PLAYA VISTA, Calif. — The embrace of AI promises all sorts of new efficiencies and capabilities to businesses. It also means new legal, cultural, social, security, and other risks that didn’t come hand in hand with other technological advances.
At the Dec. 9 CDSA Summit @ Los Angeles event held at Google’s Spruce Goose Hangar, Scott Ehrlich, chief innovation officer for Sinclair Broadcast Group, and Allan McLennan, CEO of PADEM Media Group, addressed the most critical elements about the AI transition, during the morning keynote “Business Leader Perspectives on the Values and Risk.”
“What we’re watching across the different executions is it’s helping [with] the laborious tasks, [the] kinds of tasks that are going to be greatly enhanced by AI, [like] being able to translate any given language into pretty much any other given language,” McLennan said. “From a subtitling standpoint it’s incredibly efficient, [but] whether it’s accurate or not comes back to the humans being able to touch.”
He said AI-assisted tasks around localization especially are producing massive cost savings for content companies, but AI is a long way from replacing “the artistic value of an individual and what they can accomplish.”
“Ben Affleck said it best … basically an artist knows when to stop. AI, it just keeps going. So, we’re at a really key point,” McLennan said.
Ehrlich said that legacy media companies are usually the last to embrace the positive aspects of AI and are more sensitive to the risks and drawbacks. He said he remembered there was once no such thing as an IT department, no such thing as computers, and TV stations operated just fine. But the benefits of technology always outweighed the risk-adverse attitudes that got in the way, he said.
“Horizontally across the organization somebody has got to be responsible for this new technology, because it has the same kind of implications … legal implications, it has employment implications, it has workflow implications, and what was true then is true now, which is computers aren’t going to necessarily replace people, but people who know to use computers will replace people who don’t know how to use computers,” Ehrlich said.
“AI is not going to replace people, [but] people who know how to use AI are going to replace people who don’t know how to use AI.”
Ehrlich pointed to pre-visual and storyboard work in content production as an example of where the power of AI can’t be denied: creators no longer need to spend hours upon hours drawing out their vision, when the basics can be created in moments using AI. “Now instead of spending a month creating these amazing storyboards, they spend a month iterating on the storyboards and the concepts,” he said. “I think that’s sort of the general lesson of AI: can you delegate effectively, delegate the menial tasks, the repetitive tasks, the laborious tasks, and focus on where you really add value with your mind, your imagination and how much more time you get to spend in that part of your brain.”
At Sinclair, the use of AI is having a notable impact in its ability to transcribe interviews and sift through video for specific keywords, which can then be used on social media and in preview clips. “From a news organization standpoint that is one of the great upsides of AI … with this we can use everything we collect, not just everything that we put into a package and that makes us more efficient,” Ehrlich said.
To watch the full presentation, click here.
The Content Delivery & Security Association’s (CDSA) CDSA Summit @ Los Angeles was designed to engage as much as enlighten, gathering CDSA Board and member companies along with their colleagues and collaborators to engage in vigorous conversation about the state of content protection and artificial intelligence in the media and entertainment industry.
CDSA Summit @ Los Angeles was presented by Indee, with sponsorship by Google Cloud, Eluvio, GeoComply, Material Security, EIDR, the Tech Align Group and Vision Media.
