Erik Barmack captured the mood of the drama business, in Europe at least, when it comes to artificial intelligence in a Series Mania session about the future of AI.
The founder of Wild Sheep Content and former Netflix exec set out a hypothetical dystopian future in which AI churns out an endless stream of short content. He said the ramifications of that eventuality scared him – drawing spontaneous applause from a packed room at the drama confab.
“I think there is a Matrix-like case that algorithms get better and better at feeding content that can be created without that much thought,” he said. “This is highly problematic.”
Barmack, who oversaw international originals at Netflix before leaving the streamer in 2019 was speaking on a session running under the banner ‘Fast Forward: The Ai Revolution What will our Industry Look Like in 5 Years?’
“What happens if media is outside of our collective control, we lose the specificity of what it means to have an expanded story that’s well-crafted and everybody is just cycling through information as quickly as possible?,” he said. “AI is going to accelerate that. And that scares me.”
The fears around the dystopian take on the future, which garnered the applause of the producer-heavy crowd, had actually followed on from Barmack highlighting how AI can level the playing field for filmmakers and creatives. He singled out two shorts he had seen that had been crafted with AI tools by young filmmakers and which were cinema level quality.
“Hollywood tends to be an aristocracy, it’s very, very hard to get anything made and you have to know the right people,” he said. “What happens if we allow millions of people from around the world to have access to the same tools and everyone can create at the same level?,” he said. There’s a world in which hundreds of thousands of films can be made by people who would otherwise never get a seat at the table, which the indie boss said could be “a totally stunning change in artistic freedom.”
Google weighed into the conversation around storytelling in an AI-driven industry.
“It always comes to the idea of, in abundance, how do you create scarcity… and it’s always the story, it always has been the story, and it always will be the story,” said Johann Choron, Strategic Partnerships & Gen AI Lead – Media & Entertainment, Google France.
“It’s a bit like the YouTube effect. There’s so much content on YouTube, but how do you make your video stand out there?,” he said. “For the moment, at least, we see the good content is never coming from a 16-year-old in their bedroom. No, it’s coming from directors, from people with the skill and the craft.”
