From enhancing blockbuster movies to adding deeper immersion to video games, AI is revolutionizing the way we enjoy our favorite forms of entertainment. Discover how machine learning, deep learning, and other AI technologies are transforming the industry and enhancing the entertainment experience like never before.
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Gaming
Activision Blizzard
A recent Activision Blizzard patent details a system that generates music unique to each player using AI and ML algorithms. The company also recently acquired Peltarion, a Swedish AI software company and developer of a no-code, ML operations platform that empowers users to design, train and manage deep learning models in the cloud at scale and at speed.
EA x OpenAI
EA’s Frostbite Labs team has partnered with OpenAI to create new experiences fueled by rich, dynamic, and adaptive game AI. Using OpenAI’s new software platform Universe, the research community will be able to challenge self-learning AI agents to try to automatically learn to play EA games.
Roblox
Roblox’s developer tools are designed to make it possible for just about anyone to build in-game experiences and virtual objects. The company is testing two different implementations of generative AI: one that creates virtual materials based on a natural language prompt and another that can create code based on text inputs.
Sony AI x PlayStation
Sony AI is collaborating with its PlayStation arm to leverage reinforcement learning, where Game AI Agents can be a player’s in-game opponent or collaboration partner. In 2021, Sony AI created an AI agent that could beat the best drivers in the world in Gran Turismo.
Ubisoft – Ghostwriter
Ubisoft is using AI to speed up the process of writing “barks” (snippets of dialogue comprising ambient conversation in video games) with Ghostwriter, a purpose-built AI model: “Ghostwriter was created hand-in-hand with narrative teams to help them complete a repetitive task more quickly and effectively,” Ubisoft said, “giving them more time and freedom to work on games’ narrative, characters, and cutscenes.”
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Ubisoft – La Forge
Ubisoft La Forge is an open research and development initiative that brings together scholars and Ubisoft experts with the driving objective to bridge the gap between academic research and video game innovations. The team has been working to improve NPCs’ pathfinding and navigation using ML.
Unity Technologies x Google Deepmind
DeepMind has partnered with Unity Technologies, the game-development platform used by half the world’s mobile games, on a deep-reinforcement learning project, offering an approach to AI that trains an algorithm with positive and negative signals. Unity is working with DeepMind to enable a virtual worlds environment for their games.
Film
Disney – Research Studios
Disney is exploring Affective AI, an emerging technology designed to detect and analyze human emotional states. With Affective AI, Disney can realistically model and predict audience reactions that the company could use to influence a character or plotline or make content decisions on a regional or demographic basis. Insights from the project are used by the Disney-ABC Television Group to inform content decisions.
Miramax x CAA Metaphysic
Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, along with additional cast members, will be de-aged for Robert Zemeckis’ upcoming Miramax movie Here. AI company Metaphysic has entered into a strategic partnership with CAA to develop generative AI tools and services for talent.
Netflix
Netflix debuted a short film called Dog and Boy that utilizes AI image synthesis to help generate its background artwork. The three-minute animated short follows the story of a boy and his robotic dog. Along the way, it includes lush backgrounds apparently created as a collaboration between man and machine, credited to “AI (+Human)” in the end credit sequence.
Paramount Pictures x YouCam Makeup
Perfect Corp. — the beauty tech solutions provider behind YouCam Makeup, the world’s leading virtual beauty app, and photo editing app YouCam Perfect — teamed up with Paramount Pictures for an interactive movie experience to coincide with the release of Like a Boss. The partnership includes an AR + AI virtual try-on that features the looks of the Like a Boss leading actresses.
Warner Bros x Cinelytic
Warner Bros. will use Cinelytic’s algorithms to guide decision-making at the greenlight stage. Cinelytic’s software allows users to input features like genre, budget, and actors, then see what happens when individual elements are tweaked.
Television & Streaming
Fubo TV
Fubo TV is looking at ways to index linear video on a frame-by-frame basis, then integrate metadata culled by AI to allow viewers to search for things (like action shots) on a granular basis.
Gusto TV
Gusto TV is in production on what it is billing as “the world’s first food show featuring on-screen characters generated through AI software and rendered in post-production.” Performed by actors in costume and then digitized in post-production and rendered as AI characters, each character appears in a 30-second interstitial segment in an average episode.
Hulu x IBM Watson
IBM Watson Advertising and Hulu have collaborated on a custom, targeted AI-powered ad experience. The AI-powered ads feature personalized content recommenders, leveraging natural language dialog to ask users questions about their mood and viewing habits in order to deliver unique Hulu programming recommendations based on their dialogue. Users can engage with Watson via text, voice entry, or quick pick buttons.
Microsoft Azure Cognitive Service – AI Mimi
To address deaf or hard of hearing accessibility needs, SI-com and ISCEC Japan have worked with local TV stations on innovative and cost-efficient ways of introducing subtitles to live broadcasts. Their technical solution to offer subtitles for live broadcasting, AI Mimi, is an innovative pairing between human input and the power of Microsoft Azure Cognitive Service, creating a more accurate and faster solution through the hybrid format.
MLB.tv X Google Cloud
Major League Baseball (MLB) has expanded its partnership with Google Cloud to offer new video capabilities and more data-driven, personalized experiences on its digital platforms. This will provide MLB with real-time insights to optimize the viewing experience and simplify the process of tagging its vast archive. Fans will find it easier to find their favorite moments, while AI models will recommend content as it learns more about each user.
Social Media & News
Meta – DeepText
Launched in 2016, Facebook AI tool DeepText is used to monitor comments, posts, and other data generated on Facebook to understand how people use different languages, slangs, abbreviations, and punctuation, in order to learn the context.
Google x JournalismAI (Polis)
To help the news industry use AI in more innovative ways, Google partnered with Polis, the international journalism think-tank at London School of Economics and Political Science, to create Journalism AI. Part of the Google News Initiative, the project focuses on research and training for newsrooms at the intersection of AI and journalism.
Snapchat
Snapchat has turned to AI and ML to proactively detect drug-related content by identifying drug slang and content on its app. Snapchat provides in-app information and support to Snapchatters who search for drug-related terms through a new educational portal, Heads Up.
Tiktok – Effecthouse
TikTok has many in-app AI effects to create assets for Effect House projects, like AI Greenscreen (which generates an abstract image inspired by a prompt) and AI Art (which takes an image from a user’s camera roll and uses it to create a new work of art).
Twitter x IBM Watson
Twitter uses IBM Watson and natural language processing (NLP) to track and remove abusive messages. Watson also detects the tone in messages and the meaning of different visuals, allowing it the ability to analyze millions of obscene and inappropriate messages in seconds.