“Previously … it was like being in a world of horses and having a car with a one litre engine, but controls like a Boeing 747. So you needed to get really smart, specialist people to make it go. Now, you have tools that can be integrated into the sidebar of Office 365 or the Google Suite.”
PwC’s Sharma has the same prediction. “What’s going to happen in a year’s time is that our clients … are going to expect us to deliver higher value insights in much much shorter timeframes. If we were to meet again in a year’s time, I think you could find an even older looking version of me.”
Hilary Krane, chief legal officer at Creative Artists Agency, said she believes AI creates more opportunity than risk for Hollywood. The trick, she says, will be to “favour the creative thinkers and humans who actually put out the work without constraining the use of the new tool”.
The upsides to AI technology may be more apparent for actors, who could hire out their “digital doubles” to, for example, act in an advertisement while they were shooting a feature film. The key to making this work is for the industry to enforce basic ethical concepts, including that “people own their name, image and likeness and that they should be in control of when and how it is used,” says Krane.
However, he highlights the need for experienced engineers to judge and validate the AI’s results and “coax” out the correct answers. “AI has profoundly transformed the role of coders. Instead of focusing solely on manual coding, they now spend more time defining the problem, designing the structure and directing AI to do the heavy lifting,” he says, adding that it frees up staff from “mundane tasks”.
