Artistic Freedom Or Creative Chaos? Visions Of AI’s Impact On Film & TV Laid Out At Series Mania

deadline.com:

Erik Barmack captured the mood of the drama business, in Europe at least, when it comes to artificial intelligence in a Series Mania session about the future of AI.

The founder of Wild Sheep Content and former Netflix exec set out a hypothetical dystopian future in which AI churns out an endless stream of short content.

He said the ramifications of that eventuality scared him – drawing spontaneous applause from a packed room at the drama confab. “I think there is a Matrix-like case that algorithms get better and better at feeding content that can be created without that much thought,” he said. “This is highly problematic.” Barmack, who oversaw international originals at Netflix before leaving the streamer in 2019 was speaking on a session running under the banner ‘Fast Forward: The Ai Revolution What will our Industry Look Like in 5 Years?’ “What happens if media is outside of our collective control, we lose the specificity of what it means to have an expanded story that’s well-crafted and everybody is just cycling through information as quickly as possible?,” he said. “AI is going to accelerate that.

And that scares me.” The fears around the dystopian take on the future, which garnered the applause of the producer-heavy crowd, had actually followed on from Barmack highlighting how AI can level the playing field for filmmakers and creatives.