The concerns around AI touching every corner of humanity aren’t without merit. Job losses, deepfakes, and entire library of Hollywood content showing AI running amok are enough to give anyone pause.
But according to media and entertainment experts on the panel “Seize the AI Moment” at the Nov. 12 SoCal Women’s Leadership Summit, the benefits of AI will outweigh the drawbacks in the long term.
“Creativity and innovation are human-centered and always will be,” said Monica Williams, founder and strategic advisor for consulting firm Three Twenty Dream, and former SVP of products and operations with NBCUniversal. “Think about AI as the creative partner [to] really help us to iterate faster so we can feel deeper … truly create and innovate.” She pointed to Netflix increasingly using AI in pre-production and VFX and Coca-Cola releasing AI-generated holiday ads with animals as examples of AI content done right. “It’s cool to see a lot of the studios starting to embrace this, and really seeing how can AI be an amplifier to creativity,” she said.
Soyoung Lee, co-founder and head of go-to-market for multimodal, video-native AI firm Twelve Labs, sees AI being used in media and entertainment to tap millions of hours of footage and heaps of data to create new experiences with content that already exists.
“It’s going across archive or libraries of a team’s history, and every fan has their favorite player, the stories that resonate with them the most,” she said. “How do you go across … petabytes of an archive of a team’s history, and pull together some really exciting, very touching moments? Could be short, could be longer in a documentary format, but … create that very quickly, and then be able to share that back to fans who demand this type of [content].”
She even suggested the use of unused footage in unscripted content to create new story arcs, or other new formats of storytelling derived from the libraries that already exists. And AI can be a assistive tool or creative co-pilot for creatives, using performance data or viewership data, to personalize the stories that are created, she added.
But creating content with AI has its downfalls. Alena Morris, VP with New York-based ad agency Kargo, has seen a couple advertisers launch campaigns with creatives using GenAI, and the human reaction has been less than ideal. “They can tell that there’s no emotion or authenticity in it,” she said. “I think AI is having tremendous impact on the ads that we create, not from the GenAI lens that I just mentioned, but more from the variation lens.” AI offers the ability to optimize ads for audiences behind the scenes, making sure tis the right message for the right people, she said. “AI unlocks a new ability for us to super-personalize things, and that drives to better monetization, better product sales for brands, and better top-line revenue for our content creators,” she said.
Ilana Vachini, who handles product partnerships for Google and is a former board member with the Entertainment ID Registry (EIDR), pointed out that for media and entertainment, AI technology is available for use across the entire process, from creation and strategy to ideation and storyboarding. But she said she believes AI’s true power lies in creating a robust and engaging experience for viewers and getting back-end information correct, not so much its ability to create visual and audio content itself.
“This all truly requires the best and the most comprehensive and the most accurate and up-to-date metadata possible,” she added. “Some of the efficiencies we’re truly seeing on our side are things like the ability to QA this metadata. We get so much wrong metadata, so many gaps and holes in what we take and ingest. And so, the ability for our technology to very rapidly, see that, flag that, and then help sort of fill in those gaps or understand what we’re getting from our partners in our ecosystem to make that whole. There’s just additional efficiencies.”