AI in the Entertainment Industry: How to be Better Than AI
It’s the end of the world as we know it. -REM
Everything that has been created up to now has been scraped and put into a big machine. Despite pending and forthcoming lawsuits, this is the inevitable truth. Sure, there will be payouts from Big Tech for copyright infringements (at best) but the machine has been fed and will continue to churn.
Now that we know we’ve entered the new era of the everyday use of AI in work and life, how do we pivot to protect not only our jobs, but our future creations? I personally think it will involve the blockchain, but this is beyond the scope of my understanding and this article. Instead, I want to focus on how to be better than AI in order to not be replaced. As an attorney, I have to think about this. The truth is we must all think about this.
What Hollywood has been facing with AI is only the tip of the iceberg for every other sector as the entertainment industry is usually on the forefront of experiencing the pain points and trends of evolving technologies.
Generative AI is an amalgamation of all that has been created up to this point and therefore it can quickly and efficiently recognize patterns that makes tasks and parts of the creative process more efficient and effective than humans can sometimes generate. But it’s still up to us humans to create the next. It’s still up to us to create the future. Our imagination up to now is what generates AI output. It doesn’t stop here. It must be fed new ideas and creations.
Does this mean we have to be more creative and cleverer than we’ve been in the past? Yes. New melodies, lyrics, storylines, sets, dialogues, plots, adventures, and emotions. AI is forcing us to expand—to be better than we were before.
We all use technology to make our art and creative content better in some way, whether it is in the making of it or the distribution of it. A recent Apple commercial (that was removed after receiving criticism) showed this point. All of the creative tools up to now were being crushed impliedly because they are all within Apple products. Perhaps it was too on the nose because that’s exactly where we are with AI.
The key to job security will be how to use AI tools in a way to elevate our creativity, perhaps faster but also with more eloquent output than before. In other words, to be better than AI we must use AI.
Aside from using AI tools to be better than AI, there will always be a demand for human touch in storytelling. There will always be a demand for human emotion in our creativity. There will always be a demand for the uniqueness of each one of us in what we create.
Our authenticity (which comes through your personal brand as a creative) will be job security. The paradox is that AI will force us to tap into and evoke our unique, authentic human selves in order to save us from the technological revolution.