What AI Has to Offer to the Media and Entertainment Industry

The 21st century is a time where human ingenuity crafts the technology in the first place and then cooperates with its creation. This is the closest we’ve ever come to being “gods” - we create autonomous beings that help us in many ways.

This technological branch is called Artificial Intelligence (AI). The stories and myths about AI have been created back in ancient times with the belief that artificial beings would have their own mind and consciousness endowed by us - humans. And from the middle of the 20th century, we began to materialize those beliefs.

In the 1940s, the first programmable digital computer was designed that had a mathematicized thinking mechanism. Sure, the AI has gone a long way since then but even that computer was astounding by its scale and innovative nature.

So, today’s Artificial Intelligence is a “creature”, so to speak, that works autonomously in various fields and takes care of the regular “chores” that we’ve been doing before. It’s astonishing that the robots that we’ve created can actually do things without us telling them so that we can focus more on our craftsmanship, personal relationships, leisure, etc.

Today, AI is being used in many industries for various purposes. For instance, the music industry has already incorporated AI to some extent. There are programs that can write their own symphonies, assist musicians in lyrics-writing, and tailor the music recommendations to users. And this list is expanding as we move forward in time.

AI has long been covered in the media and entertainment industry. Just take a look at Marvel Cinematic Universe movies: Tony Stark’s Jarvis is a perfect example of the Artificial Intelligence that helps him do almost everything. And while we enjoy seeing AI in movies, it’ll be even exciting to see movies that are made by AI itself.

So, here are some of the future applications of AI in this industry:

In entertainment, there’s one particular branch that has always fascinated millions of people around the world - gambling. Gambling activates people’s risk-taking ego and pushes it to the extreme. And the casino houses, online websites, or other establishments get a pretty lucrative deal out of it.

With the development of AI, gambling is set to rise to the whole new heights. When you register in a casino, be it PlayAmo Canada online casino or a brick-and-mortar establishment in Las Vegas, you enter a comprehensive data into the system that then needs to be processed and stored. First, this is a very time-consuming process and takes additional working positions to sort through. AI can easily take that job and automatically sort all the information in different sections.

But more importantly, you disclose your personal information that can be used against you in the future. Remember, we’re talking about people who are in charge of your data and people can be corrupted sometimes. With AI, on the other hand, a software can be programmed to strictly protect the data and disclose with no third parties. It can really enhance the customer privacy in online casinos.

Not only that, autonomous software can be programmed to enhance its gaming strategy and technique over time. To be fair, this is already visible in many computer-based games, but there’s still room for improvement. What this means is that casino gamers will get more competitive gameplay that challenges them more.

As mentioned earlier, movies have depicted AI since the 1920s when they first appeared in Metropolis (1927), hence the relationship between the two is pretty well-established and ready to move to the next level. And the next level is not far from realization, to be clear.

In the movie production industry, there are a bunch of tasks and procedures that make the whole process incredibly complicated. Writing scripts, breaking them down, searching for locations, creating shot-lists, making a budget, a schedule, and a lot more has to be done in sync to achieve something meaningful and worthwhile. And, as you can imagine, a lot of people and studios come together to make all that happen.

Now, imagine this: instead of those people, an automated robot or software takes all those painstakingly intensive tasks and completes them in practically no time. AI can provide a platform that takes away all the time-consuming procedures from people, who can now focus on creative production. What’s more, we might not be far from the time when even creativity is delegated to AI, how about that?

Another pretty significant application of AI in movie business is automated marketing. Today, studios put millions in not only production, but also in the popularization of the movie. Trailers, posters, commercials - all that takes a lot of cash. In fact, one 30-minute Super Bowl trailer costs an average of one million US dollars.

It goes to show how massive the movie marketing industry is. And with the addition of AI, it can become so much better. Studios and production houses can “train” AI using various multimedia content, including text, images, and videos which will then be used to automatically generate different design concepts. This way, AI can easily and instantly generate movie posters and promotional videos. At some point, it’s going to be able to create a full-fledged trailer on its own.

Video gaming is yet another form of entertainment that attracts millions of users from every part of the world. People buy consoles, PCs, smartphones, even Google Stadia subscriptions to enjoy their favorite games. 

One of the most incremental parts of any single-player game is non-player characters (NPCs). NPCs are the artificial characters that fill the gameplay and react to the actual player’s movement and actions. For instance, when they see a player, they start shooting at him/her, while when a player starts shooting, the NPCs hide behind walls and obstacles.

Now, the current NPCs are, in some way, “AI-ed” - they already analyze the players’ actions and improve their response over time. However, as this technology improves, the games will feature NPCs even while in the multiplayer mode which is something that the current games don’t have.

In entertainment, as well as other industries, there are certain contents that oppose the policy or views of a certain provider. For instance, almost every movie studio has R-rated movies that are prohibited for kids under 18.

To moderate those movies so that no television or streaming platform allows children to have access to them, the studios team up with the governments and come up with various restrictive mechanisms. But this is also a very painstaking process since the actual people have to monitor the various platforms.

Using AI, people can completely delegate these tasks to the software. It can automatically perform comprehensive scans of the images and videos and identify explicit content. On top of that, AI can even process spoken language and trace offensive speech that can be easily censored afterward.

Yet another significant application of AI in entertainment is content personalization. Nowadays, many entertainment providers use this technology to offer tailored content to their customers. For example, the Apple Music platform analyzes the user’s listening history and tries to offer them tracks based on that analysis.

This technology already uses AI to some extent and it proves to be overly successful. However, the AI-driven content personalization can be much more sophisticated than that. It can cross-reference the various platforms, including music, movie, and gaming services, and combine various offers based on them.

AI can also be utilized in many developing countries where the internet speeds are significantly lower than in the West. It can analyze the connection speeds and compress the content in a way that doesn’t necessarily sacrifice the quality too much. 

Artificial Intelligence really is a product of modern human ingenuity. People have been dreaming about creating a “being” that would be like us, act like us, and think like us. And while these were all fantasies in the ancient era, it’s become a reality in the 21st century.

Various industries, including media and entertainment, are already jumping at this opportunity and incorporating AI in some of their services. For example, automatized programs are helping musicians create lyrics for their songs and even assist in composing them. 

And as we get a better grasp of the technology, we’ll be able to delegate our every-day tasks to a computer and focus our energy on the more meaningful aspects of our activity. Be it automated movie data processing in gambling, simplified movie production, improved NPC reactions in video games, easily censorable explicit content, or improved content personalization, AI has proven to be incredibly beneficial to the media and entertainment industry. And it’s only going to get a lot better over time.