Our Entertainment is Learning About Us

Of all the new tech themes that began spreading this past year into the creative consciousness, A.I. and machine learning was the most pervasive and appears now to be boundless.

Executives from IBM challenged studio creative executives to think beyond safe audience tent pole feature film franchises to consider non-traditional story niches with just as much or more mass appeal hidden beneath the obvious. All is there to be revealed from an amalgamation of data points on a massive scale of what appeals to audiences.

Deluxe Entertainment debuted their Synapse Portal, which automates and simplifies workflows, creating the connective tissue from shoot to distribution. Not just an organizational tool, the Portal has the ability to identify what is in the content of shot material, generate the metadata with little or no human involvement, and serve it up in any number of ways as needed.

Amazon’s Comprehend offering digs into the treasure trove of unstructured data from numerous unrelated sources and threads it together to identify sentiments of interest.

Companies that run test screenings of films in post-production now have FaceTrack AI emotion tracking technology which analyzes the micro-expressions of test audiences’ faces to understand how they perceive every scene.

These paradigm shattering developments barely scratch the surface of the potential for A.I. and machine learning in production, broadcast and entertainment, before we even get to contemplating the ethical considerations. But the idea of machines developing instincts doesn’t have to be all mind boggling. This hilarious take on the nascent technology by writer comedian Keaton Patti sums up much of what we need to know right now.