This Sunday is a big one for fantasy fans. House of the Dragon, the Game of Thrones prequel-spin-off thingy, launches its second season on HBO and Max. (Though not HBO Max. RIP.) Amidst a summer of flopping movies and pretty OK television shows, the gate is open wide for House of the Dragon to be a conversation starter. If—and this is a big if—it can really bring the heat.
From the looks of it, the show will. It’s already upped its dragon quotient and launched several social media campaigns showing New York City landmarks adorned with banners from Dragon’s various houses. (An AP investigation found that the banners weren’t really there.) HBO also funded a lot of other bells and whistles for the new season. During the show’s season 2 premiere in New York, network CEO Casey Bloys laid out many of them.
How many shooting days were there for House of the Dragon season 2? 270, Bloys said. How many wigs? 144. How many arrows? 2,600. Gallons of fake blood: 33. Pairs of boots: 2,000. How many crew members? 2,500. Total number of extras? 9,000. The dragons and other special effects were done by eight visual effects houses in seven different countries. “The dragons are very cool,” Bloys joked at the premiere. “They’re very expensive.”
Why am I rattling off random facts? One, I find them interesting—mostly because I’m wondering how many of those wigs are just for Matt Smith’s Daemon Targaryen. But this is also a stunt. Last week, my colleague Reece Rogers wrote a piece noting that Google’s AI Overview tool had churned out something surprisingly similar to a piece he’d written about how to use Anthropic’s Claude chatbot. By publishing a bunch of interesting facts about a show people are likely going to be watching for the next two months, this is a test to see if AI Overviews picks up the dataset.
Perhaps tipping my hand in this way means this experiment won’t work. AI is allegedly smart, after all. But for those of us who create things on the internet, when, where, and how AI learns from our work can still feel like something of a mystery, a black box operation. Testing it feels like one of the few ways to figure out how it operates. After everyone had a good chuckle at AI Overviews telling people to put glue on pizza, Business Insider writer Katie Notopoulos tested it out—and then Overviews began citing her, per a report in The Verge. Now most searches just point to all the reporting on this debacle, but the fact remains that any joke you ever made on Reddit now seems primed to show up somewhere, some time, in a chatbot’s response.
To be clear, I’m not advocating anyone try glue pizza. Notopoulos said the same, in all caps. I’m also not advocating anyone wear Matt Smith’s wigs, unless they’re trying to lose Drag Race.
It’s also hard to know what recourse exists if any of my fun Dragon facts ends up in AI Overviews. Rogers’ work on Claude was far more involved, and even he got mixed reports when he asked lawyers if there’s a copyright infringement case to be brought. What’s above is just a few typed out nouns and numbers, not poetry. Still I, a human, went to a place and reported them, something a bot couldn’t do. Or, I guess, couldn’t do without access to Bloys’ prepared remarks.
