The creative world is on a precipice if we are to believe entertainment and media commentators on the effect text-to-video AI modelling tool Sora will have on the creative visual world.
Gary Lineker-owned All the Rest is Entertainment podcast hosts considered the disastrous macro impact of AI on media and entertainment industries,
“Really tough times (ahead)”, “No safety net put in place”, “It’s the middle of culture that will disappear and be replaced by AI”, “And it’s coming soon”.
To divert Sports Fan readers from any further doom-scrolling – there is a fleeting moment in Season 12 of HBO comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm, when successful Hollywood curmudgeon Larry David and his manager Jeff are having lunch and the service is slow.
When they learn that the staggered service is because their waiter’s mother has passed away – they bemoan the fact their food will surely get cold at the serving hatch and Jeff delivers the funniest line in the season so far, “I ordered a tuna melt – that’s f**ked”.
It would be hard to imagine AI coming up with this exquisite one liner, or follow a storytelling process that Guardian TV reviewer Jack Seale sums up perfectly,
‘You just know that (Larry) David and (Jeff) Garlin, who have been the best in the business for decades, will have enjoyed standing around discussing which is the funniest food that is bad when tepid, cycling past soup and grilled cheese before arriving at the correct answer: tuna melt.’
Comedy is a lot like Sport in terms of its evolutionary resistance to all things AI.
Comedians make their audiences laugh and sports teams uplift their fans by the power of their craft, honed since childhood and perfected through years of negative and positive feedback loops.
The fan engagement impact of the recent AI content deal between Lille Olympique Sporting Club (LOSC) and WSC Sports will depend on how long the new AI-driven content strategy takes to work through the various audience platforms.
Lille is using ‘automagical sports video solutions’ company WSC Sports to analyse the club’s live matches, in near-live time and then auto-producing and distributing the content with reduced manual effort, as reported in Broadcast Sport magazine by Jake Bickerton.
The content is then published across the club’s digital channels, with a view to enabling Lille to max out content reach and generate fresh revenue opportunities for the club’s digital inventory and assets.
Editorial teams seldom relish management jargon and less so when the business buzzwords have a direct impact on their immediate-term livelihoods. But this would be the wrong reaction.
Make no mistake, companies like WSC Sports are hungry for more than a sports producer’s cheese sandwich from the IMG canteen at Chiswick Business Park. In 2023 the AI video company were awarded the Football Business Award for Innovation, the SportsPro Award for Best User Experience and the Technology & Engineering Emmy® Award for AI-ML Creation of Sports Highlights.
However, Aviv Arnon, chief business development officer and co-founder of WSC Sports is quoted in the Broadcast article,
“Utilising (the) WSC Sports solution will enable Lille’s digital content team to dedicate more resources to original storytelling, which will increase engagement levels.”
Originality and resourcefulness are the common attributes that comedians and sports players demonstrate to delight their audiences so why not apply the same business logic to content producers and creators?
The problem is the audience and what is known as the ‘culture of good enough’.
The term initially described software development teams who would often have to put development to one side in order to focus on a fix to make a web or an app good enough for outward consumption.
It is now often applied to the deleterious effect that good-enough social media production values are having on audience increasing low expectations.
Developing and maintaining a world class AI video platform will depend on good-enough software development until machine learning truly infiltrates – but human creators NEVER have to settle for the culture of good enough, in fact if we do, it’s not good enough.