Everything is all about AI. Even a lot of TV and film dramas feature it somewhere in the plot. But they will be in trouble if they have actually used it in production; see the fall from grace of The Brutalist, the Oscar favourite until it was found to have used an AI app to tune the Hungarian accents of its American lead.  

A perfectly good indie, action-comedy picked up record numbers of Oscars instead. It’s an ill wind. That wind was the creative establishment – the Academy – putting its hand up and saying stop, no more, no AI in your feature film or forget a best picture or director statue.

But if the Academy is King Canute, does it know it was King Canute who, remember, was actually there to prove he could not stop the wave? The UK government, along with others, is facing the dichotomy between going all-in on an (uncertain) but definitely happening AI future, or siding with the creative industries who say that same future will wreck their business models and the quality of their output.  

The argument has crystalised around whether AI companies should recognise and abide by copyright norms when it comes to ‘feeding’ their Large Language Models with the human creative output (as collected on the web) that they need in order they can pattern recognise it back into existence in various forms as their ‘own’ creations.   

Sounds a bit pointless when you put it like that, doesn’t it? But, having ingested all this creativity, AI models can spew back out (indelicate, but that is kind of what they do), endless variations on the designated theme for cents on the dollar compared to shooting them practically or even in VFX.

It is a side benefit that AI is also greener – it takes far more power and water than people think, but it is still greener than flying a crew around.   And it is not like the creative world couldn’t do with a way to make productions more cheaply – budgets are down and costs are up. The BBC just admitted it has a long list of green lit projects it can’t afford to make.

Cost effective AI could arguably be a way to let a thousand TV and film flowers bloom. But if you are a creative, that is how you make your living.  Why should global tech companies be able to gatecrash your business model in order to regurgitate your work?  What I don’t understand – and please enlighten me if you do – is why companies with the smarts to run AI models and market caps bigger than many countries, can’t keep track of who has denied them copyright access and who needs to be paid an agreed fair use fee if they haven’t.  

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Categories: AI, Blogs, Business, Content, Off Message, Regulation, Rights

Tags: AI, BBC, Oscars