Some researchers at USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering have been causing a ruckus, according to this article:
A new AI tool is intended to rate a movie’s content at the script stage, allowing screenwriters and producers to edit or adjust the screenplay to achieve the desired rating from the Motion Picture Association’s ratings board, making desired changes before the movie is shot...focused on the presence of violence, drug abuse and sexual content, areas that traditionally play a role in a film’s rating. The tool, researchers say, has the potential to provide instant feedback to storytellers and decision-makers.
Even though this focuses on ratings (with the possible addition of bias detectors), the article raises questions over whether or not this kind of computer-driven review is treading uncomfortably close to the comfort zone of writers, who prefer to suffer alone at their computers without input from anyone.
And some good points are made. Afterall, no one wants to think of Citizen Kane or The Shawshank Redemption or even Avengers: Endgame as just a grouping of ones and zeros to be moved around according to an algorithm. And when so much of storytelling is about humanity, we don’t want to be taking the humanity out of its creation.
But there is far more to AI than just coldly telling people what works and what doesn’t. For example, with the Resonance AI platform, the point is not to tell content creators what to do, but give them a much deeper understanding of the content.
With our Content Intelligence, we use machine learning to look at the elements of content, to show what is truly going on. It’s a new, deeper perspective on everything from music to dialogue to editing to characters to lighting. It presents the content in a way that can be viewed singularly or compared to the elements of other content and it’s the kind of analysis that can only be done with artificial intelligence.
And when we go further by looking at the Resonance of a project, the AI isn’t making any determinations on the quality of the content. Instead it’s making millions of connections between the content and actual viewer behaviors. The platform determines how the audience actually reacted to the content and then shows what had both positive and negative impacts on the audience. This means that content creators and producers can see what elements are truly resonating with viewers. With this fuller picture they can then make more informed decisions.
Creativity will not be hampered by the analysis of Resonance AI. Consider, instead, another voice in the room. One that is offering facts about what is actually inside your content and and how is resonates with the audience.