How AI Can Benefit Hollywood and Solve It's Most Pressing Needs

The entertainment industry might be the final thing disrupted by Machine Learning, but if done right it can be as revolutionary as the camera.

Act 1 - The Machine Learning Revolution

You don’t need to follow tech news to know that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is finally arriving, after so many “AI winters ”. It’s going to impact every aspect of humanity in the coming years, and how could it not? The first Artificial?General?Intelligence will be the only example in the history of the known universe where one life form invents another.

Hollywood itself has done a great job of portraying AI and robots, sometimes in endearing ways (Her ,?A.I. , JARVIS and Vision from?Avengers , C3PO from?Star Wars ), and sometimes frighteningly (The Matrix ,?The Terminator ,?Ex Machina , Ultron from?Avengers , HAL 9000 from?2001: A Space Odyssey ).

Thanks to Turing-award winners Hinton, LeCun, and Bengio [1], the world has delivered self-driving cars, near-perfect translation, and digital assistants like Siri. If science fiction is any guide, AI will either continue beneficially and cure cancer, invent anti-gravity space travel, and replace all boring and dangerous work, or robots will decide humans are a threat and wipe us out. Big talk but it’s real and it’s coming soon. Every major tech company is betting the farm on AI and Deep Learning, and every non-tech industry and government should prepare [2]. If many predictions are right, AI will be more disruptive than the Internet or even electricity was.

We’ve seen real breakthroughs. We’ve learned a lot. One key insight is that for most tasks AI can surpass a human expert. However, the?combination?of?AI + Human Expert?wins out over all [3]. Keeping a “human-in-the-loop” will?especially?benefit?creative?activities. Sure no one you ask today wants to stream Hip Hop songs written by a robot (who hasn’t lived a compelling and brave story). I doubt collectors would buy a painting — as realistic or beautiful as it might be — without appreciating the artist’s compelling life story. Could AI make?movies?too? Not yet, but it?will?eat away at the edges for a while, even if considered a toy until it affects every facet of the entertainment industry (the classic Innovator’s Dilemma [4]).

To this point no one has paired education in cinema (i.e. Film School and Creative Writing) with experience in AI product development, and teamed up to generate enjoyable movies. I see a parallel between AI and the WWII Manhattan project (started when FDR got wind of Axis powers leveraging breakthroughs in physics). Eventually?someone?is going to apply AI to cinema, so I hope it’s a team of people with the goal of growing creative opportunities and democratizing Hollywood.

We don’t?program?machines in this new world, because we’re imperfect and they’re faster and smarter than us. Instead, we show AI?examples?(e.g. a picture with a cat; then one without a cat) and it teaches?itself?how to identify if a cat is in a picture. But does that mean AI can only?copy?what we’ve already shown it? Absolutely not. DeepMind has proven this already with AlphaGo [5]. If you see the documentary, it’s clear AI can master skills watching us — but even better — it can teach?itself?without any instruction from us blending human fallibilities in. And when the moment is right, such as the famous Move 37 in Go, AI will invent concepts that experts agree no human would ever have thought of [5].

AI can learn as humans do from examples by “reading” novels, “watching” videos, and “studying” textbooks, but on a scale no person could ever achieve in a lifetime. At some point it will surpass even our collective human intelligence. Techniques like unsupervised-learning and reinforcement-learning can even start to take humans out of the teaching bottleneck, with no labelled answers required. But more importantly it can then figure out how to?go beyond?what’s ever been done by us. Beyond anything humans could think of (like Gladwell’s 10,000-Hour Rule to reach expertise — machines will set benchmarks like 10 Trillion hours of practice and learning). AI is already better at games, from?Super Mario?to?Jeopardy. They’re better at diagnosing diseases, helping doctors improve the quality and scale of triage. Why not apply this powerful new tool to creativity next?

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist - Picasso

Act 2 - What's On Next

Click here for Part 2 in this week's series on AI disrupting Hollywood.

References

Cover photo by?Jake Blucker ?on?Unsplash

Bottom photo purchased from iStock (illustration ID:1140173140)

[1] 2018 Turing Award (ACM)

[2] National and International AI Strategies (Future of Life Institute)

[3] Articles explaining this observation include:

[4] The Innovator’s Dilemma (Christensen)

[5] AlphaGo (DeepMind)

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