Adapt, stay positive and be human – this was the sound advice offered by panellists on how professionals in the media industry can survive and thrive in a world of Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the recent CNM Leaders Summit titled “AIxMedia: How AI is reshaping the Media Landscape”.

Organised by the Department of Communications and New Media at the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, the bi-annual event gathered prominent professionals and creators from the media, advertising, artistic and legal fields who shared insights on how AI is transforming the media landscape. The audience comprised NUS students as well as PR and media practitioners.

The mass generation of content at little to no cost, and at scale
AI is vastly changing the way we consume, produce and distribute information in the media landscape, with its impact on content automation felt keenly by media practitioners and companies, creators as well as consumers alike.

The good news from an economic standpoint, observed NUS College Dean and NUS Vice Provost (Educational Innovation) Professor Simon Chesterman in his speech, is that the cost of production and dissemination of content are trending towards zero. “Generative AI enables mass generation, and it is an amazing thing that today, more people are generating more content available to more audiences than at any time in human history.”

Ms Emily Poon, panel moderator and Ogilvy’s President of Public Relations, Influence and Social Media Marketing, agreed, citing how AI has helped accelerate her advertising firm’s work processes. Where it would usually take days to derive creative ideas for an advertising campaign, employees are now able to use generative AI programmes to come up with ideas and mood boards within minutes.

“Gone are the days where we spend days trying to sketch up ideas…[For one campaign] we basically went to Midjourney (a generative AI programme), inserted a prompt and it came out with different ideas and different mood boards.”

Ogilvy India and Cadbury Celebrations’ “Not Just a Cadbury Ad” data-driven campaign was a prime example of AI generating massive amounts of content and at scale, without, Ms Poon noted, compromising on quality or consistency. The campaign used machine learning to recreate Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan’s face and voice, with endorsement from the actor, that doubled as ads for Cadbury and thousands of small Indian businesses that were hurting from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The campaign was a success with the generation of 130,000 advertisements, over 30 million ad views, 6 million rupees of free PR and a 35 per cent growth in businesses. “This is a great example of the work that we can now do that really brings personalisation in a big country like India,” she said.

A powerful tool in art and teaching
AI can also be a powerful tool used by artists to inspire their creative process and open doors to uncharted artistic territories. In fact, generative AI launched panellist Ms Jo Ho’s career as a visual artist. Originally trained in architecture, Ms Ho was inspired by how AI can produce digital artworks from existing images. One of her collections, “Skelchions”, involved the reconstruction of non-human skeletal forms produced by Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) algorithms that were trained on a dataset of X-ray skeletons to create new, alien ones.

A lecturer with the LASALLE College of the Arts, Ms Ho also uses ChatGPT as a teaching aid in her creative coding class which has helped make teaching easier. “With coding…you can ask ChatGPT how to move this ball from left to right and it gives you an option. So students solve problems on their own and we come in to help them refine the solutions.”

The bifurcation of the news media landscape
While AI brings many benefits, it comes with drawbacks. One is the challenge of convincing individuals or companies to pay for AI-generated content when costs are trending towards zero.

This has led to a bifurcation of the market in the news media landscape observed Prof Chesterman. “News media seem to be going towards two extremes…The New York Times is one of the few organisations that seems to have a business model that works through subscriptions…you’ve got the hyperlocalised Substack-style newsletters where people will pay, but it’s the [media companies in the] middle that’s been hollowed out.”

It is an issue Mr Jeremy Au Yong, panellist and Associate Editor (Newsroom Strategy) at The Straits Times, readily admits news media companies, his newsroom included, are now confronting. Newsrooms still need to cover issues of public interest such as natural disasters or accidents as these form “the bread and butter” of their work, but it is tough to get consumers to pay for such news. The key he shared, is to differentiate your product from competitors, and “what differentiates is all the value-add stuff [such as] your opinions and your long-form features.”

AI-generated works: Who pays the piper, who calls the tune?
Unsurprisingly, the rise of AI as an emerging technology has also led to legal battles between generative AI firms and journalists, and even content creators. High profile lawsuits include the one by The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that the companies are infringing on its copyrighted content to train their language models and profiting from it. Another by Getty Images against the creators of AI art tool Stable Diffusion claims that the latter has unlawfully scraped millions of images from its site.

The lawsuits point to a key issue highlighted by panellist and Chief Executive of the Singapore Academy of Law, Mr Yeong Zee Kin: who owns the copyright to AI-generated works? The jury, he noted, is still out given the pending lawsuits, but it can only be a positive one when the dust settles.

“I have got full confidence that eventually the result will do one of two things: One, supports innovation – it will support the use of works so that you can be more creative. And second, it will reward the investments of originality and creativity.”

The future for communications professionals and artists in a post-AI world
“Will AI replace communications professionals and artists?” was a question that drew a collective ‘no’ from the panel.

Communications professionals will not be replaced as the role of AI is supplemental, rather than a complete replacement of skills, observed Mr Au Yong. Also, AI does not impact the ability to think critically and analyse – skills vital to a journalist.

Artists too will not be eliminated given the human proclivity for creativity and spontaneity and human intuition, said Ms Ho. “Human artists are still important because even if there is a robot that can make its own original artwork, there are always going to be artists reacting to it and making new works from that.”

Across industries though, many jobs will become irrelevant. But Mr Yeong is optimistic that they will be replaced by new ones. For instance, new jobs were created when cars replaced horse-drawn carriages in the past. “New opportunities will come up. For us, we are probably the best machine learning models. We can pick up new things.”

Indeed, the need to approach AI with cautious optimism and pragmatism were probably the best takeaways for participants at the panel discussion.

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This story first appeared in NUSNews on 24 April 2024.