AI - Among us in the entertainment industry

When was the first time you heard about AI? For the more dated among us, you may think of Agent Smith from The Matrix or perhaps The Terminator. And for the space aficionados among us, HAL 9000 from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey comes to mind.

AI has been the fuel of many sci-fi movies and thrillers over the decades. But 2023 has been the year of AI. Most of us probably don’t even realize just how far-reaching AI has become. If you use TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, or Netflix, you have used some form of AI. More recently, AI has stormed onto the entertainment scene guns-ablazin’.

Did you know that Warner Bros uses an AI tool called Cinelytic to predict the box-office success of its movies?

Many modern games integrate AI features to create more immersive gameplay and experiences. AI chatbots and AI voices have also become an inevitable reality for social media users. Technology has become so advanced that it’s almost impossible to distinguish between a real human voice and an AI-generated one. Some people have even trained AI to make their voices sound like Morgan Freeman and David Attenborough!

The movie industry has not been left behind, either. AI algorithms are used to simulate massive explosions and natural disasters, greatly streamlining a process that would take uncountable thousands of rendering hours.

One of the most recent examples of AI being used in the mainstream entertainment industry is the AI-generated introduction of the Marvel series Secret Invasion. When people discovered that AI made the intro, it created a severe backlash, especially among visual effects artists. Another popular movie in which AI was incorporated was the 2022 film Everything Everywhere All At Once.

Artists and musicians must now compete with artificially generated content too. AI models have become so powerful that users can prompt an AI to create songs, photographs, and videos. It can even create art pieces that mimic a particular artist, or that fall into a specific genre. For example, I can tell the DALL-E powered Image Creator: “Paint me a painting of the 1969 moon landing in Leonardo Davinci’s style”. And ‘Hey Presto’! My very own pièce de résistance!

AI tools like DALL-E and OpenAI’s ChatGPT have made AI-generated content commonplace. Some creators, however, are concerned that they will soon become obsolete, given the ever-increasing power of AI-driven tools. Recently, there has been a massive plague of so-called “cash-cow” YouTube channels, where users will feed an AI content scraped from large channels’ videos, tell it to slightly modify the content to avoid copyright strikes, use AI-generated imagery, or even use footage from the original creator without permission, upload it to YouTube, and profit off of the views.

AI, in its many forms, is here to stay. How exactly things will play out for stakeholders in the entertainment industry is yet to be seen. But one thing is certain: the age of AI is upon us. Get on the wagon, or get left behind! PS This article was not written by AI., 100% created by a human.