it's Revolution time again in the entertainment business wrers make your favorite show Big Data is bringing big change and faster than ever before AI has the potential to disrupt every corner of the entertainment industry a new wave of artificial intelligence is beginning to transform the way entire Industries operate we can build an algorithm that listens to all the music in the world determine what we listen to and watch the AI predicts much money this F make and generate new forms of art generative AI moves from being something that I think is quite beautiful to occasionally
a little bit intimidating so who are the winners AI driven names were two of the top stocks in the S&P 500 and losers generative AI is an existential threat to the TV and film industry this is a real earthquake not just for the entertainment industry but for our lives in the 21st century losing home I tell you baby I'm going under I can't help [Music] you God in this studio an artist Alfie is playing a new song to the boss of his record label anit anit could you hit space bar just so I can see
my levels please it's the kind of scene that's been typical of the music business for decades we're good to go I [Music] think but it was not anit who discovered Alfie it was [Music] AI Alfie castley was one of the artists that we found through our algorithm ankit's label is based in Sweden and uses AI to find new artists across the world AI hit the right note when it identified that london-based Alfie had a big fan base thousands of miles away on another continent he's an artist from the UK his five biggest cities in terms
of where his fans come from are all in Southeast Asia Alfie's biggest hit teenage Mona Lisa had about 700,000 streams in his home country but 7 million in Indonesia and over 16 million in the Philippines in its first year it's been viral here in the Philippines for good Lord knows how long technology helps you kind of like find these let's say counterintuitive patterns I think this is the one that that both Carl and Savin and Ramy and kits company is using AI to get better at spotting opportunities and Trends in the digital era AI can
analyze metadata from social media and the behavior of viewers and listeners faster than other Technologies you look across Spotify YouTube SoundCloud any platform that has data you're looking for signs of someone raising their hand and saying I think this is a good song it could be an addition to a playlist a comment on Tik Tok the footprints in the sand the biggest use that we've had for AI has been how do we take this just fire hose of content and distill it down to something that's manageable um on a human level yeah I think let's
call it if that's right guys back in the day the whims of artists and music Executives dictated what songs the public would hear digital technology boosted by AI has now turned that model on its head you're turning hundreds of thousands sometimes millions of people into talent scouts you're democratizing the selection process to the fans you like oh I God that was amazing oh thank God AI is the latest chapter in the story of how big data has completely transformed the music business over the past decade the arrival of streaming services changed everything from how profits
are made to how songs are structured musicians now get paid per play and so there's a particular incentive to make sure that songs sound good right at the beginning so that people don't skip them big data mining also completely disrupted the world of video Netflix which launched its streaming service in 2007 led the way in using data to choose what content to make and who to serve it up to on Netflix everything you do on the platform is a data point whether it is overing my mouse on a tumbnail or opening the browser or for
rewinding and those data points are being used to train the algorithm and so with this data they know what people like they therefore know what to commission the availability of big data sets has made it much easier for creators of all kinds to determine what kind of content is going to be popular but AI has really turbocharged that effort and that's what one new company is hoping its use of AI will do to the film industry cytic is based in La the traditional home of Film Production but it offers a very modern approach to doing
business using AI to inform decisions about many aspects of movie making the ultimate goal is an accurate prediction of how well a film will do enabling producers and Studios to tailor their budgets to expected returns and reduce the risk of losing money we identify 19 variables that really Dy FM performance and move the needle within 20 seconds thei is able to provide you with a very detailed risk rated forecast for box office home video and TV numbers the beauty of it is you can go back change any input and within seconds you have a new
forecast let's start with some key decisions choosing the cast and crew the AI draws on a database of nearly 600,000 people and offers different predictions depending on who is selected let's swap our Tom Cruz with Matt Damon also very strong well recognized actor that did an action franchise as well that was very popular internationally we can rerun this forecast leaving everything else constant we can now assess every Talent out there actor writer director producer we created algorithms that figure out the real economic value of this particular talent in relation to the particular content project that
you have in mind the AI also takes other factors into into account including a film's age rating genre and budget and thanks to the fast pace of technological change there's now another variable in the mix one that tobas thinks could be the single most important of all the script what that means is breaking down a script in certain patterns in certain archetypes characters and really figuring out how these stories could connect to humans cytic says its predictions are 85 % accurate but stresses there are always outliers our tool can really help you get a much
better understanding of how your film will perform in the future this analytic is not built to predict outliers so it's time to put its powers to the test before the release of Barbie we asked the multi-million dollar question how much would it make at the box office Mar Robbie has been very strong 20 18 19 20 then maybe over the last couple of months she really had a bit of a rougher patch in the questional with Barbie will she bring in the crowds we're now talking 700 million for this film in theaters home video TV
over 10 years I got in my pocket Barbie has joined the 1 billion Club just 17 days after the film was released two months after the release of Barbie we caught up with tobas again and asked about Barbie's phenomenal success and why the AI did not predict the full extent of this our tool actually did exactly what it was supposed to do it helped to show that Barbie will be successful film and would be a positive green light this is not a crystal ball we did not foresee that it will become a cultural phenomenon Barbie
is a once in a decade outlier it's a reminder that AI and big data do not yet have all the answers I think there's been a bit of a turn back towards thinking that actually human judgment has its place competition can be stiff for companies in the entertainment business especially for streaming services which have proliferated in recent years subscriber numbers are Plateau at the same time companies are finding that they're having to keep spending billions upon billions on new content to keep people subscribed enter stage left generative a I a new plot twist for the
industry and a new world of possibilities for creating [Music] content generative AI allows people to actually create things it got onto the radar of most Ordinary People in about 2022 when apps like chat GPT and mid Journey came along allowing Ordinary People to register for free and experience some of the seemingly magic powers of generative AI generative AI works by training deep neural networks on large data sets of for example images and text the system learns to identify patterns and when prompted it can generate new content this new form of AI is enabling some artists
to create new forms of art people like beatboxer Harry ye also known as reaps 100 beatboxes use their own voices to make percussive sounds through my music and through uh my art form I've spent a lot of my life trying to sound like a machine using a data set of Harry's vocalizations an AI system has generated these percussive noises a voice that Harry calls his second [Music] self when these synthetic voices were generated I realized that now a machine was trying to sound like me the aim was to produce an interaction almost like a vocal
chess match with some of this synthetic voice this phrase where I would normally is gone and it's added extra ghost notes or new phrases my sort of Sonic lexicon started to grow what comes out the other side are streams and streams and streams of this organic second self something that is me but not me the idea of automating has been a key part in music culture the newness of it is that identity can be automated Harry has also used AI for a groundbreaking collaboration with the leipsig ballet in Germany the dancers's movements were recorded and
this was used to create a data set AI then suggested new movements which the dancers incorporated into their performance on stage for the choreography we were able to have uh video and images so that becomes a data set so you're then able to start producing uh generative outcomes which are new movements new emotions Harry hopes it's a sign that AI will open up new opportunities in the Arts to those from less advantag backgrounds and areas that I up where you have no access to resources or anything you can now with a click of a button
have access to Intelligence on tap although generative AI promises fresh opportunities and Creations debate will continue about whether it remains more derivative than Innovative and whether it will deliver quantity over quality I think the real worry about generative AI is that it is essentially parasitic it sucks up stuff made by humans and remixes it and CHS it out again and up to a point that's great but I think at some point you do need something genuinely new and I think the jury's still out really on whether generative AI is capable of producing something truly original
or whether that still needs a human I think we should ask who is going to consume all of these audio segments and videos and I think that what we need to pay attention to is the level of content fatigue on The Human Side of all the concerns around ai's impact on the entertainment business perhaps the biggest relates to human jobs AI is seen as a huge Threat by many current workers with generative AI one can create characters at the click of a button and in a fraction of the time that it would have taken VFX
artists to do the same job generative AI is already rewriting the script for how movies are made from special effects waa to lip syncing for foreign films and it's all my fault the de aging of actors f is a fo the disruptive power of AI is one reason why in 2023 writers and actors swap delivering lines for Picket lines Hollywood actors are on strike for the first time in 43 years the strikes that we've seen recently in Hollywood by writers and actors are mostly about how they get paid but part of the strikes also is
about Ai and I think that's partly what's helped to capture the public imagination here the idea of computers and Robots coming for the jobs of writers and actors is something that everybody can understand they got the money we got the power these workers are very much canaris in the coal mine they're telling us what other Industries are going to face we have the capacity to scan the body voice and the facial expression of any given an actor or Exar and then you can use this digital Avatar in future projects I'm going to show you some
magic AI driven accounts impersonating the big stars are already popular I I I don't know why I need to speak Spanish but it's those who are less well known both in front of and behind the camera who may have most to fear welcome to the last human voice podcast exploring the moral legal and ethical issues in artificial intelligence in the creative sectors and in performance syst British actor Marcus Hutton believes AI could mean the Final Act for much of his profession certainly not anti any AI tools that make workflows simpler or easier I am uncomfortable
about AI systems that are pretty much designed to wipe out a Workforce one group of workers under threat are voiceover artists skills built up over a lifetime can be copied at the click of a button using AI Markus fears many artists could be facing their Curtain Call there's a whole ecosystem a whole set of working practices that could be just chucked in the bin yeah it feels quite sad for me how you look how you speak these are the things that define you and to have it sort of taken away and synthesized I don't think
we're ready as a as a species for that Ready or Not the technology is here and Marcus agreed to have his voice cloned to test out the ai's effectiveness so I'm going to give speech if I AG go they've got a free trial of Clone your own voice with one minute of speech in a quiet environment and by the way as the person narrating this film I'm as interested as he is to see the results one minute of material is not a lot of training data but be interesting to see what happens speechify voice cloning
allows you to create a clone of your voice in the future we believe everyone will clone their voice so they never have to re-record a voiceover when a script changes let's see what it sounds like or anyone else looking to elevate your projects with top-notch voiceovers I highly recommend giving speech by a try it was such a small amount of data to be trained on I can hear it's me that's what's kind of weird it's me and there's a bit of nuance and stuff in there so perhaps us voiceover artists have been granted a brief
stay of execution but AI is capable of cloning voices and the threat to jobs is real it's very weird the idea that you might be competing with yourself AI is definitely taking away jobs rapidly station announcements checkout machines all that kind of stuff this is the bread and butter work for a lot of voice artists I'm going to delete the files now because I don't want a digital version of me to exist I think some people are probably right to be looking over their shoulder to see if the robots are coming for their jobs the
counter argument to that is that the lower cost of producing this content will mean that there's more abundant stuff there's more things being produced and all of that will ultimately need more people to work on it one estimate suggests that generative AI could add between 2.6 and 4.4 trillion to the global economy annually in the coming decades within the media and entertainment industry this technology is expected to increase Revenue by 60 to $110 billion a year as the technology improves legal questions over copyright promise to get thornier some argue that consent should be obtained each
time an artist work is used by AI once your data your image has been captured your voice has being captured it can be repurposed multiple times and you have no control over what the output will be we're talking about what we call Active consent your consent has to be gained for each piece of work exactly when and how consent should be obtained is complex and not easy to decide and it's an argument that's already playing out in high-profile lawsuits now some of the biggest and bestselling authors in fiction are suing open AI in any dispute
like this the real winners are always the lawyers the AI companies May well argue that what they do constitutes a fair use of that kind of content rather in the way that if I read a book and it just informs my thinking in a a general way I don't necessarily have to pay the author of the book if I write something on a related subject the way in which AI works is that it sucks up so much information that it's very hard to pinpoint the effect that any one data point has on any of the
output and so it may be that they're able to argue that they don't really owe people anything for this it could turn out though that it's exactly the other way around and they find that they have to foot an enormous bill for every piece of information they've ever used in their training just as it is certain that AI will transform the entertainment industry on many levels regulation of AI is also so inevitable but so far it is unclear what this will look like or how effective it will be I'm not sure that legislation alone would
be enough to stop this tsunami of Automation and I think we as consumers actually have more power than we normally realize and we do need to tell companies if you're going to use AI then we are not going to give you a credit card there's no doubt that regulation is coming to AI who comes up with those rules and when is one of the big questions of the years ahead hi I'm Tom way I'm the tech and media editor of The Economist if you'd like to watch more about generative Ai and entertainment business please click
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