Neuroscience
The only thing keeping all of us sane in this repetitive and mundane lifestyle is ENTERTAINMENT. Whether it’s music, dance, painting, movie, drama, mime, social media or even writing, these things protect our mental peace from all the overwhelming peer pressure, anxiety and stress in the fast paced world. However, such a vital part of humanity has been disrupted in the past few months. Artists and creators from around the world have raised concerns on their recognition and creativity. Today we are going to explore the pressing rivalry in the entertainment industry – artists versus artificial intelligence.
The Rise of Entertainment:
Before exploring this journey, let’s know the basics of entertainment. Entertainment is any activity or performance designed to induce pleasure or amusement in the audience. Centuries back entertainment was only to educate people with cultural values and social norms. Over time, the sector got commercialized, losing its educational purposes. Alongside the technological advancements lead to a change in medium of entertainment to radio, television and theatre. Subsequently the revolution of the entertainment industry took place due to the innovation of the internet and gaming industry. Currently in the 21st century Over The Top (OTT) and social media platforms are dominating the industry world wide.
Invasion of Artificial Intelligence:
As the technological breakthroughs that governed the industry in this century, computational capabilities rose exponentially. These breakthroughs enabled machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to advance, allowing artificial intelligence companies such as Open AI and Leonardo AI to publicly avail this powerful tool. Then social media influencers began to use these tools to produce content. This trend grabbed the attention of people world wide, reducing the authenticity of the content produced. Following that AI intruded into the realm of mainstream media. Even gigantic production houses like Marvel have used artificial intelligence in their web series. Songs and music too began to be composed by artificial intelligence.
Artists’ Concern:
Though artificial intelligence might seem like a groundbreaking revolution in the entertainment world, there are many concerns and issues on using it. Firstly creativity and credibility. One of the main pillars of entertainment is creativity. Many artists argue such a component is lost when using artificial intelligence to produce entertaining content as it follows logical reasoning and machine learning. Moreover the credibility of the content is in doubt as the developers of the AI alone know the source they fed while training it. Secondly their job is in an alarming state as the majority of their job from writing scripts and content to generating images and video is being automated by artificial intelligence. This reduces their job security drastically, even leading to economic losses to the nation. Thirdly, the quality of entertainment. As a machine is generating everything, it doesn’t have emotions, so the content produced is no longer enjoyable, not meeting the core purpose of entertainment.
The 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike is a great example for the rising concerns of using AI in the entertainment world. That strike was primarily initiated seeking better regulations of the use of artificial intelligence in film production and stronger compensation guidelines over digital doubles and AI voice generation of actors. Moreover major concerns have risen around the copyrights and credits of artificial intelligence generated entertainment. Since AI models require content to train, some companies such as Open AI have used artists’ creations without proper consent, like the recent controversy of Ghibli art founded by Hayao Miyazaki, a Japanese artist, whose anime film was used to train a recent Chat GPT model without consent. This issue created a huge controversy on the copyrights of AI generated content.
Bright side of AI in entertainment:
As we saw earlier, the usage of artificial intelligence in the entertainment industry might be disastrous and might create conflicts for innumerable reasons. Nevertheless artificial intelligence might be helpful in certain circumstances. For example, generating draft scripts, generating previsualization for a film in minutes, giving ideas for writing, automating certain processes in vfx to save time, generate audio and video of artists unavailable at the moment or has deceased with proper consent, initial drafts for dance choreography, generating reference images for drawings and paintings, tool for composing songs and music, etc. Furthermore AI can be used in social media platforms and Over The Top (OTT) media services for providing more personalised entertainment through data analysis and machine learning. This allows creators to target their audience for providing better experience for the consumer and better recognition for the artists in those platforms.
People’s perception:
Although artificial intelligence has benefits it has bifurcated the public. One of them is not caring about the change expecting just transparent, creative, ethical and emotion rich entertainment. However the other community criticising that artificial intelligent generated content lacks human emotion, creativity, authenticity and credibility. They insist on removing the existence of AI in the realm of entertainment. Though there are mixed opinions on this controversy, their perceptions are changing constantly, so the majority of them warmly welcome the appearance of artificial intelligence with proper regulations and guidelines without violating the ethnicity of humanity.
AI as creators’ assistant:
Artificial intelligence has both benefits and drawbacks in the entertainment world. It can be both detrimental and time saver, it purely depends on how an artist perceives and uses it. If the artist tries to automate the full job, concerns and issues will rise as we saw earlier. If the artist tries to get help or use it as an assistant, there is no issue, the artist will get an initial idea from the artificial intelligence, then the artist will modify it according to his creativity, emotion, and even philosophy. This way of using artificial intelligence, will reduce the production time at a lower cost as the artists are working lower hours for the project. This will be a win-win scenario for everyone.
Future of entertainment:
Entertainment’s core qualities such as creativity, emotional connection, authenticity and credibility were in a dreadful state, by the invasion of artificial intelligence. However it no longer needs to be. Artificial intelligence will be a saviour in the entertainment industry, when utilised properly without disrupting the ethical guidelines. I believe that the role of AI in the entertainment world will change to coexist with artists rather than replacing them. All these concerns and issues will be resolved.
Conclusion:
The rivalry between artists and artificial intelligence was induced as it is a new invention and we do not know its capabilities and purpose clearly yet. It’s our responsibility and duty as a human being to utilise the magnificent tool innovated in a proper manner to understand its potential uses. All the inventions made by humans are always to make our lives easier, not to disrupt them, so let’s learn to co-exist with it and use AI only as a tool.
By: S. Paarthivkumar
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