Hollywood vs. AI – Who will win the battle?

19

September

2024

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Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or any other generative AI bot to create a story; the output will always amaze you. You will get a compelling storyline with the most detailed descriptions of scenes and characters. When you’re doing this for fun, this might sound like a dream. But for professionals in the creative industries, this seems more like a nightmare.

 Strike upon strike

The tension between generative AI and creative professionals hit the world when actors and writers announced major strikes in Hollywood. One of the prominent reasons was that generative AI might replace their careers in the upcoming (near) future. According to the BBC[1], creative professionals advocated for better pay, working conditions, and job security in the age of generative AI. The strikes performed by over 160.000 creative professionals caused delays for many movie projects and caused major monetary damage. Framestore, the company behind the special effects in Marvel movies, saw a decrease of 46.7 million[2] US dollars in its revenue.

Discussion

In my opinion, the strength of generative AI and the strength of creative professionals need to be combined into a collaborative relationship. At this point, AI will inevitably replace some job roles, whether it’s in the creative industry or not. Thus, it is important to work together and to combine the strengths of both sides. For actors, I believe that the reassurance against the use of AI is justified. Their faces or voices should not be used without their consent for movies created with AI.  A more controversial opinion from my side might be that writers need to adapt to the current circumstances. It is not completely new that jobs are replaced by new technologies. Think of factory workers in car assembly lines being replaced by robots. As emphasized earlier, a collaborative relationship is needed to both foster the talents of writers and the strength of generative AI. New job types and roles could come into existence which would optimise the output of creative companies when humans and computers collaborate.

What do you think? What is your opinion on the use of generative AI in the creative industries? Should it be halted or should it be enabled?

[1] SAG strike live updates: Actors join writers as Hollywood shuts down – BBC News

[2] Marvel VFX Giant Reveals Damage Done By Hollywood Strikes (forbes.com)

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The blurring thin line between artificial and human creativity

9

September

2018

No ratings yet. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has already pervaded many industries. In recent years, a few AI use cases also caught the attention of the creative industry: Microsoft’s Chinese chatbot XiaoIce became capable of generating decent image-inspired poems, Sony started dishing out pop songs using its AI Lab’s FlowComposer, and 20th Century Fox asked IBM Watson to create a trailer for the horror movie “Morgan”. Now one has to wonder: Is the creative human mind still needed?

To answer this question, we need to look behind the scenes. For AIs to become “creative”, they have to be trained on relevant datasets first to understand what to read out of future inputs. In our examples, thousands of existing image-poem pairs were used for XiaoIce to learn how to find poetic clues in images; hundreds of songs of the same genre were fed into FlowComposer to make it adapt to different music styles; and Watson was forced to “watch” tons of horror movies to understand which scenes from “Morgan” may be useful for the trailer. Except for the poems, both the songs and the trailer actually also required extensive manual arrangement before release.

The results in all three categories are definitely remarkable for their technological achievement, but not as satisfying when compared to pure human creations. The poems, despite having passed the Turing test, tend to be more descriptive and bland rather than emotional or meaningful. The songs do show some typical characteristics of the respective genres, but are not very catchy due to the lack of recognizable motives. As for the trailer, it summarized the movie in an almost chaotic way, because the AI was trained to focus on salient emotions instead of the plot.

As we can see, AIs nowadays still miss a human touch when it comes to creating original content. And it is questionable if they will ever obtain real creativity since their outputs heavily depend on the datasets they were trained on. Yet, their ability to extract patterns from vast amounts of materials may help human creators see and break artistic boundaries to set new standards – something the creative industry urgently needs, and always should strive for.

 

Sources:

https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2018/08/10/microsofts-ai-can-convert-images-into-chinese-poetry/

Click to access 1804.08473.pdf

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-compendium-of-ai-composed-pop-songs/

https://www.ibm.com/watson/advantage-reports/future-of-artificial-intelligence/ai-creativity.html

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