The Best Take on AI and Hollywood is from Ben Affleck
20:58 Share

Today on the a daily brief, ben affleck s impressive and viral comments on A I and hollywood before that in the headlines, eleven los is now allowing users to build conversational AI agents. Ideally brief is a daily podcast in video about the most important news and discussions in A I to join the conversation, fall the discord link in our shown notes.

Open back to the AI daily brief headlines edition, all the daily AI news you need in around five minutes. We kick off today with a new conversational agent launched from seven labs. The voice cloning in text to speech platform now offers the ability to build conversational AI bots.

Users can customize their own bots, tweak settings like tone of voice and response length. The companies is head of growth. Sam squar told reporters that customers were already trying to use the platform to build agents like this, but had been running into problems around things like knowledge based integration and handling of interruptions, leading eleven labs to decide to build a full pipeline to support this huge case.

Now debs can plug in their choice of alem to drive the conversation and set limits around creativity and token use. They can also to invoice latency, stability of education, catering and maximum length of conversation. The agents also have multi language support to help engage a global customer base.

Basically, the big thing here is not any of the specifics. There's nothing super novel. It's the fact that this is just becoming increasingly Normalized. And IT really is one more signal that the AI agent era is now truly upon us. Next up, mystery have updated their products weet and an effort to keep up with the larger frontier labs mistress chat pot.

The chat now has inline citations as well as a canvas tool to allow users to modify A I outputs mistral rights in an announcement blog post. You can use the canvas features to create documents, presentation code mock ups, the this goes on. You're able to modify its contents in place without regenerating responses, version your draft and preview your designs.

In addition, the check can now in just large P, D, F documents and images as inputs. The platform leverages is black forest labs flux pro model for image generation. The chat can also now host terrible automated workload for repetitive tasks like scanning, expense reports and invoice processing. And indeed, mystery l is referred to these workload as agents. All in all, these new features bring the chat basically in line with open the eyes ChatGPT and anthropic s claude.

The new features come along with an update, the model range picture of large as the second model in mister image capable LLM line, the model clock in one hundred and twenty four billion parameters, which is a little smaller than anthropic clod three saw IT and nowhere near the size of meta larges lama four hundred b model, or of course, the room for GPT four o mister said in their announcement blog. Post picture a large is able to understand documents, charted natural images. The model demonstrates frontier level image understanding.

Mistral also unveiled a new version of their text only model mystery large, they said. IT brings notable improvements in long context understanding, making IT well suit for use cases like document analysis and task automation. Now mystery is one of a very small handful of companies that are credible frontier model developers.

They are, along with meta, holding the banner for open source approaches. But they are, of course, in an extremely competitive space where resources really do make a difference. The company recently raised six hundred and forty million in venture funding, which is no small amount, but is still a small fraction of the billions of dollars raised by companies like open eye.

And given that this isn't enough to train a competitive next generation model, misra may end up answering the question of whether A I labs can do more with less by leveraging novel techniques. For their part, mission is explicitly taking a different path, writing and mystery. Our approach to A I is different.

We're not chasing A G I at all cost. Our mission is instead to place frontier AI in your hands so you get to decide what to do with advance ci capabilities. This approach has allowed us to be quite frugal with our capital while consistently delivering from to your capabilities at affordable Price points.

So really interesting that you're starting to see this clear differentiation in terms of how they ve view their competitive set. Speaking of open a eyes, some interesting news on one of their licensing deals, publisher dot dash marry, who is the publisher of people, Better homes and gardens and in style, disclosed that they were being paid sixty million dollars per here to license content. The multiyear partners with open eye was announced back in may and is one of many that OpenAI has signed in the past year.

Speaking of lining, book publisher harper Collins has asked its authors to opt into a licensing deal for A I training. One of the big five publishers. Harper Collins confirmed that they had struck a deal name day I company, they said in a statement.

Harper Collins has reached an agreement with an AI technology company to allow limited use of select nonfiction backlist titles for training am models to improve model quality and performance. Well, we believe this deal is attractive. We respect the various views of our authors, and they have the choice to opt into the agreement or to pass on the opportunity.

A screen shot of the communication was circulated this week by author Daniel kibble smith. IT disclosed that the deal was twenty five hundred per book over a licensing period of three years. Kiwi Smith shared his feelings when he caption the post a dominant.

Interestingly, kiwi Smith took the chance to show box a little bit to A V club and wrote IT seems like they think they're cooked. They're chasing short money while they can. I disagree the fear of robots replacing authors as a false binary. I see that as the beginning of two diverging markets, readers who want to connect with other humans across time in space, or readers who are satisfied with the customized on the man content palette, bet to them by the big computers that they never have to be chAllenged again.

Now while it's clear which side he comes down on, that sort of tale of two markets take is reminisces of what we're going to get into in our main episode, which is, of course, now coming up as we are done here with the headlines. Stay tuned for that. Today's episode brought you by plum.

Want to use A I to automate your work, but donate A I worked simply describing coding or is required, analyzed my zoom meetings and send me your insights in notion and watching IT come to life before your eyes, whether your an Operations leader, market onder, the power d on three point five assembly A I and many more, don't the technology hold you back? Check out, use plum that's plum with A B for early access to the future of workload formation. Today's episode brought you by vantage, whether you're starting or scaling your company's security program, demonstrating top notch security practices and establishing trust is more important than ever.

Penta automates compliance for I S O twenty seven, O O one, soc two gdpr and leading A I frameworks like I S O forty two thousand one and N I S T A I risk management framework, saving you time and money while helping you build customer trust, plus you consume line security reviews by automating questionnaire and demonstrates your security posture with a customer facing trust center. All power by vent to A I. Over eight thousand global companies like lung chain lead A I in factory A I use vane to demonstrate A I trust, improve security in real time.

Learn more adventure 到 com flash N L W that's vented doc com slash N L W。 Today's episode is brought you by super intelligent. Every single business workflow and function is being remade and reimagine with artificial intelligence.

There is a huge chAllenge, however, of going from the potential of AI actually capturing the value. And that gap is what super intelligence is dedicated to. Filling super r intelligent accelerates AI adoption and engagement to help teams actually use A I to increase productivity and drive business value.

An interactive AI use case registry gives your company full visibility into how people are using artificial intelligence right now. Pare that with capabilities, building content in the form of tutorials, learning paths and a use case library. And super intelligence helps people inside your company is show how they're getting value out of eye while providing resources for people to put that inspiration into action.

The next three teams that sign up with one hundred or more seats are going to get free. Embedded consulting. That's the process by which our super intelligence team sits with your organization, figures out the specific use cases that matter most to you, and helps actually ensure support for adoption of those use cases to drive real value.

Go to be super dry eye. Learn more about this. A I enable ment network. And now back to the show. Welcome back to the AI daily brief.

Today we are talking about A I and hollywood, although really its A I and creativity. More broadly, the conversation is specifically Sparked by these comments from ben f lona sy nbc show that have just lit the internet on fire. For surprisingly, given that it's the internet, they are clarity and nuance as you'll see when we share the clip.

Flex is neither denying the impact of A I, nor as he fearfully warning about its implications. We're actually going to watch and listen to nearly the three and a half minute clip because it's so coherent. But first, let's talk a little bit of background.

Hollywood has actually been one of the front lines in the struggle around the eye. We got our first strikes against a ee last year where both writers and actors were concerned around how A I might be used to replace them. Last september, the ap wrote, after a one hundred and forty eight strike, hollywood screenwriter secured significant guard rails against the use of A I in one of the first major labor battles over generate A I in the workplace.

During the nearly five month walk out, no issue resonated more than the use of A I and script writing. What was once a seemingly lesser demand of the rider skills of amErica became an existent al rally and cry. And although this strike ended, as I did with the writers winning some protections, IT felt much more like the beginning of something then I did, like the end.

There have, of course, also been dust ups around training material. The atlantic, just this week, publish a peace. There's no longer any doubt that hollywood writing is powering ai.

The analysis part of the atlantics investigation into the open subtitles data set. And they write, I can now say, with absolute confidence that many A I systems have been trained on T, V. And film writers work not just on the godfather and alf, but on more than fifty three thousand other movies and eighty five thousand other T V episodes.

Now, of course, these copyright questions or not just about whether data that was used in training the model, but whether that model represents economic to the source of that data. In other words, the big question ultimately is, does A I threaten those writers? And yet at the same time, there has clearly been a countervAiling trend as well, perhaps unsurprisingly, coming from the studios.

Lions give, for example, recently announced a deal with runway to train a new model online and gates film in TV library. Lines gates CEO told financial analysts, the entertainment business is a creative enterprise, but its future growth will require a combination of art and science. We believe that A I harness within the appropriate guard rails can be available. Able tool deserve our talent, and we believe over the longer term, IT will have a positive transformational impact on our business.

And speaking, the more ethical approaches to the generated video, a company called moon valley just announced a seventy million dollar rays to build what they call more ethical video models, the founder of the company told tech lunch we shared to believe that video generation was going to transform media and entertainment, but the startups we saw Operating in the space didn't have the necessary attributes to be successful. Existing companies were deeply antagonistic towards artists, creators and the broader industries, basically suggesting that the existing crop of companies feels like you can do whatever IT wants me of the industry, as opposed to thinking about how I can be augmentative. Still, the point here is that seventy million dollars of funding just went into a company that's trying to specifically connect those dots.

And honestly, on any given day, you can find opinions across the amet nicless cage recently went on immediate tour, warning hollywood actors that A, I quote, wants to take your instrument. Tiburtine recently called the very soul sucking. But then you're also seeing opens like this one in the new york times magazine, what if A I is actually good for hollywood? Now, this article is specifically about how A I changes fundamentally, what creators can even do.

But maybe the most interesting part of IT is the contextualized, the history of holly's wood. The the author rights can be told as a series of technological leaps, beginning with the invention of the camera itself. And each time something new comes along, jobs are lost.

Jobs are created in the industry. Reorganizes itself. Everyone in town of a certain agent has seen this movie before.

Past lips, though, have tended to have narrow or impacts. Home video changed movie distribution. Digital cameras change movie production. C, G, I change visual effects.

The difference here is that AI has the potential to disrupt many places in our pipeline since lower a query. The executive of revelations entertainment, this one feels like I could be an entire industry disrupter. So with all that context, let's go back to these comments from ban a and see what he had to say.

I want to as we kind of wrap up here, I do want to come back to AI there. You mentioned that, but you been, how did you know earlier you guys born here? We did a demonstration, my colleague, Andrew sorkin, I recreated ourselves and our voices.

How do you see that? I mean, is that a benefit or is a real threat? Is IT possible that a netflix can say, and we're going to do our own, excuse me, James bond thing out there with a bunch of actors that are completely recreated for this market or that market.

that's not possible. B, will be possible. The future, highly unlikely. See movies will be one of the last things. If everything gets release to be replaced by A I A, I can write you excEllent, imitated verse that sounds a little beat, that I cannot write your shakespeare. The function of having two actors, or three or four actors in a room, and the taste to discern and construct that is something that currently entirely elude A I capability, and I think will for a meaningful period of time.

What is going to do is going to this intermediate, the more laborious, less creative and you caught more costly aspects of filmmaking that will allow costs to be brought down, that will be lower, the barrier to entry, that will allow more voices to be heard, that will make IT easier to, for the people want to make good, well on things, to go out and make IT look A, I is a craft man at best. Craft man can learn to, you know, make quickly furniture by sitting down next to somebody and seeing what their technique is an emitting. That's how large video models, our language models, basically work, a library of vectors of meaning and transformers that interpret context, right? But they're just cross pollinating things that exists. Nothing new is created.

Not yet.

not yet yeah not yet. And and really, in order to do that, look, craft man is knowing how to work. Art is knowing when to stop.

And I think knowing when to stop is going to be a very difficult thing for A I to learn because it's taste and also lack of consistency, lack of controls, lack of quality. A I for this world of generated video is going to to do key things more than me. I wouldn't like to be in the visual effects business.

They're in trouble because what costs a lot of money is now going to cost a lot less. It's going to hammer that space and that alert is and maybe IT shouldn't take a thousand people to render something, but it's not going to replace human beings making films. IT may make your background more convincing. IT can change the color of your shirt IT can fix mistakes that you made IT can make IT you know, you might be able to get two seasons of house of the drag in in a year instead of one. And if that happens, according to macroeconomics, in you know, a cultures where there are basically all of these competing, what should happen is with the same demand and the same span as they, they should just make more shows, which should you share the same spending.

Now you can just watch more episodes and eventually AI will allow you to ask for your own episode procession where you could say, i'll pay thirty dollars and can you make me a forty five minute episode where like kendall gets the company and runs off and has an affair with study and it'll do IT and it'll be a little jackie and a little bit Better. But they don't know their sides, know those actors and IT will, you know, mix, remix and IT will do that. That's the value.

And my view, long term of A I for consumers, which is eventually my hope for A I, is that it's an additional revenue stream that can replace DVD, which took fifteen and twenty percent out of the economy of the making, which is and and there should be negotiated rights, if you want to, because what of people want to make five million second tech toc videos where they look like the adventure? great. You, you know, just like you to be to buy your iron man costume at the store, you're going to buy your iron man pack and in your body's look like man and hawk, like you on witch. That's that's what's gonna really happen.

all right, to really interesting comments, right? A lot of the response was just people being impressed and not thinking that ben aflac was gonna that deep. Another big theme was the appreciation of the nuance pour demode g rights.

The reason why I liked his words so much is that he is not define or demonizing ai. A I is evolving to be a partner to assist us in our creative and production journeys where we can streamlined all the parts that are avoid of intuition. So when IT comes to the parts that involve vision, intuition and selectric download, we can be as open as possible.

And guess what, IT will open up additional revenge streams for a hollywood that are gone with. So IT might as well save hollywood. Ha will come back to that comment around the business model in just a minute.

All see, do who's the host of the ted eye, right? Finally, a ground to take on A I and film making from a hollywood a liter. Yes, say, I will share barriers to entry.

Budgets will drop in the number of movies will rise in more voices of access to film making. Paradoxically, this will raise the bar for creative quality. Yes, say, I will hammer the vfx industry.

It's already in a downspout. Al and I accelerate that decline. Yes, customize episodes on demand are inevitable. We will see new episodes of game of throne long before A, I can create an entirely new, coherent, compelling series. Incremental episodes will beat four seas and automation.

I've frequently in the past used entertainment as my example of why my base cases, the future of the world just being about more. I think it's very likely that we do in a world where people are able to just generate their own versions of their favor IP S I, for example, on west wing in season eight to twenty eight. It's also likely that there will be new networks built on top of that as well where people can share their best generated episodes, but there will still need to be new sources of I P.

Now on that front, robby starbuck, right? Sorry, but ban is wrong on multiple fronts. In the future, one small team, or maybe even one person alone, will be able to make a film that looks and sounds like a hollywood blockbuster.

A I can already write entire film, edit renders, simulate lighting in different environments at sara. Now, interestingly, I actually think that he's sort of making just an extreme version of the same point. One small team or one small person alone making something great is just those barriers to entry being lower.

And where robby agrees is that human taste is going to be incredibly important. The rise of A I in filmmaking, he continues, will force real filmmakers to set themselves apart with truly original content that emotionally separate the film from the A I films. Gill morano rights after its the nail in the head with the concept of taste, those who developed a nurture good taste will be in the golden era of a eye. Last year, I did want to make mention of that revenue stream piece, which was almost a throwaway line, a part of IT. Here's ban afflict free can contribute that David talking about how streaming change DVD economics and what the implications for the industry have been.

lots of yours can relate to is is sitting on the couch on a friday night, going through the streaming services, cycling to the movies and thinking themselves they're not making movies for me anymore as somebody's been intimately involved in movie making for thirty years. What are the mro hollywood conditions behind that?

Well, so what happened was the DVD was a huge part of our business of our revenue stream, and technology is just made that obsolete. And so the movie is that, that we used to make, you could afford to not make all of your money when I played in the theater because you knew you had the DVD coming behind the release. And six months later, you'd get, you know, a whole another chunk.

IT would be like reopening the movie almost. And when that went away, that changed the type of movies that we could make. I did this movie behind the candle abra when I talk to the studio executive who explained IT was a twenty five million dollar movie.

I would have to put that much into print advertising to take market IT. We call p. na.

So I would have to put that in p. na. So now i'm in fifty million dollars. I have to split everything I get with the exhibitor are the people who own the movie theatres. So I would have to make a hundred million dollars before I got into profit. And and the idea of making one hundred million dollars on a story like love affair between these two people, yeah, I love everyone in the movie, but that's that's suddenly a massive game in a way that IT wasn't in the nineteen nineties when they were making all those kind of movies.

the kind of movies that I loved. And ultimately, I think that even hold decide the specifics of the entertainment industry and talk and invented here really gets was valuable about this ban off. Like gets IT they right? And most A I influences are busy dmo posting or A G I hyping.

In other words, A I will change the world. IT will not end the world. IT will reshape industries.

IT will not end industries. And along the way, there will be immense opportunity. Opportunity, honestly, like we've almost never seen to make and shape the future that's going to do.

A for today's a daily brief. Appreciate you. Listings is always until next time peace.