
AI might be here, but it’s not about to develop the next big TV hit.
That was the message from UK industry execs during a panel on original IP in social video held at the TellyCast Digital Content Forum in London yesterday.
“When the AI conversation was first happening in our office, our development team spent weeks playing and plugging in various [AI tools],” said John Farrar, Chief Creative Officer at The Playboy Bunny Murders co-producer Future Studios.
“Lots of the ideas were on the surface interesting but in the end it naturally just wittered out. It just wasn’t there yet and it didn’t feel to us like AI is going to solve the problem of cracking the next big format. That’s still on us as humans. That may change but the ideas [it developed for us] felt derivative.”
“A Drake record wouldn’t be a Drake record if he hadn’t recorded it,” he added.
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Mike Beale, ITV Studios Managing Director of Global Creative and Production Support, agreed, saying AI tools were not yet near the stage of coherently developing ideas that a human couldn’t envisage.
“If it’s using existing content, it’s the same as if a human is using existing content. It’s the same principle,” he said. “If it’s using multiple ideas, that happens every day — we do that to ourselves perfectly fine already without the digital space destroying it for us. It’s not original unless it’s created something new that’s brand adjacent and I don’t know if AI as done that yet.”
Madi Woodstock, BBC Studios Director, Digital Content & Programming – Scripted, said that while AI is “obviously very clever,” it is not replacing development execs just yet.
Dan Biddle, Meta‘s Entertainment Partnerships Lead for Northern Europe, added that there was no sense AI was yet at the level where it could generate content that was monetizable on Facebook or Instagram.
“The principle behind any distribution is original content is rewarded and the people putting in the work should be rewarded by getting the monetization,” he said. “On our platform you can do branded content deals, subscription services and fan payments. How many are making fan payments to AI? I don’t know.”
The execs were talking during a busy day at London’s BFI Southbank, where podcaster and industry PR veteran Justin Crosby’s TellyCast Digital Content Forum brought together influencers, execs, creatives, producers and student.
The likes of Snapchat Head of UK Partnerships Lucy Luke, BBC Studios execs Jasmine Dawson and Nat Poulter and Banijay Chief Digital & Marketing Officer Damien Viel delivered keynotes on their visions for digital and branded content.
Deadline was the media partner at the event, which attracted well over 350 individuals who watched a series of talks and presentations during the day, before producers such as BBC Studios, Spirit Studios, Quintus Studios, Wall of Entertainment and Soho Studios Entertainment sold their latest digital ideas at an early evening pitching session.
“Drake” is brand name that the copyright lawyers can protect from covers by AI or regular humans. Anyone who can afford lawyers is safe.
Thank goodness, some sanity in the AI conversation. The narrative on AI jumped the shark during the SAG strike.
No one doubts machine learning and what’s being called AI will change pipelines and tools and the way things are made. It’s likely those working in labour-intensive technology-enabled areas in film like VFX and animation will be most affected by this. But entirely replace human production – it’s a reach. Yet this is the alleged ‘existential threat’ that was running around unchecked during the SAG debate.
For some actors it is an existential threat. The fact that background artists, for example, can be scanned on a single day of employment and their image digitized and then used free of charge in perpetuity. That means no more work once the scan has been done. About as existential a threat as you can get, work-wise. And it doesn’t stop at background artists.
If you’re talking about scans, you’re referring to digi doubles. These have absolutely nothing to do with AI. As this article outline, AI isn’t actually as good as the tech bro hype makes out, and has severe limitations.
On the other hand scans are part of the vfx process, like the costume dept presumably take measurements of actors. They don’t reccreare the actor themselves – making a digi double with scan data take multiple skilled humans – vfx artists – to create. Its not artificial intelligence, it’s human. It’s like saying because chat GPT is AI and uses a computer, a novel written in a laptop is also AI.
A photorealistic Digi double would cost at least $10,000, usually much more, and unless you want to pay hundreds of thousands to build it properly and animate, it wouldn’t be usable as a ‘character’ – it would be more like a video game NPC . Background actors cost maybe $200/day? So why would studios be looking to increase costs of one of the least expensive parts of production, and use more digi doubles?
I agree scan data should not be reused without consent. In over 20 of VFX I’ve never come across that, and neither has anyone I know, probably because it wouldn’t make any sense to do so. But in case actors were worried about this, these protections were in the AMPTP contract from July:
– Advance, specific consent from the performer required both to create and use Digital Replicas.
– No Digital Replica of the performer can be created without the performer’s written consent and description of the intended use in the film.
– Prohibition of later use of that Replica unless performer specifically consents to that new use and is paid for it. – – – AMPTP explicitly confirmed to SAG-AFTRA that consents needed for later use of Digital Replicas apply to background actors as well as principal performers.
– No “Digital Alteration” that would change the nature of an actor’s performance in a role is allowed without informing the performer of the intended alteration and securing the performer’s consent.
– Limited exceptions for traditional editing/post-production practices.
– Background actors’ job protection: SAG-AFTRA rules require Producers to hire up to a specified number of background actors under the SAG-AFTRA contract per day. Those rules remain in effect, preserving existing job protections for background actors.