We all need to be familiar with AI developments in parallel industries like (Hollywood), to learn lessons on how the industry is dealing with perceived threats, and how it is embracing the opportunities AI brings.


New from The Wrap this week, Scott Mendelson takes a look at how AI might impact a side of Hollywood most people would assume is safe from AI disruption: Acting.

Most of the developments Mendelson reviews here should be cheering to publishers. Especially the lip-syncing AI that means any movie can be seamlessly dubbed in multiple languages such that no viewer would know the actors were not speaking the lines themselves.

More movies reaching even bigger audiences in even more countries, with the knock-on sales of associated books… just one one many ways that publishing will indirectly benefit from AI disruption of related – and likely unrelated – industries.

As Mendelson, says, “Right now, we’re only seeing glimpses of AI’s potential when it comes to acting.”

AI can even raise actors from the dead. Well, after a fashion.

“Good old-fashioned CGI” (who of us born in the last century would ever imagine saying that?!) has been breathing life into deceased actors for a while now, of course.

But per Mendelson, “Recent, startling advancements in artificial intelligence promise to deliver far more realistic results than ever before thought possible. According to the experts, the technology needed to create a totally believable deep fake 30-year-old Connery is just around the corner.”

Given how much the movie and TV business is central to our publishing lives – directly and indirectly – we all need to be familiar with AI developments in parallel industries like these, to learn lessons on how the industry is dealing with perceived threats, and how it is embracing the opportunities AI brings.

The big takeaway from the Mendelson post is that disruption will happen, whether we like it or not, and that there will be both winners and losers.

So what else is new?

Reality check: The sky is not falling for Hollywood, any more than it is for publishing.

For both, the opportunities outweigh the downsides, and for both the important thing is to minimise casualties by understanding likely developments and adjusting to them, not clinging to the past.

There’s never been a more exciting time to be in the publishing industry.

Read Scott Mendelson’s piece for The Wrap in full here.

#AI #AIacting #AIHollywood #AIpublishing #BewareTheFutureItsCloserThanWeThink


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