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Exhibitors touting AI-driven creative tools at the International Broadcasting Convention, which wrapped earlier this week in Amsterdam with a reported 45,000 attendees from 170 countries, struck a delicate balance in their messaging. Companies such as Adobe and Avid emphasized continued innovation and a desire to empower creatives, while steering clear of anything that might suggest potential job loss.
AI, after all, was one of the biggest obstacles in recent labor negotiations and a key factor behind 2023’s SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes. And while IATSE managed to make deals with the AMPTP while avoiding further work stoppage, their latest contract underscores the uncertainty surrounding what impact AI might have on jobs including those of editors, sound pros and art directors. In fact, part of the new contract calls for continued discussion and updates about AI with the studios and AMPTP.
Avid—whose Media Composer editing system and Pro Tools audio post software are widely used by members of IATSE Local 700 (Motion Picture Editors Guild)–has now embedded AI in “all of our products,” according to CTO Kevin Riley, who emphasized that the company treats AI as a “copilot” in order to “let the creators create.” He stated that that goal includes “helping the creator handle the mundane tasks, or automating tasks, so that they can focus more on the creative storytelling process.” He cited automation and translation of speech to text as examples, “so you can set up a script arrangement, automating how we organize and arrange content for someone to start to tell a story.”
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Riley added that Avid has created guidelines for the company’s use of AI. “Where we draw a very strict line—and some other companies do not do this–is we do not get into really the Gen AI part of generating or synthesizing finished content or trying to replace the creator,” he asserted. “If it starts to cross the line into doing what a creator should be doing, or wants to be doing, crossing into storytelling, we stop.” He elaborated that using Gen AI and synthesizing videos, synthesizing images, “that’s something that we are not doing as a company, because I do think that starts to cross into that threshold where it is threatening to the industry and creators. And we believe that there’s huge value in humans telling a story, and we’re never going to encroach on that as a company.”
Meagan Keane, principal product marketing manager for Adobe Pro Video and a former documentary filmmaker, stated, “My perspective is jobs are going to change. There will be some shifts, but I think that there’s actually a superpower in AI.” There’s been worry in the creative community that assistant jobs are at risk, but Keane suggested as an example that assistants that are trained in how to use AI could help bring efficiencies to postproduction. “That’s where we’re really focusing our product development–how do we build in efficiencies to make sure that editors and assistants are doing more of the creative work.
“We do not take the responsibility that we have with this lightly,” she added. “Because of that, we’ve spent the last year really digging in with the creative community–our users, filmmakers, editors–to understand what is it that they’re actually hoping for from AI, but also just creating space to have conversations about what are their fears., what are their questions.” Keane added that she recently had such in-person conversations with Los Angeles-based editors.
Adobe is now previewing its new Firefly Video Model, which according to the announcement was “designed to empower film editors and video professionals with tools to help inspire their creative vision, fill gaps in their timeline and add new elements to existing footage.” New Firefly-driven text to video and image to video capabilities are scheduled to be available later this year. And Adobe’s Premiere Pro will gain “Generative Extend,” what the company describes as a tool “designed to tackle several editorial challenges, including extending insufficient frames at the beginning or end of a clip, giving you extra footage to hold on a shot for another beat or to cover a transition, or creating seamless audio edits by generating room tone where none exists.”
Opinions vary about AI, but unease remains in the creative community. Contributing to this climate was the backlash after Adobe changed its terms and conditions last spring. Adobe quickly removed and revised its terms. Various websites at the time republished original wording, including “Solely for the purposes of operating or improving the Services and Software, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free sublicensable, license to use, reproduce, publicly display, distribute, modify, create derivative works based on, publicly perform, and translate the Content.”
At IBC, Keane said, “the terms of use that came out was an unfortunate situation where the verbiage was not easily digestible by people who are not lawyers. … I want to be very clear, we do not train our models on user content.”