Leviathan or Utopia? Strategic Options to Harness AI in the Screen Entertainment Industries

Industrial movements and unrest in the face of the sudden arrival of new technology are hardly new. April 2012 marked the bicentenary of the high point of the Luddite uprising in the UK. The Luddites were machine breakers, opposed to new automated looms that could be operated by unskilled workers, which meant that many of the skilled craftspeople who had done that work would lose their jobs. Although they have been remembered as the first in a series of industrial working-class movements, the Luddites were a handful of skilled workers with very specific concerns (O'Rourke, Rahman, and Taylor, 2011).

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) marks the arrival of a new industrial revolution, and the creative industries are sitting in the front row (Kissinger, Schmidt, and Huttenlocher, 2022). How may management best capture and optimize the value created by this new technology, while limiting its potential damage to the creative talent community and to the process of creation at large?

This paper explores these shifting power dynamics by drawing comparisons to the arising tensions and strategic challenges currently posed by AI technologies and applications across the screen entertainment industries (film, television, and streaming).

Notably, high stakes for talent and management framed the two concurrent and longest industrial disputes in Hollywood’s history: The Writers’ Guild of America (WGA) and the SAG-AFTRA actors’ unions, which cost Hollywood’s production and promotional runway a combined total of 266 stoppage days in 2023. At the heart of the industrial strikes lay a polarizing battle for power between management and skilled creative artisans that is reminiscent of the Luddite uprising. On the management side (Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers - AMPTP) – representing the Hollywood Studios and Silicon Valley-backed Streamers – AI was initially downplayed and discounted. Accordingly, management’s opening position on AI was to offer an annual conference on “the changing state of technology.” By contrast, writers and actors saw AI as a ubiquitous and existential threat to their working rights and future careers, and alongside improved remuneration, placed AI first and foremost in their negotiation strategies.

Societal stresses and values played a key role in the dispute, with management’s initial positions and expectations being eroded line by line as the pressure of a total Hollywood shutdown and wider public support for writers and actors built over months. An “emergent” power struggle in the creative industries is set to be played out over the coming decade, with the next formal clash set for 2026, when the three-year union agreements come up for renewal.

Industry norms and standards that have held for more than a century are being disrupted and rewritten by AI, including copyright, a long held legal precedent that underpinned intellectual property rights and risk management in the screen entertainment industries (Finney. 2023 a). Within the next two years, key AI elements will be bedded into digital workflows, augmenting Virtual Production in particular (Finney, 2023 b). For creatives and project managers, AI technologies have the potential to unlock resources and creative capacity. For the wider film and television industries, roles will disappear, be replaced, and many will change. And new skills and expertise will be required. Increased investment in the technologies will also accelerate the efficiency of previously established AI functionalities, such as content moderation, closed captioning, green-screening, and sentiment analysis. The impact of generative AI specifically on the screen industries is already exceptionally fast and dramatically transformative. The barrier to AI entry is almost zero: nearly all functions across the screen entertainment value chain involve the use of computers, from screenwriter to sales executive, production scheduler to post-supervisor. Of the two historically most accessible and tactile domains, animation has already taken the leap to 3D digital production (Catmull, 2017), and live action shoots are now moving swiftly in that direction.

The film, television, and streaming sectors have found themselves suddenly at the frontier of a rising debate around how to engage, harness and utilize generative large language models (LLMs), images and text-to-image generating models such as Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and DALL-E, and the application AI to create, re-create and augment actor’s performances and voices, to name but a few.

In a bid to address the challenges, we organize the industry into five groups across the screen entertainment value chain (Finney, 2022), related to how AI technologies are being utilized: (i) creative content (e.g., written, images, performance etc.), (ii) data and information analysis, (iii) content augmentation and post-production inputs, (iv) information extraction and enhancement, and (v) algorithmic inputs and outputs. We critically examine the proven (and potential) utility, threats, and posit the unforeseen consequences of AI in each of these areas across our bespoke AI value chain across the screen entertainment industry.

We then explore the use of AI as a creative tool (Du Sautoy, 2019; Orme, 2019). At present, creative players can broadly be divided into two camps: the “Luddites”, frozen by fear of the unknown; and the “Co-Pilots”, eager to prompt and play with generative models in a bid to work with the technology rather than against it. Two different visions of AI lie beneath the two camps. The Luddites see AI as “something closer to an alien life form — a leviathan being summoned from the mathematical depths of neural networks — that must be restrained and deployed with extreme caution in order to prevent it from taking over and killing us all” (Roose, 2023; also, Barrat, 2023; Suleyman and Bhaskar, 2023). In contrast, the Co-Pilots see AI as “a transformative new tool, the latest in a line of world-changing innovations that includes the steam engine, electricity and the personal computer, and that, if put to the right uses, could usher in a new era of prosperity and make gobs of money for the businesses that harness its potential” (Roose, 2023; also, Gawdat, 2022). Management appears to be sitting on the fence, waiting to see what cost-benefit opportunities AI can provide in a business whose overall model is under extreme duress both creatively and financially.

Next, we delve deeper and speculate about generative AI’s evolution as a potential creator in its own right - beyond human direction, input and agency. This anticipated development lay at the heart of the 2023 Hollywood writers’ (WGA) and actors’ (SAG-AFTRA) strike actions and impasse. We examine and assess the temporary guard rails put in place as a result of union and management settlements, and what implications they have for leaders and strategic man-agers given the high level of challenges kicked into the three-year down the line 2026 long grass.

Our overall framing is focused on the strategic options the Studio-Streaming management have in adapting and harnessing AI without alienating and impoverishing the creative community. Can strategies enshrine maximum benefit from AI where it is derived through a human-centric model designed to augment, rather than replace, human creativity (Anantrasirichai and Bull, 2021)? What indicators exist today that suggest positive directions of travel and new shared revenue models? For example, digital gaming enjoys well-functioning models for users, creating games and assets of their own, as well as for film and drama series storytelling. Could large IP brands with digitally orientated film assets similarly create such virtual studios and distribution platforms for narrative content generated by avid fans?

The paper concludes by proposing strategic options to allow management to best capture and optimize the value created by AI, while limiting its potential damage to the creative talent community and to the process of creation at large.


Keywords

Artificial Intelligence, Film, Television, Streaming, Value Chain, Labor Relations, Industrial Revolution


References

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Finney, A. (2022). The International Film Business: A Market Guide Beyond Hollywood. Routledge, 3rd Edition: London.

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Suleyman, M., and Bhaskar, M. (2023). The Coming Wave. Penguin Random House: Dublin.