When AI becomes a triple-threat (in the Hollywood sense)

In my mind, I've seen a glimpse of the future of entertainment through the prism of artificial intelligence. Let me paint you a picture.

Take a popular show, say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. You can watch it in different languages, right? Humans have performed the translations, and they're rendered as subtitles, or by different voice actors. But machine translation is already a thing. It'll get good enough (firm understanding of idioms and metaphor and such) to where it's possible to pick any language on earth, and AI will do that translation for the whole show. Subtitles? Voice-over? No, it'll render the original actors' voices in those languages, even though the actors themselves don't know them.

Are you learning a foreign language, and you'd like to hear it a little more slowly? Or perhaps you're in too much of a hurry to spend a whole hour on an episode? AI systems can already speed up or slow down an audio conversation, such as a radio broadcast or podcast. Imagine they'll be able to do the same for a TV show or a movie. Note, this means extending or shortening the video sequences, including background elements like passing cars on the street, or a crowd of background actors. It also means the system is taking over some responsibilities you'd normally reserve for the editor, like cutting out whole scenes without disrupting the flow. Or interpolating new scenes with all-new material? The system becomes a writer and a director as well.

The tech will get there eventually. We already have AI that can write music in the style of Bach or Scott Joplin, well enough to trick most listeners who aren't experts. I would project it'll be able to do the same for the writing and directing style of Joss Whedon, or anyone else. Imagine applying a Terry Gilliam visual filter to the show to see how that looks. Or Aaron Sorkin's style of dialogue, or Kevin Smith's, or perhaps Quentin Tarantino's fight sequences.

Redo the show with a 2019 audience in mind -- updating the fashions and the cultural references and the slang, sure, but also the themes, the zeitgeist. Rewind to the Old West, or apply a post-apocalyptic filter. Perhaps you'd like to see what Buffy the Zombie Slayer would have looked like. Or leave her as a vampire slayer, but make her the cursed vampire instead of Angel. Inject crossovers: Sunnydale receives a random visit from Jesse Custer (looking for God, but the Hellmouth might be a promising lead). Or... feed the whole show into a satire, say, in the style of Futurama:

"Welcome to the world of tomorrow, Buffy Summers!"

"Did I sleep through the apocalypse?"

"Oh, you slept through three thousand and twenty-nine of them, but I'm sure another will be along shortly... [glances at watch]"

When this tech gets fast and powerful enough to compose episodes in real time, it will enable the viewer to become a participant. Now you're looking at crossovers into video game territory. Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Grand Theft Auto. It starts to look more like a Star Trek holodeck.

Someday the system will be smart enough not only to imitate other people, but create new styles, personalized to the tastes of you, the consumer. It'll know your views, your attitudes, your preference for character-driven writing or your sense of humor. You'll be able to tell it to compose an episode about an arbitrary topic and just watch it go. Ask it to teach you about a subject in an interactive way, to compose allegories and employ irony, to thumb through the entirety of TV Tropes and mix up a uniquely appealing brew.

Let's not assume entertainment will stay within the confines of a viewing device or a room. Once you can script the actions and dialogue of Buffy in real time, you can use her personality to drive a robot. A Buffybot, if you will. Now there might not be any vampires around for it to slay, but I'm sure those could be built as well... and you'd need a place for them to live, so now your holodeck experience starts to look more like Westworld.

Hmmm, best establish a few ground rules before we actually go and build Sunnydale.

Original Facebook post

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