How AI affects creative industries

Graphic image by Park Seong-hye

By Park Jin-hai

Last year, the repercussions of the defeat of 9-dan professional Lee Se-dol to a deep-learning based computer program in Korean society were immense. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the one of today's hottest topics and its use has now gone beyond the world of logic and is fast making inroads into the most creative field of human beings _ arts.

In the recent convention Next Content Conference in Seoul, spectators wowed at an AI named Benjamin printing out a full-length poem _ even emotional and touching _ in less than a second. With a keyword, or "seed," given, a full movie script has been completed in a split second.

Based on the AI bot-written script, the film "Sunspring" was entered in the Sci-Fi-London Film Festival short film competition and won a special award last year. It also gave a bizarre experience to spectators, when judges asked the automatic screenwriter what is next for it and it closed its speech by saying "The world is still embarrassed. The party is with your staff. My name is Benjamin."

Although many focus on the commercial use of AI, as seen in the global AI speaker war, many interesting experiments are being carried out on its use it in the spectrum of the arts around the world.

New media theorist and computer science professor Lev Manovich, who visited Seoul for the conference, said customized cultural content with the help of new technology is possible. "People will not be making the same movie, same clothes, same design for everybody. Every time people go to see a movie, it will be different and made just for me," Manovich said. He called for the end of culture as an industry. "I believe industrialized culture has to die. I urge talented Korean minds to devise ways in which culture can thrive without being forced into an industry."

Local media companies are adopting AI in their news writing, albeit to a limited extent. Since August, Yonhap News has been running an automated reporting system to produce news on English Premier League football games. At soccerbot.yna.co.kr., the algorithm-powered "Soccerbot" imitates the way human journalists write at During the past election, NARe (News by Artificial intelligence Reporter) was adopted by broadcaster SBS, in reporting the percentages of votes counted and polling rates, ultimately concluding that, "With 87 percent of total votes counted, regardless of the remaining votes, candidate Moon Jae-in is confirmed to become the next President."

Lee Joon-hwan, a Seoul National University professor who co-developed NARe, said, "Robot journalism appeared in 2015 to write short articles. But this year, it was used to write longer articles on the stock market and election."

Like a child learning sentences, the AI software gets trained repeatedly to learn various ways to express a given datum, according to the professor.

"As seen in the LA Times' Quakebot, which analyzes notifications for earthquakes and automatically creates a blog post for the newspaper, it is very effective in delivering critical information fast. If we use AI in journalism, it will be possible to write different articles for each person, based on the needs of that person."

More experimental approaches, including collaboration between AI and human creators, have been also made. Local Art Center Nabi has done a project where an AI algorithm is trained with iconic paintings like Rembrandt's and is used to reproduce images in that artist's painting style.

Oscar Sharp, director of "Sunspring," said the AI script writer is "humane." because it is trained by thousands of human writers. "Literally thousands of human screenwriters trained Benjamin, and those human screen writers write about characters who sometimes say their own names. So when you are experiencing the output, you are not experiencing the output of a machine, but experiencing the work of thousands of human beings, processed through a machine."

He said Benjamin a different kind of instrument that enhances human creativity. When a writer is stuck on finding the next words or phrases, it shows selections of words it was trained on from past literary masterpieces, and the author can rather avoid those cliches and think about other creative expressions, he says.

But still, many remain skeptical about AI's role in content creation. Animator Pierre Coffin, director of the "Despicable Me" and "Minions" movies who was in Seoul for the conference as well, said, "AI feels more like a trend than anything revolutionary. I have a hard time imagining AI influencing content, which is about how to tell a story and tell it well."

"Story is something that is too human to be technologically driven. Content is aimed at human beings, so I'm not sure how stories not made by human beings will psychologically impact human beings."

Kwon Ho-young, senior researcher at Korea Creative Content Agency, said AI's practical use has remained elementary and largely unexplored. "AI is writing novels and scenarios, but many of such attempts are mainly done in the laboratories and have not reached to the level where human beings can feel ease to enjoy," said Kwon. "Even in AI journalism like NARe, which has been developed close to being used practically in real world, the outcome and the order of telling facts and logic have been not as natural as human reporters. It has been human being making a format and AI has been changing numbers according to different conditions. In election reporting, SBS human reporters took eight minute to adjust the article and give meanings to it."

When it comes to straight articles on stock market, weather or sports, AI could be okay to be used, so that journalists can have more time to focus on articles that requires personal insight and creativity, he said.