy and girl newborns are about evenly split. In the 50s and 60s, dowries were socially acceptable; today, not so much. And Bollywood's conception of beauty has remained consistent through the years: beautiful women have fair skin. Fans and critics of Bollywood - the popular name for a $2.1 billion film industry centered in Mumbai, India - might have some inkling of all this, particularly as movies often reflect changes in the culture. But these insights came via an automated computer analysis designed by Carnegie Mellon University computer scientists. The researchers, led by Kunal Khadilkar and Ashiqur R. KhudaBukhsh of CMU's Language Technologies Institute (LTI), gathered 100 Bollywood movies from each of the past seven decades along with 100 of the top-grossing Hollywood moves from the same periods.