Sopa Pictures | Lightrocket | Getty Pictures
Netflix is “all in” on leveraging generative synthetic intelligence on its streaming platform, in keeping with the corporate, as AI continues to make its manner into mainstream leisure.
The feedback got here from Netflix’s earnings report Tuesday, which highlighted AI as a significant focus for the world’s largest streaming service by subscriber rely.
“For a few years now, [machine learning] and AI have been powering our title suggestions in addition to manufacturing and promotion expertise,” Netflix stated in a letter to shareholders.
Netflix added that generative AI presents a “vital alternative” throughout its streaming platform, together with enhancing its suggestions, adverts enterprise, and films and TV content material.
“We’re empowering creators with a broad set of GenAI instruments to assist them obtain their visions and ship much more impactful titles for members,” it stated.
Netflix offered latest examples of this, noting that in its just lately distributed movie Blissful Gilmore 2, it used generative AI instruments to assist de-age characters. In the meantime, producers for the Netflix sequence Billionaires’ Bunker have used numerous generative AI instruments throughout pre-production to discover wardrobe and set designs.
Considerations of AI alternative
Netflix’s feedback come amid broader considerations within the leisure and artwork world relating to the potential for AI to exchange human staff and the expertise’s use of human-made content material.
Talking throughout an earnings name, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos seemingly addressed these points, noting that AI can improve the general TV and film expertise, however “cannot robotically make you an ideal storyteller should you’re not.”
“We’re assured that AI goes to assist us and assist our artistic companions inform tales higher, sooner and in new methods — we’re all in on that,” Sarandos stated. He added: “We’re not apprehensive about AI changing creativity.”
Nevertheless, many within the leisure business stay skeptical of AI and its rising presence in media.
An upstart manufacturing studio known as Particle6 just lately confronted huge backlash for its plan to create, design, handle and monetize AI-generated actors and expertise, together with from the media union SAG-AFTRA.
SAG-AFTRA beforehand led a big actors’ strike in July 2023, amid a broader sequence of Hollywood labor disputes that noticed considerations about using synthetic intelligence delivered to the forefront.
The strike lasted over 100 days earlier than a tentative settlement was reached between SAG-AFTRA and the Alliance of Movement Image and Tv Producers, which included the institution of contractual AI protections for movie and TV performers for the primary time.
To additional encourage the accountable use of such AI instruments, Netflix just lately launched a brand new AI-focused production guidance geared toward its creators.
