Daniel Hart, JEGI CLARITY Vice President, attended the Generative AI conference as part of the AI Summit in London, targeted at the media, marketing, and creative industries. With artificial intelligence (AI) on the top of every senior leader’s agenda, below are the seven key takeaways from the event of the impact, the opportunities and of course, the challenges of AI to businesses in this sector.
1. Importance of the Human Touch
The significance of the human touch in storytelling emerged as a central theme throughout the conference. The consensus was that human connection and emotional resonance remain highly valued by people, emphazising its continued importance in creative endeavors to capture emotions and engage audiences.
2. Efficiency rather than replacement
This phydigital concept suggests that rather than replacement of humans, AI will free up resources and allow for focused creativity. It was clear from both the speaker presentations and the discussions with delegates, that this is already happening with AI tools being incorporated into workflows, enabling efficient ideation, storyboarding, and empowering creative teams to explore new ways of delivery value – all resulting in increased efficiency and productivity.
3. Fact checking and factual accuracy
The importance of human intervention in AI created content to ensure accuracy and integrity was also highlighted with the overreliance on AI bringing with it an increased risk of misreporting or factual inaccuracies noted.
4. IP/confidentiality and plagiarism concerns
Attendees agreed that blockchain technology, particularly using smart contracts, could play a leading role in protecting original artists’ rights and ensuring appropriate compensation to counter concerns regarding copyright and plagiarism. Transparency was emphasized as a critical factor, allowing stakeholders to understand the extent to which AI was used in any given output.
5. Bias and discrimination
The potential for bias and stereotyping in generative AI tools was acknowledged, and an awareness of how essential using the appropriate prompts and actively monitoring the outputs are to ensure an adherence with EDI policies.
6. Hiring and emergence of new roles
Creation of prompt engineers, fact-checkers ensuring content accuracy, AI managers to maintain consistency, monitoring inputs and outputs and overseeing the reusable nature of AI tools were all mooted as possible new roles that the AI industry could generate.
7. New monetization possibilities or enhanced experiences
AI tools introduce exciting possibilities for monetization and enhanced experiences. The ability to offer personalized and interactive entertainment experiences, as well as the digitization of art collections and virtual tours, could create new revenue streams and enrich user experiences.
Conclusion
We know that AI is already disrupting the marketing, media, and creative industry landscape and with change will come challenges and opportunities in equal measure.
In our role bridging the relationship between investors and senior industry stakeholders, these are some of the key questions raised that resonate with us all:
- What training and technology investment will be necessary to keep up/ stay ahead of the curve?
- Will the cost efficiencies driven by AI boost margins?
- Will the replacement of certain roles allow those employed to focus on innovation and creative excellence, increasing quality of output?
- What new creative frontiers will we be able to enter leveraging the new tools available?
- Will the technology lower barriers to entry, drive increased competition and lead to pricing pressure?
- Will clients demand more for less? Ultimately, will AI add or devalue my businesses?
It is still early days for any of us to have any definitive answers, and no doubt the answer will be a balance of all the above, but listening and talking to both sides of the investment relationship will result in an understanding of how the market will play out, where investment might be needed and help businesses unlock new opportunities for this investment.
If you have any queries or would like to have an in depth discussion on this topic or the broader market contact us.
