Content that Connects: Matt Miller on a “Strange” 2023 and AI’s Potential Implications on Production

Matt> It's been a strange year. The first quarter started up really strong. The second quarter was very slow, abnormally so. There's a rebound effect that we feel right when marketers get very cautious about the economy and pull back and stop spending - things get very slow. There’s a wait-and-see element, and then oftentimes the floodgates open, because they may have pulled back prematurely for whatever reason. 

In the past in the industry, we would be able to look at cyclical seasons - car season, toys, etc. That just doesn't happen anymore because products get introduced all the time, the cycle isn't the same in most marketing strategies, and we don't have upcoming television seasons to time product launches around. So, we don't have some of those telltale signs of what's to come by seeing an extremely strong car season or whatever it happens to be. I think it keeps people a little off balance, and rightly so because we are not in a long-term planning and strategy business. By the time jobs get into the marketplace and production companies are aware of them, it's very much a hurry-up style offence. It's not like you're planning things for the year or six months out or anything. Sure, you'd like to know those things as any business person would, but it's generally not how it works. It puts production and post companies in a very difficult position, because in order to react quickly, you need to keep your structure in place, and therefore you need to keep your overhead in place, and you don't know what's coming. That creates a bit of an imbalance. 

Stronger companies have either a) figured out how to weather that with volume and making sure they keep oil in the engine, or b) taken a tack where they really pare down their overheads so that they can manoeuvre and turn on a dime - but they're not as concerned about carrying the overhead. People have adjusted. I think in some odd way the covid years helped people to do that because they realised that they can pare down a lot of their overhead, and work in a much more nimble fashion in some respects, but it does put stress on other areas of operations. 

Matt> It's back to the rugby match. There's a lot of concern from marketers' points of view about where and how they're spending their money, and talk of a recession looming is always a factor. The whole industry is a little bit shifted in some of its business concerns. You have marketers truly building their in-house agencies to a degree that they've talked about for years. Then you have agencies filling in the gaps of losing this work, and upping their in-house production and post production capabilities to a point where they've talked about for years. Both clients and agencies have dabbled in it, but I think they're really doubling down in some areas and trying to execute in these areas in a meaningful way. So, you have this shift in how the parties interact together. It all swirls because if the client really has a functioning agency, who are they then dealing with for the core of their marketing communications? Is it their agency all the time or only some of the time? Are they then dealing directly with their production and post production vendors? And then when the agency is dealing in their production/post production scenario, are they no longer bringing in any of the outside vendors to collaborate with them, the people who are more expert in these areas? That creates a very interesting relationship between the agency and production and post production as competitors, as opposed to a strictly vertical relationship. These are all things we've been talking about a long time, but we're starting to see it playing out on very different levels. 

Matt> It's an open world. I go to the TED conference every year, and half of the talks this year had some component of AI. One of the companies there was Metaphysic, who really created the deep fake technology that we all saw with Tom Cruise about a year-and-a-half ago. That was a sliver of what they can do and what they're doing, so you can imagine the possibilities of these incredible tools for our processes.

I find it both fascinating and horrifying, and you don't know which way it's going to go. There was a piece recently in the New York Times talking about how the presidential race coming up is going to be dominated by the use of AI, deep fakes and everything else, and people are not going to be able to discern the source or the truth. People had a hard time discerning the truth in the last one. Imagine when you actually see a video that is indistinguishable from reality, and you're hearing ‘facts’ coming out of people's mouths that they never said. This is not tomorrow, it is today. 

Unfortunately, at TED, I saw so many demos of video imagery being created by computers with just a few problems. It still feels like science fiction. Where it goes and how it's used is the big question mark. How much can it really be harnessed as a tool, as opposed to thinking you can make wholesale replacements? I'm scared to make these types of predictions!

Matt> The founder of Metaphysic is an IP attorney. He did an experiment where he took a digital embodiment of himself, every possible movement he could make, facial expressions, etc., and made a digital package. He did the same with his voice and filed for copyright - he's copywriting himself. So, what does that mean? Well, that means that ultimately, if someone deep-fakes him, he can sue them for infringement - he owns himself, he has the IP. But the next step is to just think if an actor like Tom Hanks does the same thing. He can protect his copyright, but he can also lease it and never even show up for a ‘performance’.

This tells you why the Writers Guild and the Screen Actors Guild and all these unions are in these negotiations, trying to put up walls. The New York State Senate recently introduced a bill, clearly pushed by the unions, for the NYS film tax incentive - not the commercial tax incentive - to disallow any application for the incentive for any feature film or television show using AI that ‘displaces a human being’. But, what does that mean? Who is going to be the cop that says AI was used and it has displaced a human being? Technology always displaces someone. When they created the AVID it displaced the guy that used to go out and buy razor blades to cut the film. Jobs get displaced - hopefully other jobs get created.

Matt> The irony of everything I've said is that it hasn't changed. The fact is that true craft and true ingenuity and true creative talent is still as valuable as it's ever been, and will continue to be. There's nothing that displaces the nuance of true talent and innovation and human thinking. If you look at the winners of the AICP Show, the very human stories, the quirkiness - that nuance isn’t in automated areas, it’s in true craft, collaboration, bringing together a lot of minds, a lot of thought, and capitalising on various things that are happening in culture in a way that is very hard to synthetically replicate authentically. There are synthesised versions of it that can get you steps closer. But when you get down to the things that really stand out, the nuance of it, that's what true craft is all about. 

The question for me is whether or not society goes the way of 'good enough technology'. When do people want exceptional craft and when are things ‘good enough’? We shifted from records to CD culture and got away from this big, beautiful spectrum of sound into CDs because, while compressed, it was good enough and it was very easy to use. We tend to do that with a lot of technology and settle for things that are good enough - but they're not quite what they were. There's a certain point at which you have to realise whether or not good enough is, truly, good enough. Or whether you want things that are exceptional and standout and have the nuance that only true craft can bring.