How implementing AI in media can help your company reduce freelance cost

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly developing and is being used by more creative people: artists, designers, musicians, authors of texts in various genres, and recently neural networks were started to be used in video production: movies, TV series and commercials, and also in news websites, personal blogs and services with text and video content. According to Forbes, the market of AI-based products for media has reached a total value of 13 billion dollars, and by 2030 it will be worth about 100 billion dollars.
The introduction of AI in media and entertainment (M&E) will help to significantly reduce the cost of content production and reduce the risks of high-budget projects not paying off, as AI can help to estimate everything. On the other hand, artificial intelligence is also developing for ordinary users, and they use these tools to find the information they need. People stop using standard search tools and websites, which immediately leads to a drop in traffic and, consequently, advertising traffic, which is an important part of a company's revenue. This is why businesses need to seriously consider how to regain their audience and what their profits will be in the future.
In this article, we look at several popular AI trends in the M&E industry, explore the problems that can arise when implementing AI tools and how to solve them, and cover the issue of the effective use of neural networks in the entertainment industry.

Trends of AI in media

We listed and talked about three popular AI trends in healthcare. In the M&E industry everything turned upside down in November 2022, when ChatGPT, probably the most popular generative AI-product, was released, and it can write the necessary text at the user's request on any topic and in any style, even the code. The work of generative AI is still far from perfect, but it became a truly breakthrough technology for a wide variety of spheres of life and industries. We did an experiment where we tried to write a small plugin for Google Chrome using ChatGPT.
Artificial intelligence already created a lot of trouble, because it affected the way people search for information online. People have become less likely to use search services and more likely to rely on AI, resulting in users not needing to visit websites that have the information they need. This results in lower ad display and, as a consequence, lower ad revenue. This is a problem for advertisers and website owners, however, at the same time AI technologies found application in several areas of media, which we will discuss next.

Personalization

One of the main reasons why AI emerged in the M&E industry is the personalization of services for each user. This aspect touches several areas that improve the accuracy of unique and customized offers:

• Analysis of user behavior and sentiment;
• Building multiple scenarios to provide a personalized user experience;
• Developing and training neural networks for real-time user experience.
  

Netflix is one of the biggest media companies who incorporate neural networks into their analytics tools and recommendation system. They also implemented artificial intelligence in their video encoding algorithms, which allows them to compress the picture without loss of quality, allowing users to consume less traffic and watch movies and TV series without lags and long waits for downloading.
Also, AI tools are used for news writing, when a neural network processes large amounts of statistical data and creates a news text based on it, even without human input. This was called automated journalism, and these technologies are already being used by major media outlets like Bloomberg and The Washington Post. And recently, Google announced the creation of its own AI tools for creating news content.
In general, natural language processing, audio and video generation and content creation technologies based on big data and deep learning algorithms will be the key for many companies in different aspects.

• Content creation will be faster, easier and cheaper, as AI tools will become more available.
• AI-powered tools will help companies with better understanding of their users, so they will be able to create more precise recommendations and personalized advertising offerings that solve the widespread «paradox of choice» that users regularly face when trying to find a movie or TV series to watch.
  

These things no longer seem like something fantastic.

Creating content

When ChatGPT emerged, many authors adapted it as a tool to help create content: generate texts, create colorful illustrations, short videos and audios that will best fit the users' requirements and the context of the media. It's pretty hard to argue that generative AI revolutionized content marketing.
Also neural networks improved the designers and branding authors workflow. The tools became faster, easier, more accessible and more effective, and they make it possible to create well-crafted and unique advertising solutions for each target audience with its own requirements and preferences.
But it's important to keep in mind that using pure and raw AI output can lead to legal problems, which we'll discuss below. So people in creative occupations will still be in demand, but AI will make it possible to optimize and speed up their work, as well as reduce the costs of hiring part-time employees and freelancers.

Improved advertising and increased revenue

Nowadays, most advertising approaches are outdated and don't make enough profit for companies, so artificial intelligence comes to the rescue here. As we wrote above, AI solutions increase the personalization of customer’s offers, which means they will be able to analyze user behavior in more detail and offer ads to those who will actually be interested and take advantage of the offer. This can also increase revenue from sales of a company's services.

Challenges and threats of AI in media

The introduction of artificial intelligence brings a lot of new opportunities for companies and users, but at the same time it brings several problems and even threats for everyone, especially when used carelessly. Let's take a look at what problems can arise with AI implementation in the M&E industry.

High cost of implementation

This is perhaps one of the biggest challenges facing companies that want to implement AI solutions into their business. You will most likely have to train neural networks on large amounts of data and customize them to your needs, which can be costly, and as a result, the cost of implementing AI tools can add up to the following factors:

When implementing AI into their systems, it is important for media companies to understand whether it is worth the effort and money spent in the long run. However, such a problem is slowly fading away, because more and more AI tools become generally available and their usage will become a regular thing.

Loss of traffic and reduced ad revenue

Yes, you got it right: some AI tools help to increase traffic and ad revenue, and some tools decrease them. This thing became an issue since generative AI appeared in everyone’s lives, particularly ChatGPT, which generates information based on a user's query. Thanks to AI tools, users don't have to go to web pages to search for companies. That’s why a significant part of the traffic from the site may disappear, and thus the revenue from display ads will decrease.

Job extinction

AI solutions are efficient solutions for creating content or analyzing data, and they can handle their tasks faster than humans. This is good news for companies that want to get results quickly and cheaply, but on the other hand it is bad news for some professionals: journalists, copywriters, designers, musicians and many other multimedia content creators.
People of artistic occupations already thought about their substitution by neural networks and started to adapt to new conditions. We want to reassure you that the trend to total disappearance of some jobs is not expected, but the work of many professionals will change, and you need to adapt to global changes to remain in demand. Moreover, it is too early to talk about full-fledged substitution by AI tools because of the next problem of artificial intelligence.

Quality of generated content

AI-based tools and algorithms are actively developing and improving nowadays, however so far they make a lot of mistakes and errors that need to be corrected manually or generate a lot of low-quality and fake content. Therefore, companies have to implement verification tools as well to validate the results.

Ethical and legal issues

Besides the quality aspects, there are also legal and ethical issues, such as copyright. American and European legislation does not protect information generated by artificial intelligence by copyright, which can lead to serious problems in the work of mass media, in particular, with their financing.
Moreover, neural networks are trained on content from the Internet, some of which is also protected by copyright. It is alarming to authors that technology is being trained on their material and content, but in return they receive no compensation or mention of their authorship.

Fake news and junk content

Most people are familiar with the concept of fake news, which has become a big problem in our society as it is increasingly difficult to distinguish them from real news. Artificial intelligence has made it simple to create fake content, and the authors who create the queries don't even have to try. Neural networks don't know where is true and where is false (this is one aspect of neural network training), so without good user verification of the result, there is a high chance of misinformation, which can lead to loss of audience loyalty, traffic, revenue and reputation.

How to effectively use AI in communication and media

Besides the most obvious way to use neural networks, namely generating multimedia content, cost optimization and personalization of products and services, there are several other ways to utilize AI in the communication and media industry.

Improving workflows with video content

Most of the people receive information through video, which means that this type of content needs to be handled in many aspects. Recently, labeling, adding subtitles and other important metadata became an important part of working with video. Modern tools based on neural networks are now doing a great job with this task.
Also in this article we mentioned Netflix's use of AI algorithms for encoding and compressing video without much loss of quality. This way users can quickly download content in good quality even with slow internet speeds.

Supporting users with AI chatbots

Our world is changing rapidly, information is becoming very plentiful, so society is developing a clip mentality, which makes many people expect their needs to be met instantly and their problems to be solved quickly. Human support services may not be able to cope with such a task, so smart chatbots come to the rescue, which will be able to answer questions and solve users' problems at any time of the day. Advancements in technology are allowing chatbots to become more advanced and offer users comprehensive support that is indistinguishable from human support. The introduction of modern AI in user support creates a human image of the company and increases customer loyalty through high quality customer interaction. Where customer loyalty is, there are high engagement rates and good monetization.

Fighting fake news

The reasons for the rapid development of fake news are unscrupulous journalists and... neural networks, which generate news based on already created texts without the ability to distinguish truth from lies. This is how they are trained.
However, the creators of AI tools figured out how to fight fake news with the help of modern technology, in particular, such algorithms developed in Google, which scan websites and check whether the information is trustworthy for users. Of course, the algorithm is not accurate, but it is a serious step in the fight against fake news.

Content moderation

This is a similar area to the previous one where AI can be used effectively. A company can check its resources, including advertising, for harmful content, such as those related to hate speech, bullying or violence. This way, users will feel safe and have a positive experience with your products.

Conclusion

Artificial intelligence has a huge potential for use in various spheres: from mining to healthcare. And in the media and entertainment industry, AI solutions can be used to their full potential to make creative ideas come to life, verify the authenticity of information, automate work processes related to various content, and so on. However, it is important to remember that AI solutions cannot yet fully replace humans; they can only serve as auxiliary tools. Therefore, it is important to check everything that neural networks do and make corrections if necessary, and then the results of such «joint» efforts will bring excellent results.
In this article, we looked in detail at AI in media and entertainment, what neural networks can bring to users and businesses, and what problems they can create for them. We tried to focus on issues related to advertising and revenue generation, but as it turns out, there are many other important aspects to keep in mind.
Our team works on several M&E and news industry related projects where we successfully implemented AI solutions. In one of the them we are developing AI-based applications in multiple domains, including:

• Generation of short commerce texts in the required tone-of-voice, e.g. captions for the product images.
• Generation of the content based on the pre-collected and systematized information, including articles and texts previously written by the editorial team.
• Generation of the content based on statistical, historical and unchangeable information, e.g. writing the reviews to the products, venues, cars, etc.
  

Each of these directions gave us promising results and one of the biggest achievements was the cost reduction on the freelance work because neural networks could cover these project needs.
If you have a project where you would like to implement AI in media products, but don't know how to do it effectively, fill out the form on our website and we will be happy to answer all your questions.