“Belle:” Making a Movie for and in the Metaverse

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“You can’t start over in reality, but you can start over in U,” a narrator promises at the start of Belle, a refreshing new take on the metaverse as a sanctuary for young people.

This is the Japanese animated feature from director Mamoru Hosoda about a lonely teenage girl who becomes a global singing star through her alter ego in the online world of ‘U’.

Belle does not gloss over the harmful aspects of digital life such as online abuse, viral gossip and doxing (publicly revealing personal information), writes Steve Rose in The Guardian, “But, rather than portraying the online world as a place of cruelty and corporate overreach, it suggests it could be one of sanctuary, even salvation, especially for young people.”

Vulture’s critic puts it succinctly: “Belle is an explicit attempt to wed the fairy tale with the high tech, retelling Beauty and the Beast by way of social media.”

In interview with The Verge, Hosoda explains his idea:

“In Beauty and the Beast, the beast obviously has this very vicious and violent-looking exterior, but what’s inside is quite different. In a similar way, with the invention of the internet, people have the version of ourselves that exists in reality and another projection that exists in the internet. So, there’s a similar duality happening, and I thought that would allow the narrative, and a lot of those themes, to come forward.”

The creator of Digimon (2000) and Summer Wars (2009) claims he had never heard the term ‘metaverse’ until after Belle’s release, he says. His inspiration was watching his five-year-old daughter growing up in a world where things like smartphones and social media have always existed.

He told The Guardian, “Grownups see the internet and we think, ‘This is reality, and that’s not reality,’ but for young people it’s more: ‘This is the real world and that’s another world.’ It’s just as real and just as valuable, and how you behave in that online world is also part of reality. This is the new world they find themselves in, and it’s all about how they create that world for themselves.”

Elaborating on this in interview with Polygon, Hosoda said he believes the internet has emerged as much more of as a reflection of our own reality now that every generation is using it.

“We have a lot of our own issues that we have in our present, real society that have been transferred into the internet, like the toxicity and fake news and a lot of these kind of negative aspects. 

“I feel, because of that, a lot of other films try to project the internet in a much more negative light. But I want to help younger generations come face to face with all these issues that we know exist in the internet and overcome them, to somehow still turn it into a much more positive space where they can do a lot of things.”

In thinking how to capture this visually he devised a world “that doesn’t necessarily have an up or a down, a left or a right,” he told The Verge. “It’s packed with these skyscraper-like structures. It feels a little more cramped. Not quite as open as it did in my previous films. It really feels like the center of this world, and it’s hard to tell where the horizon starts and where it ends. That was the visual translation of what I felt the internet has evolved into.”

To design Belle’s metaverse, Hosoda recruited British architect and illustrator Eric Wong after coming across some of Wong’s detailed fantasy cityscapes online.

“Belle’s U is a vast linear city made up of geometric skyscraper-like forms,” describes Rose. “Working in the evenings between his full-time job, Wong took inspiration from existing places such as New York City and Central Park, but also from movies such as Kubrick’s 2001.”

The director also collaborated with animator Jin Kim (Frozen, Tangled, Big Hero 6) and Cartoon Saloon’s Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart on the character design of Belle and background art of the film, respectively.

He told Polygon that they wanted to have an international background reflected in Belle’s designs.

“I think there’s not too many interactions between US-based animation studios and animation production culture and Japan or other overseas-based animation studios, so I wanted to help change that in some ways because entertainment is shifting to this much more global medium of ideas.”

Where Do You Stand on Web3? (In the Middle, Maybe.)

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Unbridled optimism about technology can be just as misleading as unbridled criticism. What then are we to make of Web3? Should we embrace or deride the suite of technologies it comprises? As ever, the sanest response is to sail between the two extremes.

The argument is familiar to the philosophical battles around the metaverse, a vision for the future of the internet. Those debates haven’t gone away but much of the focus has shifted to a set of tech trends said to underpin the nascent metaverse and unified under the banner Web3.

The debate has been galvanized by the resurfacing of a 1995 clip from an interview with Bill Gates on the Late Show with David Letterman. The Microsoft co-founder was expounding his vision for the internet with puppyish optimism and Letterman was playing the sceptic.

The recirculation of this clip signals that we’re once again in that peculiar FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) phase of a new technology push, notes Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic. “Some view Web3 with hope and promise. But others see it as a frothy hype cycle, full of VCs and tech folks bullying people into markets and ideas.”

Web3 backers argue that you can build anything online and put it on the blockchain, which means the information is hosted collectively instead of by one company or entity. When you use Facebook or host your content on any platform, you’re on their turf; they have your data and you’re subject to their rules. On Web3, the idea goes, you can help set the rules. And you can port your data anywhere, using a digital wallet.

Web3 skeptics counter that the cryptocurrencies that undergird this new version of the internet are at best a wasteful scam and at worst an ecological nightmare. The most vehement critics see Web3 as an elaborate Ponzi scheme orchestrated by the same greedy and immoral technology titans who built the social internet.Warzel sides with Elon Musk of all people in acknowledging that Web3 “seems more a marketing buzzword than reality right now,” but, “Given the almost unimaginable nature of the present, what will the future be?” he asks.

“Web3 does feel more like investors pumping a stock than it does an organic movement. Still, I worry about developing a mindset that goes beyond reflexive skepticism and into a kind of calcified naysaying,” says Warzel.

“Perhaps worst of all, I find so much of Web3 deeply inaccessible. When I took the time to set up a crypto wallet and participate in the new economy, the experience was devoid of thrill. I didn’t feel that sense of hope and potential that came when I first logged onto the internet, logged into Facebook, downloaded a song on Napster, or held a smartphone in my hand and checked my email away from a computer.”

This is similar to the experience of Vox’s Peter Kafka, who explains that he gave up trying to buy an NFT because of the complexity involved in buying crypto, setting up wallets and handing over money to essentially unknown organizations.

Nonetheless, Warzel insists that the Web3 ambitions must be taken seriously: “It has the money and the influence and sheer marketing power to make the dream a reality.”

Ethereum, the cryptocurrency that powers much of Web3, will be around for a good while, he thinks. Blockchain has established such a durable culture, that dismissing it out of hand ignores the reality on the ground, he adds. And, as the writer Robin Sloan argues, Web3 will likely influence the direction of the internet incompletely and unpredictably.

But, says Warzel, the FOMO-fueled marketing of this technology can still be deeply problematic: It strong-arms people into markets and ideas, attracting grifters, scammers, and the greedy while repelling those who want to build sustainable communities and products.”

 

“Severance:” Now, About Solving the Work/Life Balance…

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The Apple TV+ series Severance puts a new spin on the work - life balance. A mix of sci-fi and social satire, Severance is gaining plaudits for its vision of a corporate world that’s as sinister as it is sterile.

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As Film School Rejects puts it, the people in Severance can’t simply clock out of work because their work is their life. Or, rather, their work is a perfectly bisected portion of their lives.

The enigmatic series follows the lives of a pod of workers who are employed by Lumon Industries, a powerful company with a long and corporate cult-like history. Each of the series’ main characters willingly underwent a procedure called severance, which involves implanting a device in one’s brain that will wall off work memories while at home, and home memories while at work.

Ben Stiller, who directs 6 of the 9 episodes optioned the script by Dan Erickson through his production company Red Hour, telling Forbes,  “The idea of going to work where you have a chip put in your head and you forget everything about your life when you’re at work and when you leave work, you don’t remember what happened was just such an interesting and kind of tantalizing idea.”

At first, this seems like a quaint premise that could be used for an easily digestible slice of social commentary, but it soon becomes clear that the series has built out every corner of its own freaky world.

“This isn’t just a neat trick to turn people into focused worker bees; it essentially turns them into two people,” explains FSR. “Characters in the show call them ‘innies’ and ‘outies.’ The “outies” don’t remember the classified work they do all day, but the ‘innies’ have it much harder. They don’t remember if they have kids or partners. They don’t experience sleep, or know how to drive, or have any sense of whether or not their experiences at work are normal.”

The jumping off point is fascinating and sets up many interesting questions about the nature of our relationship to work and the work environment. “It was a question of, where should we go tonally with the show? Because we didn’t want it to go to a familiar place, necessarily,” Stiller told Variety.

In the same interview Patricia Arquette who plays one of the company managers says, “there was so much structure” in the fictional company, but also within the making of the show itself, in terms of “the composition of the shots, in the wardrobe,” which helped establish “the behind-the-scenes working of this corporation and all the years we’ve been in it and how it had informed how we communicate with people.”

IndieWire  observes the show’s “unsettling symmetry; balancing and unbalancing compositions in order to undercut the inherent comforts of routine and uniformity.”

This is a function of camera work and production design (by Jeremy Hindle). “The oners down an endless maze of white corridors. The way cubicle walls slide up and down to trap workers in tight frames. The contrast between the timeless stasis of antiseptic office life and the bristling cold of a messy existence above ground. It’s a striking, immersive design, if you’re on or off the clock.”

Mark (Adam Scott), Irving (John Turturro), and Dylan (Zach Cherry) sit in a small, four-sided cubicle space within a massive white room, focused on computer screens displaying a series of numbers.

The series is shot with “a sometimes alienating precision,” describes FSR, “moving quickly between the outie memories and the ‘Innie’ experiences to communicate the disorientation of severance. As Lumon’s interests grow more confounding and menacing, the building starts to feel like an inescapable funhouse full of ever-twisting hallways.”

Stiller seems to have approached the scripts as if wondering “What if Hitchcock had directed The Office?” ponders AVClub adding that Severance’s deadpan humor “is more like Being John Malkovich than Zoolander and Tropic Thunder.”

The reviewer later adds that some scenes feel like a David Lynch movie. “Yet, moments from Mark’s outside life play out like Noah Baumbach comedies with an undercurrent of The X-Files…  It’s an instalment of The Twilight Zone that continues past the shock ending.”

The character of Helly, played by Britt Lower, is described by the same critic as a modern version of Patrick McGoohan’s character from The Prisoner.  “She won’t be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. You’re led to think that Mark is Helly’s Number 2, but he’s just as much as prisoner as she is.”

Indeed, critics can’t seem to get a fix on the show’s genre. When the series zig-zags into mind-melting corporate thriller territory, for FSR it calls to mind “the better parts of less focused shows about similar subjects, like Homecoming and Mr. Robot.”

Wired suggests Stiller has distilled the sensibilities of writer-director Charlie Kaufman. “Like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, (which Kaufman wrote) it’s about a man trying to deal with the grief of lost love by messing with his memory via experimental surgery. Like Being John Malkovich, it uses a high-concept mind-control premise to explore knotty questions about identity. Like Adaptation, it’s fond of genre-hopping and piling twists and turns on top of twists and turns. And, as with Kaufman’s best work, it’s at least as funny as it is trippy.”

What gives the show its sting, according to John Powers at NPR, is the way that Mark and his comrades' story tap so engrossingly into the anxieties that, even in post-COVID working conditions, many people feel about their jobs:

“How companies try to own us, how employees feel like cogs in corporate machines that they fear may be actually ruining the world, how many people bury themselves in work to avoid dealing with the difficulties of their personal lives and how many of us already live a de facto version of Severance. We have two different selves, one for work, where we play a role, and one for home, where, if we don't feel depleted, we can be who we really are.”

Stiller reflects on what these past two years have done to working conditions in Hollywood.

“One of the things I’ve really noticed recently with the pandemic was looking at the unions and talking about the work situation for crews, which is something that has just been entrenched for a long time - with the hours we work and the turnarounds on those hours for crews, basically just to save money,” Stiller told Forbes. “And so, I think that was a really important thing that changed. Everybody was looking at their priorities and looking at really what was important in life and that’s just something that has been a thing in show business for a long time that was just accepted and I think that’s changing, which I think is a really good thing.”

 

TV Ad Sales Have Been Strong For a Decade, But We Need to Think About OTT

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While the shift towards streaming delivery is having an undeniable impact on linear broadcast ad revenue, Imagine Communications believes the decline is much less dramatic than headlines suggest.

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The broadcast technology systems vendor predicts that by 2030 linear broadcast will still command between 40-50% share of ad revenue. Some analysts are even more bullish, projecting that by the end of the decade linear advertising will still take more than half the ad dollars in certain economies.

It is not dismissing OTT revenues or the rise of connected TV but advises broadcasters to take steps to enabling what it calls ‘true cross-platform monetization’.

The reasons Imagine thinks linear TV will remain a major plank of media campaigns is the age-old one that strong linear brands gives audiences “reassurance” that they will receive quality programming.

“That same promise of quality content attracts top-tier advertisers; they know they can rely on linear television to deliver the most valuable audiences and the broadest reach to power their brands.”

OTT advertising, on the other hand, tends to be sold at arm’s length by demand-side platforms (DSP) that manage multiple inventories without ever really matching advertisers and content.

“This disconnect is a key reason why broadcast is still seen as the gold standard for television advertising,” Imagine says. “That said, the one advantage that OTT advertising has is how efficient the trading becomes due to end-to-end automation with minimal manual intervention required.”

Imagine argues that if cross-platform content distribution is the goal for most broadcasters and global media companies, then mass campaigns will not be able to achieve targets an efficient cross-platform monetization model.

Its solution is to bring all advertising inventory, linear and nonlinear, together in a single point of sale, “treating it as a single audience for unified campaign planning.”

Pay-TV broadcasters Sky in the UK and Nine in Australia are already moving toward a converged selling approach, it says, “that combines the quality and brand safety of linear with the speed and precision targeting of digital on a single platform.”

To transition from spot-based to audience-based monetization the essential focus must be on the notion “that the audience is the inventory, rather than the spots.”

To elaborate what that means, Imagine has outlined a five-step guide to making the transformation.

This starts from decoupling programs, spots and audiences, followed by the optimization of linear inventory to find audience.

“This is the logical next step. Use all the research and tracking tools — at least once a day and ultimately in real time — to refine placement, making it more fluid. Know exactly how close you are to your audience commitments in volume, demographics and frequency, rather than rely on pure ratings-based audience predictions.”

Step three in Imagine’s guidance is to begin selling linear and VoD inventory together and then move away from DSPs by “filling VoD/OTT inventory with campaigns you have sold.”

All this should mean broadcasters can finally start optimizing across inventories to guarantee reach, volume and frequency goals.

 “The audience is fragmenting. Maybe linear is skewing older, OTT skewing younger. For a single campaign, you can optimize across those different platforms to find your audience, maximize your operational efficiencies and achieve your revenue goals.”

Imagine even suggests that, all being well, a broadcaster could consolidate operations for other broadcasters and media companies ― offering advertising management as a service.

“The five-step program is as much cultural change as technical transformation ― and that is always challenging. But without it, you will be in no position to build a strong business in the new, dynamic, multiplatform media environment. This journey of transformation is critical for the survival of our entire industry.”

 

Streaming Aggregation is Coming to Save Us All

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Consumers may not be able to express it, but they want an aggregator. The industry knows this too. In a new survey, management consultant Accenture has determined that streamers who ignore the frustrations felt by consumer and instead focus blindly on subscriber acquisition do so at their own peril.

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Based on a survey of 6,000 consumers across the world last October and November, industry consultancy Accenture has released a new report pointing to three big issues that are eroding the streaming experience.

Issue one: Navigating through OTT services is like entering different rabbit holes, each with its own entry and exit — a turnoff for consumers.

This is borne out by the survey, which found that 60% of consumers globally consider the process of navigating among these different services “a little” to “very” frustrating, and nearly half (44%) spend more than six minutes trying to find something they want to watch.

A second issue is encountering inefficient bundles. According to Accenture, 33% of consumers globally say they will “somewhat” or “greatly” decrease spend on media and entertainment across subscriptions and one-time purchases in the next 12 months.

A third issue is that incomplete or inaccurate recommendations and, hence, often irrelevant content, is the norm for most consumers. That’s because algorithms remained scattered across providers

“Furthermore, the reliance on the algorithm to pitch consumers shows doesn’t allow consumers to tune the model, except through actual show selection,” the report says.

Not surprisingly, a majority of global consumers said they’d like to be able to take their profile from one service to another to better personalize content (56%); and they’d be happy to let a VOD service know more about them to make recommendations more relevant to them (51%).

The analysts’ cast-iron prescription — an inevitability, in fact — is that the streaming landscape needs to consolidate under aggregators. This trend has been on the cards for a few years but it seems that, as streaming services continue to multiply, the need is greater than ever.

Accenture: “For streaming to continue to grow and fulfill its potential, we believe a big change to the ecosystem is needed: the addition of a smart aggregator, sitting across multiple platforms, that dramatically increases viewers’ control over the content they watch.”

For their part, most media executives agree: According to Accenture’s Technology Vision 2021 research, 77% of media executives said their organizations need to dramatically re-engineer the experiences that bring technology and people together in a way that puts people first.

Such an aggregator service would among other things act as a single platform that enables viewers to select exactly what they want to watch, such as categories of specific shows, regardless of who’s providing it.

It would also personalize the experience by providing seamless navigation and curation across streaming services, created in collaboration with and for every individual.

Any of the current streaming ecosystem players — major SVOD services, access devices and connected TVs, major internet onramps and consumer apps, and even traditional cable operators — could become an aggregator.

“Early versions are being assembled, although it’s too early to call the winners. Some might come from the top-tier SVODs that “google up” other apps or make partner apps available inside their service. Others might emerge from access devices that already do basic aggregation of apps on, for instance, a connected TV or a stick that plugs into a TV.”

The obvious question to ask is whether the end game for consumers is just another version of the cable/satellite pay TV bundle. Accenture thinks the new model will be different, if aggregators deliver on the promises of choice, personalization, and convenience.

“Initial incarnations will be bundles of SVOD and AVOD streaming services. But look out for the categories of offerings to expand to including music services, digital books and podcast apps, video games, virtual fitness, food delivery, commerce, and even productivity tools.

What’s more expect future evolutions to be the onramps for any form of digital consumer experience — such as the metaverse.

“Aggregators — if trusted — can be enablers and caretakers of digital identity, entitlements, security, currency, and more. Indeed, the battle to be the home of a consumer’s streaming experience may, in fact, be just the first skirmish in the broader battle to be the home of a consumer’s every experience.”

The analyst is in no doubt aggregation is coming.

“Becoming a successful aggregator or surviving as an individual streaming service requires different sets of actions. But what’s clear for all players: A blind focus on driving subscriber counts without taking steps to position the business for the aggregated future, regardless of which route you choose, presents near-certain peril.”

 

Here Is The AI-Driven News

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Everyone is trying to do more with less and the newsroom is no different. Automation offers significant benefits, including the ability to quickly make changes and adapt technically to things like work from home and remote production. But to what extent is AI taking over the newsroom?

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The latest version of the BBC's automatic live subtitling software was recently shown to have some major defects - such as getting the spelling of proper names wrong, Head of News Neil Reid was previously embarrassed when, as Controller of Current Affairs, BBC News coverage of the Syrian crisis used a a photo of Sting’s wife Trudie Styler instead of Asma al-Assad.

These incidents in the BBC’s Broadcast Centre parody W1A (see series 3 ep3 and series 1 ep3) are funny because we know they cleave close to the bone. Some insider knowledge perhaps illustrating what can go wrong when automation is out of control.

“Automation is principally about cost-saving and speed,” says Trevor Francis, Grass Valley's business development manager who trained as an engineer at the BBC some four decades ago and spent 17 years at ITN, managing the news editing team and helping digitise its newsroom among other roles.

“When I was at ITN, the chief of news had a row of TV screens in their office displaying CNN, Sky News, BBC, AlJazeera and so on. And when a story broke of course they wanted to make sure ITN was first with it as often as possible. That’s just as true today for breaking news to social but the same process of quality control, verification of sources and reliability needs to be enacted.”

Automation back then meant using Quantel, Grass Valley, Ross or other vendor’s tools for automating programme output and controlling replay devices (then tapedecks, now video servers) and vision mixers.

A classic use case would be automating the new clips to play out in exact sequence with Big Ben’s ‘bongs’ at the start of the 10 O’Clock News. “You want to automate the right video clips in the right place with frame accurate split-second consistency so the show opened perfectly and you couldn’t do this by relying on lots of people triggering replay devices and operating DVEs and mixers.”

That automated output hasn’t gone away. If anything, the need to produce eye-catching TV presentations has got more important.

“Good automation will ensure a consistent look-and-feel for a show, enable a more elaborate production than might otherwise be possible with the resources available, and help to minimise errors,” says Neil Hutchins, CEO at aQ Broadcast. “And, in these times, it will provide seamless support for remote or distributed production teams.”

Automated production systems have been expanded as a result to improve security in more distributed environments through cloud, virtualization, or working from home. The latest version of Ross’ OverDrive for instance, was primarily based around securing all the platforms, UIs, and communication required to work in those environments.

“It’s all about sophistication and speed,” says Mike Paquin, Product Manager, Ross Video. “Automated production systems provide directors and producers with the ability to choreograph complex opening sequences and storytelling devices to present a flawless, engaging segment. Things that would have needed to be pre-taped or edited in the past can now be done live every day with as little as one person to execute. This has also freed up more time for editors and creative people to focus on additional content.”

Everyone is trying to do more with less. Automation offers significant benefits, including the ability to quickly make changes and adapt technically to things like work from home and remote production.

"It enables production teams to improve their creative output with new graphics and set designs that include elements like LED screens,” says Paquin. “Automation makes it easy to adapt to new OTT outputs or fast-developing news stories – and allows for quick and efficient changes in the heat of the moment.”

“Additionally, news broadcasters now want to get content onto social media as quickly as possible,” says Francis. “Perhaps a piece of news is government embargoed or the story needs to appear on Facebook the split second after the last frame comes off air.”

What has changed to enable this is that automation has expanded back down the chain to encompass postproduction and multi-platform publishing.

“Most major news broadcasters have a review process so that before a story goes live on Facebook a senior journalist would review the finished edit,” says Francis. “Once they give the ‘ok’, a single button press will automatically transcode the clip, bundle it with metadata and send to the CMS or directly to playout and to various online and social platforms.”

The mechanics of the automated process include creating a version of the story/file acceptable in technical terms to each platform.

“Automating content production to provide wider access to content, but at lower costs, will be the biggest benefit,” believes Michael Pfitzner, vp, Newsroom Solutions, CGI. “Broadcasters are now dividing their various content outputs between different publishing channels. The earlier approach, which was to produce once and then publish everywhere, did not work out as expected. Audience centricity is key as we head into 2022, as channels have distinct needs.”

Publicly funded broadcasters in particular tend to have operations built with teams of people and often different sets of infrastructure to feed social media and web platforms and other outlets. It’s a workflow architecture that is not sustainable.

“Ideally, news broadcasters want the producers and editor in their newsroom to create a piece of content for repurposing on any platform including radio at the touch of a button,” Francis insists.

“News automation is a key tool to enabling leaner production of consistently high-quality content,” says Ulrich Voigt – VP Product Management, Vizrt. “Producers, Directors, and other production staff don’t need in-depth device knowledge, so they are able to perform complex operations flawlessly, quickly, and consistently and are able to focus on the creation of exceptional stories."

He adds, “News automation helps to eliminate production mistakes, ensures a high-quality show, and lowers operational costs for production teams to provide audiences with accurate, timely and engaging shows.”

This is increasingly possible thanks to AI-driven tools like speech to text engines, subtitling, facial detection and others. This is making searching and locating media content in newsrooms much easier and, given AI’s increasing role in generating metadata regarding content, this is a virtuous circle.

“In production, AI supports scanning and tracking of material, identifying locations and faces in videos, transcribes audio and much more, to ease the daily journalistic routine,” says Pfitzner. “AI is also helping to diversify content automatically, e.g., specific regional topics that can be created based on simple inputs like sports and weather.”

The use of AI is extending to detection of deepfakes. “Given the increasing polarisation in global politics, the use of deepfakes to stir up controversy is increasing. As these are created by AI, it stands to reason that the tools to detect them should also be AI-driven.”

Even without AI, automated tools to help check the veracity of material is vital. “Credibility remains a core value for broadcasters,” Pfitzner says. “News organisations face an increasing struggle to maintain credibility and public trust amidst an avalanche of misinformation. This is especially true when it comes to publicly funded broadcasters, who are under increasing political pressures.”

Other AI tools can quick-assemble a package of clips and audio from internal and external sources to cut the time it takes a journalist to research elements of a story complete with authentication. AI-editing tools can also assemble a complete video package or write an entire story, though even here fact checking and verification before publishing would be in everyone’s interest.

“AI will have a role in helping directors and producers improve the speed of pre-production and quality assurance during a show,” says Paquin. “This can be done with motion tracking for robotics, video analysis that provides the director a warning to avoid jump cuts, and suggested camera shots or effects.”

Since AI tools deliver the best outcomes when trained on vast relevant data sets, most AI tools are likely to be found hooked into major cloud providers Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure or Amazon AWS in some way. It’s not the only reason news production is moving to the cloud, but it’s one of the cloud’s advantages to the operation alongside gaining benefits in OPEX models and the agility to pop-up special event news channels.

Here Is The AI-driven News

The evolution of AI-driven news automation is likely to be incremental rather than a quantum leap. “Even more flexibility will be needed to support a greater range of environments and workflows,” thinks Hutchins. “The automation should properly enable different scales of production within the same facility, from true, single-person operation up to a conventional news programme supported by a full technical team, whilst ensuring that each individual can work as efficiently as possible.

“And there should be allowance for multi-platform output, from traditional linear shows to on-demand piecemeal packages, to minimise the effort involved in repurposing content from one distribution mechanism to another.”

Voigt points to multi-platform adaptation to various screen sizes and aspect ratios as the next big innovation in news automation.

“For audiences, seeing content optimized to the screen they are viewing is becoming a need, not a want. Providing all audiences with news and content that is optimized for the device they are on creates more stories, better told for higher viewer engagement.”

Whether AI will drive people – editors, journalists, producers – out of the newsroom altogether seems highly unlikely.

“At least not in any recognisable form,” says Hutchins. “News programmes are living, breathing things – they reflect all aspects of their human creators, from the presenters, producers, editors, directors, production assistants, technicians and the rest of the creative team, to the owners and managers of the channel that they represent. The productions have a heart and a soul, which news automation helps to bring to life for the viewers. Even the smallest news bulletins require at least one person to create the linear production. At that scale, surely AI would not be viable or effective in any form, given that news automation already supports presenter-driven production?”

In any case, if AI was somehow generating news programmes without human intervention, then, by definition, news automation would not be required: the entire function of the automation is to act as an effective interface between people and technology.

“In that case, the AI-generated news would lack any of the natural characteristics of a traditional production,” says Hutchins. “Whilst we live in an era of high demand for instant, unique and compelling streamed content, at least conventional news programmes can appeal by being different.”

While AI is rapidly growing for many sectors of production, the idea of completely replacing human run news productions isn’t something Viz see coming to fruition either.

“We don’t predict a world where there isn’t at least one person overseeing a production to ensure a near-perfect broadcast,” says Voigt.

Eventually, AI might take over the world… but creative purists might have a say in that fight.

AI + Human = Superhumachine: The Debate at the Center of Deep Learning

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The science of artificial intelligence is new but has already taken a few twists and turns. There’s a debate raging in some quarters that computers alone will never have the smarts to emulate human thought — unless we work in collaboration with the machine.

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The idea requires a brief history of AI, which Clive Thompson charts in the MIT Technology Review. Go back to 1997, when IBM computer Deep Blue made headlines by beating chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov. Game over — or so everyone thought. In fact, not long afterwards, Deep Blue was left out in the cold.

“Deep Blue’s victory was the moment that showed just how limited hand-coded systems could be. IBM had spent years and millions of dollars developing a computer to play chess. But it couldn’t do anything else,” says Thompson.

The reason lay the in AI baked into Deep Blue. It could play chess, brilliantly, because it’s based on logic: the rules are clear, there’s no hidden information, and a computer doesn’t even need to keep track of what happened in previous moves. It just assesses the position of the pieces right now.

Chess turned out to be fairly easy for computers to master. What was far harder for computers to learn was the casual, unconscious mental work that humans do — ”like conducting a lively conversation, piloting a car through traffic, or reading the emotional state of a friend.”

This requires, in Thompson’s phraseology “fuzzy, grayscale judgment,” which we do without thinking.

Enter the era of neural nets.

Instead of hard-wiring the rules for each decision, a neural net trained and reinforced on data would strengthen internal connections in rough emulation of how the human brain learns.

By the 2000s, the computer industry was evolving to make neural nets viable and, by 2010, AI scientists could create networks with many layers of neurons (which is what the “deep” in “deep learning” means).

A decade into our deep-learning revolution and neural nets and their pattern-recognizing abilities have colonized every nook of daily life.

Writes Thompson, “They help Gmail autocomplete your sentences, help banks detect fraud, let photo apps automatically recognize faces, and — in the case of OpenAI’s GPT-3 and DeepMind’s Gopher — write long, human-sounding essays and summarize texts.”

“Deep learning’s great utility has come from being able to capture small bits of subtle, unheralded human intelligence,” he says.

Yet Deep Learning’s position as the dominant AI paradigm is coming under attack. That’s because such systems are often trained on biased data.

For instance, computer scientists Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru discovered that three commercially available visual AI systems were terrible at analyzing the faces of darker-skinned women.

On top of that, neural nets are also “massive black boxes,” according to Daniela Rus, who runs MIT’s Computer Science and AI Lab. Once a neural net is trained, its mechanics are not easily understood even by its creator, she says. It is not clear how it comes to its conclusions — or how it will fail.

This manifests itself in real world problems. For example, visual AI (computer vision) can make terrible mistakes when it encounters an “edge” case.

“Self-driving cars have slammed into fire trucks parked on highways, because in all the millions of hours of video they’d been trained on, they’d never encountered that situation,” according to Thompson.

Some computer scientists believe neural nets have a design fault and that the AI also needs to be trained in common sense.

In other words, a self-driving car cannot rely only on pattern matching. It also has to have common sense — to know what a fire truck is, and why seeing one parked on a highway would signify danger.

The problem is that no one quite knows how to build neural nets that can reason or use common sense.

Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist and co-author of Rebooting AI, tells Thompson that the future of AI will require a “hybrid” approach — neural nets to learn patterns, but guided by some old-fashioned, hand-coded logic. This would, in a sense, merge the benefits of Deep Blue with the benefits of deep learning.

Then again, hard-core aficionados of deep learning disagree. Scientists like Geoff Hinton, an emeritus computer science professor at the University of Toronto, believes neural networks should be perfectly capable of reasoning and will eventually develop to accurately mimic how the human brain works.

Still others argue for a Frankensteinian approach — the two stitched together.

One of them is Kasparov, who after losing to Deep Blue, invented “advanced chess,” where humans compete against each other in partnership with AIs.

Amateur chess players working with AIs (on a laptop) have beaten superior human chess pros. This, Kasparov argues in an email to Thompson, is precisely how we ought to approach AI developments.

“The future lies in finding ways to combine human and machine intelligences to reach new heights, and to do things neither could do alone,” Kasparov says. “We will increasingly become managers of algorithms and use them to boost our creative output — our adventuresome souls.”