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Pragmatism has replaced fear as the sentiment most likely to be directed at generative AI by creative media companies and tech developers.
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“If you’re not
using AI it’s sort of like saying you’re not going to have a mobile strategy,”
says Jeremy Toeman, Founder, AugX Labs. “AI was commoditized in less and under
a year and now it’s just as much a building block for doing things than
anything else.”
He was speaking on
the video panel “Beyond ChatGPT: How AI Is Transforming Streaming Workflows and
Businesses,” moderated by Ben Ratner, director of news technology at Boston 25
News.
Like Toeman, Steve
Vonder Haar, senior analyst for Intelligent Video & Enterprise at
IntelliVid Research, is taking a long-term view:
“In a decade we
will not be using the term artificial intelligence at all because it’s not
really descriptive of the value that these capabilities are delivering to the
marketplace, just as was the case in the early 1990s when ‘information
superhighway’ was in fashion. As we move forward, the term AI is going to fade
away.”
All these experts
agree that AI helps by speeding up processes, but that if users really want to
make creative content with value then AI only gets you part of the way. It may
automate 80% of the previously manual process, but human skill, knowledge and
taste making is crucial for finesse and polish.
As Mobeon CEO Mark
Alamares puts it, AI enables teams and individuals to amplify their
capabilities to make a much more efficient production process overall. “AI will
enhance what we’re doing both on a creative and technical level, in the broad
sense,” he says.
Vonder Haar likens
generative AI to “getting people past that blank sheet of paper.”
Toeman says his
colleagues use ChatGPT to evolve their own strategies and question their own
thinking, resulting in higher-caliber of outcomes than they would otherwise
achieve.
The downsides of
reliance on generative AI include stifling independent creative thinking and
learning.
“I still remember
when I used to know phone numbers. And then, thanks to Google, we don’t know
facts. And now, thanks to GPT, we might not know anything,” says Toeman.
“That’s obviously hyper cynical, but there’s somewhat of a concern.”
Alamares reports a
lot of hesitancy in the creative industries, because of ethical concerns, but
most of the panelists are pessimistic that anything can be done to concretely
vet every copyright infringement or deepfake.
“For me, it’s a garbage
in-garbage out,” says Vonder Haar. “If you’re going to take information from
the web, then God bless you, because you’re not going to have a trusted source
of information from which to draw.
“The real future
for AI in the business sense is going to be in the development of limited
datasets that are used to inform decision making within a specific corporate
network or a specific realm of individuals.”
There is some
discussion about whether regulatory bodies like MPEG could devise a scheme to
watermark video directly into video codecs as a way of tracking and verifying
content. Vonder Haar suggests that Vizrt’s NDI video-over-IP protocol could be
used to the same end.
“NDI is relatively
widely distributed among devices [and they] would also have the opportunity to
create some sort of standard that would help in this type of watermarking of
real content.”
Perhaps blockchain
technology holds the most promise for differentiating real from fake video.
“If you’ve got
blockchain-certified video that was recorded from a blockchain-certified camera
you can know that that’s the original,” says Toeman. “I think that’s going to
be hopefully our savior through this all, I don’t know.”
On the storytelling
side, AI will be able to jumpstart creative thinking and fast forward the
scripting process but there’s a belief that traditional storytelling talent
will rise to the top.
“The point is
ChatGPT drives toward the norm, toward the middle, toward the average,” says
Toeman. “So you use it to do average things. If you want to be a great
storyteller, you will write a better prompt to get more out of it using it, but
all the tools are kind of the same from this perspective.”
The consequence, he
says, is that reliance on generative AI tools alone will only churn out very
average mediocre content. The flip side is this trend will enable master
storytellers to use the tool to shine.
“A great example
might be Jon Favreau, who made the first two seasons of The Mandalorian using
a lot of new tech to make that storytelling cheaper, faster, easier. But it’s
not the tech that made the story.
“So, if you can
write a very clever prompt for your unique story angle, and then add your own
special sauce on top of that, that’s where [AI is going].”
Corey Behnke,
co-founder and producer at LiveX, says he believes there will be more demand
for producer oversight and moderation of AI than ever before when it comes to
live streaming.
AI could help with
80% of the mundane tasks in video production but that still leaves 20% for
actual humans to get the product right.
“The place where
you are going to deliver your value is that last 20% of broadcast quality
video; that’s [what] separates a basic piece of video from a high
polished piece of content,” agrees Vonder Haar.
“Because so much
more content will be developed there will be more opportunities for high-end
producers. The folk who were only going to be in trouble will be those who
[operate] at the very basic levels of video production rather than the high end
of the market space.”
Asked where he
thinks AI will be a year from now, Toeman anticipates we will start seeing the
first AI-generated content but no one will like it: “That’s my hunch. I think
the content industry stays away from AI for [maybe] five years and by only then
we’ll start seeing it used sort of the way CGI showed up in movies.”
In a decade we
could have AI-driven real-time bespoke storytelling: “Make me a video in the
style of Harry Potter about a sci-fi wizard on an asteroid, and I
want it to be 90 minutes long, and make it seem like it’s written by Quentin
Tarantino. I think that’s 10 years from now, tops.”
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