Artificial intelligence (AI) and robots have had the mainstream fired up since they made their silver screen debut in the 1920's film, Metropolis. In the last decade alone, at least 30 movies with a spotlight on AI have been released. From Star Wars to Iron Man, AI technology has kept the masses entertained and chomping at the bit for more. In recent years, however, AI has since transcended its role as a plot focus to add more value to show business as a practical solution.
Cognitive movie trailers
The thriller Morgan adopted AI to create the movie trailer in 24 hours, a task that usually takes humans 10 to 30 days to complete. The machine was put into film school to learn from more than 100 horror movie trailers with experimental APIs before processing Morgan in about 90 minutes, extracting its scary scenes for the film's trailers. However, while AI is the tool that picks and arranges the visuals, a human element is still necessary to supervise the creative aspect of production. Hence, an editor stepped in to create the final trailer from those selected clips.
Automatic screenwriters
Benjamin, an algorithm – LSTM recurrent neural network – which is commonly used in text recognition, wrote the movie script and created a soundtrack for the 9-minute long sci-fi movie Sunspring. Created by filmmaker Oscar Sharp and AI researcher at NYU Ross Goodwin, the movie won a top ten spot at Sci-Fi London's 48-Hour Film Challenge. Benjamin was fed the scripts of different science fiction movies including such classics as Highlander Endgame and The Fifth Element before embarking on script development. Some of the lines don't make sense, yet it is still an interesting watch.
Optimization for customers
To increase views and offer personalized choices, Netflix developed Meson, an AI framework to operate a large volume of machine learning workflows on a daily basis. Meson manages personalization algorithms that drive video recommendations based on users' previous viewing activities and behavior, subscription history, interaction with content, viewing times and devices. It also refines the way the home page is presented to users, where the "Continue Watching" section is optimized to maximize views.
Judging the performances of talents
Last year, an AI developed by Alibaba Cloud was able to predict with 100% accuracy the finalists and grand winner of hit Chinese reality singing show, I'm a Singer. By evaluating variables including the ability of the singer, the popularity of their song, and crowd responses, the AI predicted the winners the show's judges would select.
This example demonstrates the ability of AI to judge the talent of performers in show business, in a way which emulates how humans evaluate talent.
While AI is incapable of true creativity, its technology speeds up labor-intensive work, giving those in the industry more time to focus on the creative process. While showbiz is still at the initial phases of adopting AI, it's still exciting to see the ways it augments the production and distribution processes. It's safe to say that this duo of machine intelligence and human creativity has made a lasting impact on showbiz, and there's much more to come.
