A MAIN topic of two current TV festivals was AI which, as in other industries, is being touted as a money-saving, cost-cutting entity.

This major trend, which has creators terrified and investors and studio executives “excited,” is the rapidly expanding use in every phase of the business of artificial intelligence, AI.

Perhaps the scariest projection of the technology, described by one longtime independent film assistant director as “nothing but plagiarising software,” is a new gameshow on Korean TV titled Gone Producer. In this nightmare gameshow scenario, the entire series is cast, directed, and produced by AI, which also judges the videos contestants submit in a competition.

According to the studio: “The ‘fun factor’ is not only that the show is produced by AI, it is also the contestants getting confused and bewildered confronting the AI.” In other words, the show not only uses the service to replace jobs, it also makes a virtue of the fact that, as everyone knows, AI often “hallucinates” and returns incomprehensible information and opinions. The contestants and the viewers are asked then, as the media critic Theodore Adorno put it, to participate in their own demise.

Korea is well-known for its game show formats, having produced a spin-off of the Emmy-winning fictional series Squid Game and Gone Producer has already been sold to Sweden and Norway.

The “buzz” at the more industry-oriented annual MIPTV festival in Cannes centred around what the technology could do for producers and studio profit margins. Pre-conference, the Hollywood Reporter ran a full page on AI’s “buried perils” without mentioning the thrust of its creators toward job destruction, and nowhere was there a conversation about how the lost jobs would be replaced.

The Series Mania Forum did more thoroughly debate the issue but began with an opening presentation from two advocates for the practice who showed articles from the business press, including Bloomberg News, “proving” that AI was a boon to job creation. However, in The Future of Work, the French theorist Bernard Stiegler, citing an Oxford study predicting an ultimate 50 per cent loss of employees when the technology was fully developed, decried the development as “the negation of know-how itself,” inducing “a functional stupidity.”

The Series Mania Forum day was titled benignly “AI: The Technology We’d Love to Like” with one panel called “Past the Sideration,” a French word that the panel defined as “fascination” but which equally, and in this case more accurately, means “disturbance.”

A YouTube representative, a company owned by Google which is a leader in the race to dominate the field, proclaimed AI would allow “unprecedented speed” and its use would be “bold and responsible.”

Clearly, the implementation of AI is one part of the studios’ attempt to curb, in the wake of recent writers’ and actors’ strikes, the growing power of the unions. Kate Ballard from the US Writers’ Guild, in acknowledging that AI is moving faster than any limits (either contractually or legislatively) that can be imposed on it, said the Writers’ Guild had done the best they could to ensure that AI be a tool for writers, not a way of getting rid of them, and that they would revisit the situation again in two and a half years when the current contract expires.

One of the claims for AI in job creation is that the machines need “prompters,” since it is crucial that what is fed into them be specific and limited, but the host of one of the panels revealed that she had just read an article stating that AI creators were now working on machines that could learn to prompt, thus eliminating the most fruitful arena for jobs.

At MIPTV, one developer, who claimed that AI could be used in every phase of film and television production listed, for example, programs such as Storyfit, designed to predict whether a story will be commercially successful; Storyboarder, which produces storyboards for shooting, and SORA which creates synthetic images that are drawn from AI itself, and which produced an intriguing image of a smoky 1920s nightclub but which claimed that The Cotton Club, the title of the film, was in Chicago, not in New York’s Harlem.

A scarier development was that another CEO had trained AI to identify the predominant emotion of each scene (happy, sad, fearful, joyful) in a film or series and select clips aimed at enticing particular audiences. The ultimate goal one CEO claimed was “to be able to make a complete film from your bedroom.”

Craig Peters, from Getty Images, stated that the answer to controlling the device was not in legislation such as the recently passed first-of-its-kind European Union Artificial Intelligence Act, but rather through “all of us putting our collective minds together.”

The solution sounds naive and potentially a way of warding off legislation in the US, but what Peters did explain was that with the drive to feed more and more data into the machines to train them, the IP of books, movies, films, songs would soon be exhausted and the current drive is to feed as much personal data into the machines as possible. In other words, to turn each of our individual experiences into training vehicles and to “harvest” this “personal IP.”

It wasn’t long ago that the major catchphrase in the information industry was “big data” used for its predictive capabilities — but now that has been replaced by the quest for synthetic creation which might someday eliminate the human element entirely and which would be a next level up in current cost-cutting. Instead of, as the writer and showrunner Frank Lipsitz (X-Files, The Man in the High Castle) put it: making “us as writers, better, faster, smarter” studio heads envision, (as the trade press put it) “using AI to ‘scale’ creativity”; that is, to simply produce more, faster.

The battle is on to see whether AI in the film and television industry as everywhere else, simply becomes a cost-cutting tool fostering mass unemployment.