The Rise of the Synth. How TV, News and Movies are set to change.
It’s as intriguing as it is disturbing, the idea of a hybrid-sentient clone taking on your memories and experiences and ultimately replacing you. How far off are we from this?
That’s the script for Swan Song (Apple films) by Oscar winning director Benjamin Cleary starring Hollywood winners and heavyweights Mahershala Ali, Naomie Harris and Glen Close.
The secondary story line shows a future perhaps not too far away with driverless cars, 3D virtual reality gaming without visors, and haptic gesturing to control electronics.
But it’s the script’s undertone playing out at the moment as we speak which caught my attention. Creating humanoids like this might still be the thing of sci-fi, however creating videos that simulate people isn’t — synthetics.
And another reality that appears in the film will be writ large. When Ali’s character asks how many people work at the cloning research centre the response is worth a thought. Three, says the head. The rest of the staff, some 50 are AI assistants, she concludes. AI will attack the skilled market on a scale that is unprecedented.
Remember the video Did you know in which jobs would be created in 2010 that did not exist in 2004. We’re here again.
You likely know of deep fakes, content distribution based on viewing habits, and predictive texts from typing on your iPhone. Then there’s twinning — one of the sources of contention for the SAG-AFTRA Hollywood studio strikes which has found a tentative solution. Here digital replicas from scanning actors or synthetically creating them for movies will be bound by the consent of actors. The test for that lay in wait.
Outside mainstream media, a burgeoning industry is taking shape set to impact its own in unimaginable and some ways. The magic wand is AI’s generative capacity to create text, images and video abbreviated as Gen AI.
History shows us just how much new technologies are worked into obsolescence. It used to take a generation or more reading When Old Technologies Were New by Carolyn Marvin. Think Vinyl to CDs, then Mp3s. Today, that process happens multiple times within a decade.
Virtual productions and the ground-breaking work seen through The Mandalorian (when is the next season?) was the next big thing stealing VRs oxygen. Gen AI has done a number on both, not entirely as replacements. LED Volume tool Cuebric combines virtual production and AI to recreate realistic background scenes in movies.
Gen AI is different to its utility function which encompasses controlling behaviour which has been with us for a while. Yet despite being an infant it spells a radical change to movies, tv and video in the immediate offing.
Been here before
I’m David, Dr David Dunkley Gyimah, a Reader/Associate Professor with expertise in cognitive storytelling and AI. I’ve had a career spanning more than thirty five years across some of the world’s best brand media e.g. BBC (Reportage — Youth Prog on BBC 2. Remember that?) ABC News and Channel 4 News. I’ve been involved with and leveraged a range of consumer media tech resulting in awards, and kindly peer reviews.
In 2004, at the dawn of multimedia, I spoke passionately about how the online world and video would become dominant. Net speeds hovered around 250k/bits then. It seems oddly quaint now. Nothing to see! That’s because that system has integrated into our daily lives.
The platform I built was one of the first video streaming sites (sans YouTube) which featured diverse stories that Apple and the industry e.g. Southbank Artistic Director Jude Kelly picked up. That same feeling of excitement back then consumes me today.
Whilst Gen AI has kickstarted a strong movement in fictional often sci-fi shorts, it’s in the non-fiction space that I see a trend which will impact docs and non fiction storytelling using synths (synthetics); images and video generated within AI.
A month ago, I had the good opportunity of sharing my latest work at the British Screen Forum. It went something like this. My father came to the UK in 1955 from the Gold Coast. He was part of a cohort that were meant to gain knowledge and skills and return to help build the newly minted Ghana. He didn’t.
His story is full of compelling story arcs. He was a policeman, but abandoned any idea of it once in the UK. He was metaphorically drowning. After twenty-something years and with his children (my three siblings and I) he took us back to Ghana. There he was being feted by friends that knew him from London as Mr Fixer to become a presidential candidate, or otherwise CEO.
With a few images of him and letters he left behind the idea of making a film about him drew stronger. But the film would not just about his life. It would be symbolic of the myriad stories other Africans (West Africans) went through. The feeback online was overwhelming.
And then, a slice of politics too. Africans like my father and mother are part of the Windrush generation. Yet Windrush, obviously leans towards the Caribbean experience. That’s not a slight and Windrush must continue to be applauded. However, we’re mature enough to give similar flowers to the West African contribution to the UK.
Today, there are more British people registered in the UK of African origin than Caribbean. That stat is dominated by people from West Africa.
This is the trailer on the back end of my research. A piece of factual impressionistic work created via AI. Chairman, an affectionate term of respect, was produced with almost half the media generated via AI.
I use the word impressionism as my representation of a truth about my father in the same way docu-drama is created or an auteur like Errol Morris or Ken Burns would use the medium. And yes I’m not comparing my output to them, rather the method.
I found it interesting too that several years ago as an Artist in Residence at the Southbank when Filmmaker Mark Cousins shared a week of his time with me, he too would refer to my work as impressionism.
What does this all mean? Couple of thoughts.
Well there are huge ethical and moral dilemmas unquestionably ahead. The trailer I’ve produced is a first iteration. The next will showcase more of what Gen AI can do. And yet it’s still early days.
There’s a wealth of historical films, which combined with research can be revived. I’m looking to collaborate with a researcher who’s unearthed some mind-blowing facts around Britain’s industrial revolution.
Skills at prompting Gen AI to produce exactly what one has in mind, will develop and the softwares will become more adept at producing not just frames or limited video but whole, more acutely, directed (24 frame) sequences.
I’d like to see greater collaboration between industry and academics who have their feet in the AI practice and research space. There’s some movement here.
Then there’s the concern around the creative process and how technologists exploring deep patterns could automate filmmaking. Five years ago I tested my film made near the Syrian border on IBM’s AI. More on that in the future.
This morning I was watching the epic trailer for the next Ridley Scott film. I couldn’t help though thinking, how soon before someone using Gen AI creates something as epic as this. Blink!
- Watch out for the new tech magazine publication.
- Dr David Dunkley Gyimah
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