With so many creatives fearing, understandably, that generative AI is coming for their jobs, last year’s WGA deal allowed for artificial intelligence to be used as a tool — not a replacement — for writers. But for how long?
The day may come when a Primetime Emmy Award winner for best drama series gives an acceptance speech shout-out to ChatGPT, Sora or some other perhaps yet-to-be-conceived artificial intelligence (AI) tool. Just don’t expect it to happen this year.
Because while AI has sparked enormous interest — as well as a good deal of fear — in the television industry, “the tools aren’t quite there yet,” where high-end drama is concerned, says Guy Bisson, executive director of data and analytics firm Ampere Analysis.
In 18 months, however, “you will find an explosion of usage” of AI in scripted content, predicts the co-author of Ampere’s recent report: AI In The TV And Movie Creation And Value Chain.
Big TV players in Europe have been relatively open about their interest in AI, though usually with reference to formats, documentaries and non-scripted content.
RTL CEO Thomas Rabe has said the Luxembourg-based media group sees “great opportunities from artificial intelligence, in particular to increase efficiency and generate content”. And ITV Studios managing director Julian Bellamy said recently that the UK-based multinational producer-distributor views generative AI as “a co-pilot with creatives to help amplify and augment the existing creative interest”.
In the US, the Hollywood studios and other TV production companies appear more guarded (none of the US or UK companies contacted by Screen International were available for comment). Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Tony Vinciquerra has described AI as “an unbelievable tool” for writers but a “very complicated subject”.
The studios have reportedly been pitched by ChatGPT creator OpenAI on the potential of the company’s text-to-video generator Sora, which has not yet been made available publicly. And, according to a recent Bloomberg news story, they have had discussions with Alphabet and Meta about licensing content that could be used to ‘train’ the two tech giants’ own AI video-generation tools.
So far, the studios have responded cautiously (according to Bloomberg, Disney and Netflix have both declined Alphabet and Meta’s licensing proposals, while Warner Bros Discovery has shown more willing).
The caution, suggest observers, is due in part to the fact AI was one of the most contentious issues in last year’s US writers and actors strikes, with the relevant clauses in the final agreements still to be significantly tested in practice.
There is also a lack of clarity over the use of copyrighted material in the training of AI software, leaving studios wary of allowing producers and writers on their series to use tools that could lead to legal action.
Tentative steps
Any company that wants to make use of AI technology “needs to be very careful about how it positions things to the creative community”, argues entertainment industry and AI expert Peter Csathy. Using generative tools like Sora to produce commercially distributed content involves “a real risk of potential liability”, he adds. “If you’re a major media company, are you really going to embrace generative AI right now, when there’s all this uncertainty?”
No wonder, then, that practical examples of AI use in or around drama programming are few and far between, rarely discussed publicly by the production companies or studios involved and sometimes the cause of audience disapproval.
In the promotion area, the BBC recently conducted what it described as a “small trial” using AI to generate marketing messages about its venerable Doctor Who series, only to end the trial after complaints from viewers. Amazon MGM Studios reportedly used AI in the creation of a marketing image for its hit videogame-based series Fallout.
Disney+ turned to AI-powered voice cloning by Ukraine-based company Respeecher to create the voice of a young Luke Skywalker for the streaming service’s Star Wars spinoff series The Mandalorian and The Book Of Boba Fett.
And Marvel Studios called on an effects company using a custom AI tool to create the credit sequence for its Secret Invasion miniseries, also for Disney+.
Examples like these barely hint at the role AI might eventually play in every part of the television industry, including the production of high-end scripted drama.
Currently available to TV companies, producers and writers are ‘discriminative AI’ tools such as Cinelytic, Largo and StoryFit, which can be used to analyse and provide feedback on scripts, and generative AI tools, like ChatGPT, Midjourney and Google’s Gemini, which, with prompts from a writer, can provide material for storyboards and pitch decks.
Coming soon will be Sora and Google’s text-to-video tool Veo. Experimental filmmaker and artist Paul Trillo, who has been given early access to Sora by OpenAI, believes the tool could have uses in mainstream TV. But he adds that because of the computing power involved, the technology, presently only capable of generating one-minute clips, is probably “years away” from producing footage that could be edited directly into a top-line TV show.
US writer/producers who have already begun experimenting with AI — and who sometimes express frustration over the studios’ cautious stance on the technology — see the tools as both a potential benefit and a potential threat.
Mark Goffman, whose writing credits include Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy series and multiple Primetime Emmy Award winner The West Wing, believes AI has “tremendous potential for research and a lot of the general opening work that writers do in the creation process. There are ways you can train a GPT [generative pre-trained transformer] or an LLM [large language model] on the traits of a character and the tone of a show. You can put in all the parameters and then come up with non-obvious solutions.
“But it takes a lot of learning and a lot of effort from the writer to create really meaningful prompts,” asserts Goffman. “Because the more generic your prompts are, the more generic the answers are. There’s always going to be a human component.”
Echoing the concerns voiced by many writers during (and since) last year’s strikes, writer/producer Marc Guggenheim believes AI “can be a very useful tool or it can be phenomenally destructive”.
Guggenheim, known for series such as Carnival Row and DC’s Legends Of Tomorrow as well as features including Percy Jackson: Sea Of Monsters, has experimented with AI, but insists, “It’s not ready to do the work of a writer or even write a particularly good scene in a script.” As a result, he adds, “There’s not a whole lot of motivation for studios to encourage writers to use AI at this point because the technology is simply not there.”
For now, suggests Guggenheim, AI is “not really a tool that’s ready for primetime”.
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