Views on Creativity, Entertainment and AI
Last week, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos shared the following views about AI during an interview with the New York Times:
“I think that A.I. is a natural kind of advancement of things that are happening in the creative spacetoday ….
"Writers, directors, editors will use A.I. as a tool to do their jobs better and to do things more efficiently and more effectively … and in the best case, put things onscreen that would be impossible to do
“Every advancement in technology in entertainment has been fought and then ultimately has turned out to grow the business. I don’t know that [AI] would be any different.
“I have more faith in humans … I don’t believe that an A.I. program is going to write a better screenplay than a great writer, or is going to replace a great performance, or that we won’t be able to tell the difference.
“A.I. is not going to take your job [however] the person who uses A.I. well might take your job."
Separately, Dawn Ostroff, board member of Paramount Global and Mattel, in her article “Memo to Hollywood: AI Is a Threat — And an Opportunity” (The Hollywood Reporter) said:
"The potential applications of AI in the creative field are endless and exciting, but they raise critical questions about the future of human creativity and innovation. What happens when machines can create faster and better than we can? How can we guarantee that AI won’t strip away our fundamental human traits of curiosity, imagination and intuition? We have always been driven to use our imagination to see what doesn’t exist yet, to envision a society on a new planet, to see the best and worst of mankind in the future, to create the next masterpiece. What happens to humanity if we are no longer the composers of our music, or the artists behind our creations, or the tellers of our own stories? Should the future of creativity be left up to the machines we ourselves created?
"It’s a larger existential threat, but the future that we imagined has arrived, and with it come the economic realities of AI. As we chart our path forward, we are all best served to start from a place of mutual respect for one another’s work. Our colleagues in the tech industry patent every aspect of their inventions to ensure that the inventor or company is protected and compensated every time their tech is used. Similarly, artists, creators, talent and IP owners expect to be paid every time their content is used by others. Recognizing that the contributions on all sides deserve a compensatory value and consent to use is a great place to start.
"We’ve been at the brink of existential threats before. And while our imagination and creativity often brought us there, it also brought us back. Finding the ways to use AI to make us better at what we do is the path best chosen. Otherwise, AI will do it without us."