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In a world where AI is capturing every conversation, a series of experts is trying to figure out what it actually means for the world of entertainment.
“I think the word ‘AI’ is doing too much right now,” says Mira Line,
Google’s vice president of technology and society. ”One of the things that we’re doing, especially with the industry, is figuring out, well, what does AI mean in the industry? How do you break it down?”
Lane made her comments alongside several entertainment and tech personalities during the “Entertainment and Media in the Age of AI” panel, one of several AI-focused conversations happening at Variety’s Entertainment and Tech Summit presented by EY. Moderated by Variety business editor Todd Spangler, the conversation saw executives from Netflix (Girish Balakrishnan, the streamer’s senior director, creative innovation), Lionsgate (Kathleen Grace, its chief AI officer), Hasbro (Bertie Thomson, head of its AI-focused studio Sixth Wall), Teads (Annaka Vasquez, senior vice president of sales) and Adobe (Meagan Keane, Pro Video’s head of business strategy) come together to walk through AI’s place in entertainment and the use cases for versions of the technology — once people figure out how to talk about it.
That comes down to building relationships with creators about how it can be used, including where it fits within the production landscape. Balakrishnan highlighted Netflix’s public framework for how the company uses AI within its production pipeline (on a generative level, for roughly 300 programs), a model he said “builds trust with the creative community” and gives those members ”a pathway to navigate to drive use cases that are meaningful to the creative process.”
The industry is already landing on other frameworks surrounding AI’s place in the industry, such as the Kathleen Kennedy and American Film Institute-led “Human Generative Workflows” paper published last month. Lane helped develop the paper, which she said breaks down the use cses in ways that can help AI-backed productions reach a still-elusive goal: being copyrightable.
“We did a whole exercise around tooling and looking at everything from de-noising techniques to fully synthetic characters,” she said. “Let’s start thinking about the vocabulary and breaking it down so it’s not just AI as one big monolithic.”
Adobe has tried to help distinguish that in its own tools, Keane said, delineating between “assistive,” “corrective“ and “generative” functions. That allows users who’ve found those use cases to prosper, she said. “People don’t even really realize that they’re AI anymore because so much of the conversation has shifted to generative,” she said.
Some of that trust built between companies and those working in the AI space has offered up another elusive item in the field: intellectual property, including renowned brands and high-profile characters.
“[Companies] are very careful about how we use those creative assets to maintain the integrity of the brand,” Vasquez said about Teads’ work with ad sales. “We have AI models to build the creative, but for those world’s largest brands, there’s a lot of scrutiny around that. So what I’m looking forward to, and the brands that we partner [with] look forward to, is what are the guardrails in place?”
Hasbro, through its Sixth Wall work, has worked to implement proprietary guardrails for the ElevenLabs-backed AI replicas of characters it licenses, such as those of Cobra Commander and Optimus Prime. While companies can license those characters for interactive experiences — one hypothetical Thomson offered was a Waymo with the voice of Prime — those can’t be manipulated in the way many unauthorized clips of Hasbro characters have been.
“If you think about the existence of lots of unauthorized characters out there… they’re not necessarily safe for our brand,” Thomson said. “Whereas working on the authorized AI version of the character means that, for these actors, it has a protective value for them too, and also for us as IP owners.”
Still, each company is still working through public misconceptions surrounding AI, whether the idea models are preparing for humanity’s imminent destruction or the notion that full-fledged blockbusters can be create with a quick prompting of ChatGPT.
“They don’t understand that, when you’re making really premium movies, TV shows, really engaging stories the way that Lionsgate and others on the stage do, the technology you have to use there is more complex than just prompting. It’s a whole process,” Lane said. “There’s a lot of consideration that goes into everything we make, and in my role, I’m here [saying] here are the tools you could use to make your thing better, bigger, more, and get to the end of the production faster. You choose what’s best for the story, and then, great, you chose the thing that’s best for your story, and it’s better. It’s not necessarily what people think of in pop culture. It’s not like ChatGPT. We just can’t throw something onto that.”
In the end, each leader said they wanted the technology to help creatives tell better — and more — stories, not feel like they have to adopt the technology for the sake of staying ahead.
“Filmmakers aren’t asking, ‘Do I want to use AI or not?’ They’re looking to solve meaningful creative problems that they’re faced with on their shows,” Balakrishnan said, citing several Netflix programs that made use of generative AI. “I think those are the opportunities that creators are looking for, and that’s where AI comes specific as an option to be able to solve real creators.”
It can also, in Grace’s view, help studios find and distribute new stories from creators who’ve utilized AI tools to help bring their visions to life. She cited the worlds of “John Wick” and “The Hunger Games” as examples of work the company has done to sell well-liked IP, and that it wants to have “all kinds of filmmakers we work with.”
“Just look at the range of our slate from this year: ‘Housemaid,’ ‘Michael,’ ‘Sunrise [on the Reaping]’,” she said. “Those are all very different filmmakers and different stories. To me, it’s just more creative people, and in some ways, easier to find them because the tools are democratized. Is it going to be an exciting challenge to bring in more talented people who have access to tools? Yes, but I’m interested to see what happens.”
