A.I. AND HEART & SOUL

There have been some interesting discussions this week on LinkedIn and elsewhere about emerging generative AI music software. I have had thought-provoking exchanges with the likes of Sam Barcroft and Dr Alex Connock. Sam wrote “nobody wants to watch or read derivative content built by robots” and “AI music is derivative and lacks that special something that truly original content sparks inside”. Reflecting on music is helpful because it just has the audio dimension, simpler than the audio-visual nature of my chosen medium of film/video.

Alex flagged up Udio music-generating AI and said: “I’m not saying it’s desirable to have our creativity done by AI; just that it’s perhaps a little naive to think it won’t happen!”

I’ve been reflecting on music and what role heart, soul, humanity and authenticity play in its creation. If we break it down, AI can generate the tunes pretty efficiently, especially at the functional end of the spectrum such as Electronic Dance Music, ambient music like in gyms and malls, and TV library music (that’s a moribund business if ever there was one). EDM is arguably already maths (apologies to its fans out there).

The words can be generated fairly well given the right training material. Even highly emotive songs. If you gave an AI, say, all of John Martyn’s material, it could probably come up with a decent simulacrum which all but hardcore followers would be hard-pushed to distinguish from the real thing.

“The army and the navy they never will agree
Till all the men and all the boys
Are gone from our country“

It’s not really poetry. It’s quite simple.

Then there’s the third component – the voice. Feed all of John Martyn into the machine and even though his voice is pretty distinctive, it can already be effectively reproduced. Which is, indeed, useful from one perspective as he’s gone to the Great Gig in the sky.

But the final component – how the artist sings/performs the lyrics – is arguably where the magic is, the heart & soul. Listen to the first minute of the song above, ‘Don’t You Go‘. It’s illuminating what the poster has written: “I could try and explain how wonderful John Martyn’s music is, but my words could never do his art justice.” How Martyn delivers the simple tune and the simple lyrics I would contend is beyond the abilities of AI, certainly AI without consciousness. AI has no experiences, never lost a child, never had its heart broken, never felt pain, fear or anything else, and therefore can never communicate real feeling, only a copy of feelings. Humans have highly tuned abilities to detect genuine emotion and empathise with it. So, for now at least, there is some corner of the music field that is forever human – a small space where AI can’t really go. But it is a very small space.

Heart & soul do play a vital role in the best of art and culture but in music at least the field is wide open for AI. It is important and instructive that we keep a close eye and ear on where the heart & soul are, and never forget why they matter.

Don’t You Go is from the Glorious Fool LP

Will you ever work in This Town again? – SCRIPTWRITING AND A.I.

The protagonists of ‘This Town’

This week saw the release of writer Stephen Knight’s (Peaky Blinders, SAS Rogue Heroes) latest drama, ‘This Town‘ on BBC1/iPlayer. The title I assume is derived from The Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’  (1981, the year the story is set – it opens with the Handsworth riots). It may be a touch of nostalgia for that era of music that made me so receptive to the drama but I thoroughly enjoyed it, felt it had substance, and found it moving and energising.

Also this week a UK-based scriptwriter called Guy Ducker posted a thoughtful item on LinkedIn about the potential impact of AI on screenwriting. After testing ChatGPT 4.0 for various aspects of scriptwriting – from generating ideas to writing scenes – he shared his broader thoughts. His conclusion from the testing was “right now, the best it’s going to give you without a lot of help is a third-rate script for a Ron Howard movie” (which prompted a chuckle). Beyond the product test he felt that not only does it have no soul so far, it has no personality either. He punctuated his piece with a caustically amusing scene from Michael Tolkin & Robert Altman’s ‘The Player’ which spotlights the algorithmic nature of old school movie development by demonstrating the formulaic conversion of true/news stories to movie pitches. His conclusion: “AI-generated stories feel so empty because they are: no experience or emotion is being communicated, because the storyteller has none to offer.”

‘This Town’ would be extremely hard, if not impossible, for AI to write because it is driven by an intense personal sense of nostalgia for coming of age in a specific place at a particular time. It has scenes which are visually (rather than verbally) driven, especially the scenes of the Two Tone-like band (Fuck the Factory) coming together. If Stephen Knight was writing the prompts, perhaps AI could be his machine co-writer – but what would be the point? It would be easier for a writer of his calibre just to write it.

The important perspective to keep in mind is that AI applications like ChatGPT are simply tools. They help you fill the white of the blank sheet. They get the ball rolling. They can help prompt better and more original ideas – from your human brain and spirit. Looking for such tools to write ‘Citizen Kane’ or ‘Manchester by the Sea’ or ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’ is missing the point. It’s a matter of thinking Pen not Manuscript.   

Reflections on AI scriptwriting

Some useful thoughts from Guy Ducker, a fellow BAFTA member, asking whether AI will help screenwriters or bury them…

Shallow HAL

AI and Factual Television 3: Innovation & Creativity

Drones in Forbidden Zones (Channel 4)

When drone technology emerged I commissioned a series for Channel 4 from the nascent Little Dot Studios eventually titled ‘Drones in Forbidden Zones‘. I had noticed that films of pure spectacle did well on YouTube, such as a camera simply attached to the front car of a new rollercoaster ride. So the brief was simple: POV spectacle films shot using drones – anything that could be shot from a helicopter or a Steadicam was not to be included. The flight itself should be a visceral delight in itself. The films were largely shot flying through narrow spaces in difficult to access places and higher than human height.

In other words, they used the new technology in ways that emphasised what could be done now that couldn’t be done before.

In 2009 I commissioned the multiplatform half of a Channel 4 series called ‘The Operation: Surgery Live‘ (Windfall Films: my co-commissioner (TV) was David Glover) – it was one of the first TV shows ever (possibly the first) to use Twitter as an integral part of the editorial. Budding surgeons have always learned by watching experienced doctors at work – that’s why it’s called an operating ‘theatre’. In these programmes the viewers were given the opportunity to learn by asking experienced surgeons about what they were doing live via Twitter. In the UK, Live TV is anything up to 15 minutes behind reality due to the demands of television regulation. For this series the delay was reduced to a minimal 8 seconds to enable viewers’ questions to be put to the surgeons – who were doing all sorts, from open-heart surgery to awake brain surgery – after a minimal delay. The show had to explain what a ‘hashtag’ was as Twiiter was so unmainstream then. Tweeters in the USA were asking what the heck this #SLive thing was.

In other words, it used the new technology in ways that emphasised what could be done now that couldn’t be done before.

That is where we need to be for AI. There is a lot of fear, anxiety, bullshit, hyperbole, depression, catastrophising and band-wagon-jumping going on right now around TV and AI. Making things cheaper and faster and with less people is of little interest to true filmmakers and creatives.

This is the time to ask what the new technology enables us to do in film, television, content, digital interactivity and media now that couldn’t be done before.

The Operation: Surgery Live (Channel 4)

AI and Factual Television 2: Truth & Trust

As the Allies landed in Normandy in June 1944 and fought their way eastwards, their progress was filmed by British and American cameramen under the direction of Sidney Bernstein (later founder of Granada TV) from back in London at the Ministry of Information. When the concentration camps were liberated at Majdanek, Poland (the first major one, in July 1944), Auschwitz (January 1945) and Bergen-Belsen (April 1945) the unknown horrors revealed to these cameramen were sent back in rushes (dailies) to Bernstein. As soon as he saw them he realised that the way these inconceivable scenes should be filmed was important and he issued precise instructions to his teams. The filming was to be as incontrovertible testimony, using slow pans/camera movements and with a view to minimal editing, so that no one could accuse the footage of fakery.

Cut to 80 years later and the age of fake news and deep fakery. What role can footage created through generative AI play in factual filmmaking and documentary? The same issues surface – trust, authenticity and truth. AI-generated footage by definition contains no genuine truth, despite being the product of various source truths. Since documentary is fundamentally about documenting reality AI footage can by definition have no major role to play in it.

Where AI can contribute to documentary is in anything from the pre-film-camera age. For example, a thoroughly researched, historically accurate shot of the Roman forum in the reign of Nero.

It is also useful for resurrecting dead people. In the 2022 feature doc ‘Gerry Anderson: A Life Uncharted‘ director Benjamin Field deployed AI-generated images of the Thunderbirds creator’s talking head synced to archive audio recordings of the great man.

What about B-roll and GVs? Sunset over the jungles of Vietnam? Waves lapping the beaches of Normandy? This must be the wrong side of The Line because they document nothing. They are ultimately fantasy. Fine for scripted. No place in documentary.

When Stephen Lambert went down in 2007 for faking the Queen’s behaviour at a photo session, ‘Crowngate‘ proved an accidental act of public service by putting ‘Viewer Trust’ firmly on the TV agenda where it remains to this day. The issue has spread to other media, most recently in the doctored photo controversy. People want to be clear about what they are actually looking at.   

How can documentarians indicate material in their films that were created by generative AI? Benjamin Field did this by putting the Gerry Anderson talking heads into vintage TV sets to differentiate them from the regular factual footage. One way to do this as a standardised practice would be to create an AI ‘watermark’ to make clear what is not actual documentary.

Another way would be to establish a certificate that indicated ‘nothing in this film was made by AI’. At the moment a scheme of this sort is being discussed by PACT, Equity and BAFTA.

The 1 Habit of Highly Effective Factual Filmmakers is: “Trust is the glue of life. It’s the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships.” (Stephen Covey)

Sidney Bernstein, 1st Baron Bernstein of Leigh by Howard Coster (courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, London)

AI & Factual Television

“The future of Television” created by Microsoft Designer’s AI image generator

Just back from CPH:DOX documentary festival in Copenhagen where, apart from running a workshop on stress-testing nascent documentary ideas, I have been exploring the interface between factual filmmaking and Artificial Intelligence.

I had an interesting conversation with multiplatform specialist Simon Staffans about the current crisis in Television in the UK, Europe and beyond. His observation is that, although there is tons of money knocking about in the world in the wake of the pandemic, quantitive easing, etc., the vast bulk of that is being invested in applications of AI in all aspects of life, and not the very 20th century technology that is TV.

What I am seeing at the interface of TV and AI is a strong focus on what AI can or soon will be able to do to speed up, improve or enhance the processes of video content making – from idea generation to pitching to editing to creating voiceover to cleaning up picture/audio to optimising distribution to upping discoverability.

Most training/CPD and briefing sessions at present seem to be largely catalogues of the latest software presented in broad categories representing production stages – that is, the What and a bit of the How. But the frame of the Why is for the most part absent.

AI can help speed up processes and reduce the human resources required – so quicker and cheaper to produce.

It can help fix dodgy pictures and degraded audio – so higher technical quality.

As the arms race for TV sizzle reels continues apace, it can generate impressive visuals, moving and still, to help get you in a room with a money-person. You can add a cloned celebrity voice-over and some in-the-style-of music for a very polished pitch.

But who are you pitching to? If the business models of TV collapse further, where will the funding come from to enable production companies to make good use of these amazing tools?

To what extent will AI give rise to new low-cost forms of content? For example, where text-to-video apps do away with the main costs of production. What’s the relationship between puppies playing in the snow and 20 Days in Mariupol?

Meanwhile today the BPI (British Phonographic Industry) went into legal battle with London-based AI start-up Jammable (formerly Voicify AI), which creates voice clones from BPI-represented and other music artists. The knotty legal/rights and ethical questions AI is throwing up are fascinating and watching them play out over the next couple of years will be as interesting and meaningful as all these other questions about what this major ground-breaking, era-defining, future-shaping technology signifies for our industry.