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CES 2025 predictions for Generative AI and Hollywood
Before the main show opens on Tuesday, professionals in the digital marketing, advertising and creative industries gather at CES for a day of roundtables and panels, usually discussing the hottest topics of the moment.
This year is no different, and the hot topic was, of course, generative AI.
I attended several panels throughout the day, all under the “Digital Hollywood” track. These covered the manner in which AI impacts the media industry in particular, ranging from how it’s changing the creator economy, what monetisation opportunities and threats it presents, and where things stand from copyright, legal and ethics perspectives.
While many of the viewpoints focused on the film industry, there were plenty of predictions and opinions that apply to anyone in any industry that revolves around content creation.
Will generative AI eat up Hollywood? Read on to see what the experts predicted throughout the day.
The democratisation of content creation
There was much talk about the potential for AI to democratise content creation. That is, to lower barriers to entry and enable faster, more efficient production processes in Hollywood and beyond.
Some panellists expressed the view that generative AI will enable more people to manifest their creativity in ways that would have been previously inaccessible. One example: text to video, where the creator might not need any filming equipment to “shoot” something.
I don’t believe that a tool becoming more widely accessible makes it more democratic. In some panels, there was almost an over-eagerness to embrace 90-second generative AI videos as proof that AI is coming and will make “everything better”.
Mind you, “everything better” here means largely making money; I suspect that money is unlikely to trickle down to the artists that ultimately make art possible. I can’t see how that makes anything more democratic.
Or as Garbage Day more eloquently puts it, it’s likely less democracy and more just “AI Slop“.
Extended Reality (XR) was just waiting for Gen AI
Could the integration of AI and XR (Extended Reality) technologies create more personalized and immersive experiences? Some panellists argued yes, and that AI was the key ingredient that XR was missing to take off.
The premise goes that consumers need reasons to return to any kind of metaverse-like experience they might have had, regardless of whether you’re talking AR, VR or XR. Giving consumers vast amounts of content that keep them engaged could be one such reason.
Generative AI can certainly create endless reams of content, and with potential applications in entertainment, navigation and everyday use, it might just be the final piece of the puzzle for XR experiences to become mainstream.
Infrastructure needs to catch up with AI
Some of the promised experiences from Generative AI will only come to fruition once the infrastructure catches up. Or, in other words, factors like latency, bandwidth and computing power all play a role in a consumer’s ability to experience any kind of generative AI-powered content.
To that effect, Leslie Shannon, Head of Ecosystem and Trend Scouting at Nokia, spoke of a partnership the Finnish company has penned with T-Mobile and Nvidia, which aims to bring AI, computing and RAN (Radio Accessed Networks) to a telco pole near you.
The idea is that by installing “processors” closer to access points, computing can be done closer to where it’s being requested from, cutting times and reducing latency.
Don’t hold your breath, though, as it will likely take a couple of decades before widespread coverage is in place.
And so does local computing
In a similar vein to the above, your mobile phone will need to become a lot more powerful in order to handle the computational requirements of many generative AI use cases.
This is perhaps even more the case when it comes to augmented reality devices, such as the Meta Ray Ban. It’s currently physically difficult for a pair of glasses to run a computer-like engine without adding size and weight that makes them uncomfortable, cumbersome or just plain silly.
As a workaround to this, companies are exploring having smaller devices like your phone do all the computing and then beam that data for rendering on your lenses, whatever type of lenses they might be. While this might be the case with or without generative AI involved, the simple fact that generative AI is becoming native to all sorts of applications will likely mean that mobile devices will need to keep up.
Coming soon to a Judge Judy episode near you
Given the much-publicised ongoing legal battle between the New York Times and OpenAI, it was brave of Jenni Katzman, Senior Director from Microsoft, to sit in a panel with six other people to tackle the litigation, copyright and ethics perspectives regarding AI in the creative community. Very brave.
For the most part, the sentiment seemed to be more or less unanimous: there’s a need for legislation and regulatory overview that governs the many cases in which generative AI is being used, particularly as far as an individual’s image, voice and other biometrics are concerned. On that, everyone seems to agree.
The differences of opinion start when it comes to how AI is trained, with Microsoft arguing fair use and the rest of the panel explicitly or implicitly disagreeing.
But whether it’s to protect individuals from being deepfaked or artists from having their content used without due credit or recompense, it’s unlikely that legislation will come anytime soon.
Don’t wait for a Trump administration hungry for deregulation to do much about it.
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