Concerns about artificial intelligence’s (AI) potential to displace jobs and negatively impact creative endeavors are particularly prevalent in the media and entertainment industries.
In May, Avasant’s Empowering Beyond Summit included a panel titled, “Reality Check: How can media survive the coming disruption?” Avasant Managing Partner Robert Joslin led Fay Wells, a technology and media entertainment executive; Bharat Krish, CPO of Newsweek; Ghalib Kassam, CIO of the LA Times; and Chad Hamilton, VP of Fremantle, in conversation about AI and the media. They spoke about the current capabilities of AI in content creation, the ethical concerns it raises, and the implications for human creativity.
AI’s Role and Ethical Concerns
The salience of the recent writers and actors strike overinflated AI’s current capabilities but also brought to light very real conversations about its potential impact, according to Hamilton. He notes that the strikes were more of a response to the perception of the technology than to what it could actually do. Early proponents who believed it would fundamentally change everything experienced “a lot of disenchantment once they got ahold of it, it’s a lot less impactful than what we expected initially.” Wells attributes this to still being in the very early stages of the technology where “people don’t how exactly what to do with it.”
So, what can AI do exactly? Its potential lies in being recognized as a tool and in how people choose to leverage that tool to enhance the content creation process. For tasks such as fact-checking, central to news media operations, AI can speed up the process and more quickly publish articles. This allows writers to “tackle news we otherwise wouldn’t have tackled,” and develop more personalized angles, according to Krish. With the increased democratization of AI tools, “knowledge is now accessible to anybody, and all they have to do is interact with the bot.” Content creation also becomes more accessible as people have access to necessary tools they lacked before, like artists now being able to compose things from their home, according to Hamilton.
Ethical and humanistic concerns with AI technology do abound. For instance, its ability to speed up content creation brings a risk of misinformation, copyright infringement, and information overload. A level of trust and transparency needs to be established alongside a way of utilizing the technology. With the widespread availability and democratization of AI bots and algorithms, Krish believes that “anyone opening a laptop can create content.” A large quantity of content does not equate to a high quality of content which makes it even more important, as well as challenging to sift through the noise and bring up trustworthy information.
Hamilton sees a potential solution: unless otherwise verified, “assume everything is AI generated” to better protect oneself against increasingly convincing disinformation and deepfakes. Copyright concerns will take center stage as delineations between what is acceptable to train models on and what level of content must be human generated to be copyrighted, arise, according to Hamilton. In explaining the potential challenges AI poses to copyright law, a Wall Street Journal report posed the question, “If a user prompts an AI tool to build a new character influenced by say, SpongeBob, should the original creators have to grant permission? Who owns it? Can the new work itself be copyrighted?”
Besides copyright concerns, too much of a focus on the tool’s ability to increase profits and efficiency, risks devaluing human contributions. Wells believes that if this happens, it will follow a common technology pattern where a rise of innovative technology deemphasizes human contributions but is quickly followed by a widespread realization of the importance of humans and what they can bring to the table that technology just cannot quite capture. Wells notes, “I am very optimistic, we’re going to land on the human side again” but with the addition of this new technology which will “force people to be more creative and unlock new skills and abilities.”
Impact on human creativity and industry perspectives
Though there are fears about AI’s potential to displace human creativity, at its current level, this is an overstated claim. Wells believes that people can recognize when someone puts heart and soul into a product, and it resonates more deeply with us since we intrinsically “value things made by other humans.” People should use AI as a tool to enhance, not replace creativity. In comparing AI’s creative abilities to humans, Hamilton notes that AI produces an amalgamation of data while humans can take it a step further and mold that data into a novel idea. He states, “it’ll come up with something, but it’s almost a piece of clay that’s not really well formed” whereas “a highly skilled creative person can mold it into something that will really resonate.”
Similarly, success in the news media requires originality. According to Kassam, winning awards like the Pulitzer Prize is a function of having original content, not of producing AI-generated content. This is not to say that AI has no role in content creation, just that human creativity is still paramount.
Filmmaking is a unique industry through which to observe the AI debate. On one hand, the industry has a highly technical, visual effects side that has leveraged the technology. Evan Halleck, visual effects artist for the Best Picture Oscar winning “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” used AI tools offered by an app, Runway, to remove backgrounds on different images and make the editing process a bit easier. He explains the tool’s capabilities: “It was cutting things out better than my human eye was.” He turned to the technology to overcome the challenges of having tight deadlines and a small visual effects team. After his positive experience, he notes that he wishes he had used it earlier “instead of spending weeks working on it and photoshopping aliens.”
Runway technology CEO Cris Valenzuela has seen an increase in adoption of his tool because “it automates the tedious and time-consuming aspects of making videos and films…it frees up your time and costs to focus on the creative iterations and ideas.” On the other hand, in part because of fears of displacement and in part because the technology is not yet up to par, the filmmaking industry’s writing and acting side does not see the technology in a positive light.
According to Yves Bergquist, director of AI & Neuroscience in Media Project at USC, “It’s nowhere near capable of the symbolic abstraction necessary for script development, and it can’t output a script with narrative structure and character arcs.” Similarly, Jonathan Taplin, director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at USC, notes that “entertainment relies on new ideas, and this technology can’t produce them.”
Conclusion
As debates about AI in the media industry continue, it is clear that AI holds significant long-term potential. Industry leaders emphasize the importance of learning to use AI effectively, as the current economic landscape no longer rewards “fast followers;” the biggest risk lies in failing to leverage the technology to enhance productivity. The panelists agree that AI should be seen as a tool to augment creativity, not replace it. Embracing AI, media professionals can develop new skills and abilities, ultimately leading to more innovative and engaging content. The future of AI in media is promising, but it requires a balanced approach that considers both the technological advancements and the ethical implications.
By Adriana Guzman, Associate Consultant