Wildscreen Festival 2024
This year our CEO and Creative Director Rob Hifle was invited onto a panel at Wildscreen Festival, which brings together industry thought leaders, emerging talent and the most exciting, innovative voices in natural world storytelling. Rob featured on the panel ‘AI won’t take your job, but the person that can use it better than you will’ hosted by journalist Simon Bucks.
In a time of great uncertainty in the industry, the panel discussed whether AI will create new tools that will allow us to innovate out of the current lull and engage with new audiences. AI's application is expanding rapidly in the development, production and post-production of filmmaking, though it's a subject matter that divides opinion.
There is no doubt that this coming wave of artificial intelligence is going to change all aspects of our working lives in the creative industries. Rob talked about how Lux Aeterna have used ‘closed’ AI models to drastically lower their render times leading to reduced electricity use and therefore Lux Aeterna’s carbon footprint. But Rob was under no illusion that AI is green. AI has the ability to analyse and process large amounts at lightning speed, but this comes at a cost. Today data centres run 24/7 and most derive their energy from fossil fuels, although there are increasing efforts to use renewable energy resources. Google are presently looking to build six or seven small nuclear reactors (SMRs) to provide low-carbon solutions to power AI data centres which require huge volumes of electricity. The world’s data centres account for 2.5 to 3.7 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, exceeding even those of the aviation industry! It’s also a very thirsty process, it is estimated that ChatGPT needs to ‘drink' a 500ml bottle of water for a simple conversation of roughly 20-50 questions and answers, depending on when and where ChatGPT is deployed. The figures are staggering.
With the new abundant AI tool set applications proliferating the creative industries, Rob outlined the importance of a recent paper published by the Archival Producers Alliance on the value of primary sources in documentary. This would essentially create an industry paper trail, stipulating any AI integration into an image. Rob went on to say that there was currently a lack of transparency and accountability leading to sources being data washed when they’ve been processed through the AI washing machine. There needs to be more accountability regarding scraped data. Legal frameworks are catching up with the tech but US, Europe and the UK all have different legal stand points and laws concerning copyright and intellectual property.
Rob demonstrated the ease and efficiency of generating AI content with Creative Technologist James Pollock’s ‘Night at the Museum’ video. James took photos of taxidermy animals at Bristol Museum and then processed them through an image and text prompt to video. The animals came alive inside the cases, even Alfred the Gorilla and the famous Dodo made an appearance. The results got a round of applause but the irony and contentious issue about this video was that the images were probably trained on all the natural history footage which can be scraped from the internet.
Rob went onto conclude that there was one huge elephant in the room that everyone was ignoring on the panel and that was ethics and authenticity. Not only are there ethical boundaries one crosses when accessing open AI sources with regard to scraped data and the bias accumulated from skewed data sets, but there is also a personal ethical belief and conviction which one needs to teach and pass onto the next generation entering into the industry. By exercising leadership within the creative industries, we can educate the moral values of what is ‘right’ and what is ‘good’ when it comes to deploying AI.
To learn more about our AI research read What the Tech! here.