AI influence grows in creative industry
Last year, the repercussions of Alpha Go, a deep leaning-based computer program, beating nine-dan professional go player Lee Se-dol, given to Korean society were immense. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the one of the hottest topics of today and now its use has gone beyond the world of logic and is fast making inroads into the most creative field of human beings — arts.
In the recent convention Next Content Conference in Seoul, spectators wowed at an AI named Benjamin printing out a full-length poem — even emotional and touching — in less than a second. With a keyword, or “seed,” given, a full movie script has been completed in a split second.
Based on the AI-written script, the film “Sunspring” entered the Sci-Fi-London Film Festival short film competition and won a special award last year. It also gave a bizarre experience to spectators, when judges asked the automatic screenwriter what is next for it and it closed its speech by saying “The world is still embarrassed. The party is with your staff. My name is Benjamin.”
Although many focus on the commercial use of AI, as seen in the glob- al AI speaker war, many interesting experiments are being carried out to use it in the spectrum of the arts in and around the world.
New media theorist and computer science professor Lev Manovich, who visited Seoul for the conference, said, with the help of new technology, customized cultural content will be made possible. “People will not be making the same movie, same clothes, same design for everybody. Every time people go see a movie it will be different and made just for me,” Manovich said. He called for the end of culture as an industry. “I believe industrialized culture has to die. I urge talented Korean minds to devise ways in which culture can thrive without being forced into an industry.”
Local media companies are adopting the AI technology in their news writings although its extent is limited. Yonhap News is running an automated reporting system to produce news on English Premier League (EPL) football games since August. “Soccerbot” software powered by an algorithm imitates the way human journalists write at soccerbot.yna.co.kr. During the election, NARe (News by Artificial intelligence Reporter) was serviced to local broadcaster SBS, reporting the percentage of votes counted so far and polling rates, and concluded, “With 87 percent of total votes counted, regardless of the remaining votes, candidate Moon Jae-in is confirmed to become the next President.”
Lee Joon-hwan, the Seoul National University professor who co-developed NARe, said, “Robot journalism appeared in 2015 to write short articles. But this year it was used to report longer articles on the stock market and election.”
Like a child learning sentences, the AI software gets trained repeatedly to learn various ways to express a given datum, according to the professor.
“As seen in the LA Times’ Quakebot, which analyzes notifications for earthquakes and automatically creates a blog post for the newspaper, it is very effective to deliver critical information fast. If we use AI in journalism, it will be made possible to write different articles to each person, based on the needs of that person.”
More experimental approaches and collaborations between AI and human creation, have been also made. Local Art Center Nabi has done a project where AI algorithm is trained with iconic paintings like Rembrandt’s and is used to reproduce images in that artist’s painting style.
Oscar Sharp, director of “Sunspring,” said the AI script writer is “humane.” because it is trained by thousands of human writers. “Literally thousands of human screenwriters that we trained Benjamin on and those human screen writers write about characters who sometimes say their names are. So when you are experiencing the output, you are not experiencing a machine, but experiencing thousands of human beings’ work, processed through a machine.”
He said Benjamin a different kind of instrument that enhances human creativity. When a writer is stuck on finding the next words or phrases, it shows selections of words it was trained on from past literary masterpieces, and the author can rather avoid those cliches and think about other creative expressions, he says.
But still, many remain skeptical about AI’s role in content creation. Animator Pierre Coffin, director of the “Despicable Me” and “Minions” movies who was in Seoul for the conference as well, said, “AI feels more like a trend than anything revolutionary. I have a hard time imagining AI influencing content, which is about how to tell a story and tell it well.”
“Story is something that is too human to be technologically driven. Content is aimed at human beings, so I’m not sure how stories not made by human beings will psychologically impact human beings.”
Kwon Ho-young, senior researcher at Korea Creative Content Agency, said AI’s practical use has remained elementary and largely unexplored. “AI is writing novels and scenarios, but many of such attempts are mainly done in the laboratories and have not reached to the level where human beings can feel ease to enjoy,” said Kwon. “Even in AI journalism like NARe, which has been developed close to being used practically in real world, the outcome and the order of telling facts and logic have been not as natural as human reporters. It has been human being making a format and AI has been changing numbers according to different conditions. In election reporting, SBS human reporters took eight minute to adjust the article and give meanings to it.”
When it comes to straight articles on stock market, weather or sports, AI could be okay to be used, so that journalists can have more time to focus on articles that requires personal insight and creativity, he said.
I believe industrialized culture has to die. I urge talented Korean minds to devise ways in which culture can thrive without being forced into an industry.