Artificial Intelligence Ally, Not Foe, Asian Executives Say at Busan

Artificial Intelligence (AI) being beneficial rather than harmful for Asia’s creative industries was the tenor of the opening sessions of the AI conference at the Busan Asian Contents and Film Market on Sunday.

Jerry Chi, head of Japan at Stability AI, delivered a keynote address on AI innovation in Asian content. Chi showcased Stability AI’s multimodal open AI tools, including the popular Stable Diffusion image generation model. The exec highlighted AI’s utility for ideation and communication in visual effects and character design. “Generative AI and machine learning, which is the primary form of AI being used, is actually great for digital effects and it’s good for ideation and communication,” Chi said, quoting Stability AI CTO Hanno Basse, who previously held the same position at Digital Domain and 20th Century Fox.

Emphasizing Asia’s potential in AI-driven content creation, Chi said, “One thing I really love about working with this space and being in Asia is that there’s a very rich, diverse culture, both a traditional culture and modern culture. And there’s so many countries and peoples and languages and festivals and all these things in Asia, which can inspire creators. This can inspire people to create various kinds of AI. It can also inspire people to put various inputs or various creative combinations of AI to create new kinds of creative work that people might not think of in other regions.”

Chi demonstrated new AI video tools, showing how simple 3D animations can be converted to different visual styles. “Controllability and editability are extremely important in actually getting AI to be practically usable in film production. So for example, when I say controlling things like camera angle, movements of people and objects in specific ways, controlling the lighting, controlling the highlighting and focus, these are all things that are very important in the control of the scene. And we also want people and objects to be consistent over time. These are some challenges that are still being worked on, but I’m very excited by the progress of the research,” Chi said.

The exec noted that while some individual creators are publicly sharing AI-generated videos, major studios are also beginning to adopt the technology. “We’re talking to large studios already. There are some large studios that are starting to use AI in a serious way,” Chi said.

Chi concluded the keynote with a quote from James Cameron, who recently joined the board of directors of Stability AI: “While AI tools can streamline processes and automate and even add to certain elements of the filmmaking process, the essence of storytelling fundamentally relies on human emotions, experiences and imagination that cannot be replicated by machines.”

Streamlining was also very much the highlight of the sessions that followed the keynote, which focused on the AI roadmap and new business strategies for Asia’s content industry. There were presentations from Aaron Zhu, business development producer at Dentsu Inc, Zhu Liang, VP, at Chinese streaming platform iQiyi, and Park Kiju, CTO of Future Technology Research Lab at Korean firm WYSIWYG Studios.

iQiyi’s Zhu highlighted the effectiveness of AI during the information extraction process of adapting novels as scripts, noting that outline, relationship diagrams, plot points and reading efficiency increased by more than nine times, leading to more precise and efficient decision-making leading up to the production process.

Park noted: “We believe AI is going to act as a creative assistant in every part of the filmmaking pipeline. It’s going to allow for new stories to be told, it’s going to democratize the filmmaking industry and support filmmakers all around the world in telling their stories.”