ITV wanted gen-AI head to ‘protect’ IP, not replace writers
ITV’s controversial job ad for a “head of generative-AI innovation” was part of an effort to protect its intellectual property instead of replacing human screenwriters, the broadcaster’s research head has revealed.
Neil Mortensen, director of ITV Insights Group, said the ad, which was widely criticised by industry bodies when it was published last month, was “written by one of our tech teams” and not by “creative people” at the company.
The job posting, which was condemned by high-profile UK TV writers such as Lisa McGee (Derry Girls) and the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, was soon removed after the story caught attention in the UK news.
However, speaking on a panel at the Media Research Group Conference in London on Wednesday, Mortensen insisted the role was created to help ITV better understand generative AI, “so we can better understand and be equipped to protect our intellectual property rights”.
Mortensen revealed that the 2023 Hollywood writers’ strike, which brought huge parts of the US film and TV industry to a halt, was a key driver that moved ITV to create the ad.
ITV, whose Studios production division sells to US-based broadcasters and global streaming companies, was directly impacted. Earlier this month, ITV reported its Studios revenue was 20% down year on year, with the strike cited as a key factor.
“[The writers’ strike] essentially ground our production business to a halt,” Mortensen said.
“There were a couple of things that they were negotiating over, but part of that was this issue of machines and AI, and all of this technology taking over and writing scripts for them. What they’ve successfully negotiated is a guardrail.
“We can use these technologies to work with our writers and our production teams, but you are not allowed to replace them. We still believe that creativity needs humans in the process.”
AI use cases
The job ad, posted on LinkedIn in October, advertised a salary of between £80,000 and £95,000 for leading “strategy and execution of AI-driven transformation across ITV Studios and ITV’s streaming services”. The candidate would be tasked with “implementation tools like AI-generated ideation, character development and enhanced production graphics”.
More broadly, ITV is employing AI and machine-learning models to do “all sorts of things”, Mortensen said.
“There’s all sorts of proof of concepts in every part of the company, and the use cases and the things that are happening radiate across every department. About 80% of the people in ITV are making TV shows, so a lot of the work that we are using AI and that technology is making our workflows better, increasing the efficiency in that production.
“So things like versioning, subtitling, translating — they’re often really, really dull tasks that no-one really wants to do.”
The future of TV ads? ITV creates two spots with generative AI
Mortensen also referenced the recent AI-generated ads that have been created for new-to-TV small businesses, but insisted those spots were delivered using “the normal creative processes”.
“We use the AI tools for imagery and for some video, but we coupled them with our own voiceover artist. So, again, it was a thing that was using machines and humans together, and that’s the important thing for us at ITV is the mix of those two. “
AI means news is in ‘existential crisis’
Mortensen was part of a panel discussing future media trends, focusing on personalisation driven by AI, the rise of social commerce and the impact of AI on news and creativity.
Konrad Collao, founder of media and entertainment research company Craft, pointed to how large language models can unlock more facts to be reported at scale, such as granular voting data in the recent US presidential election.
This is despite, as Mortensen put it, the industry facing an “existential crisis about what actually is the truth any more” because of the potential for AI content to distort the reporting of news at scale.
Collao argued that, because journalism is about “storytelling” as opposed to purely the delivery of facts, humans will always demand stories told by humans as opposed to machines.
“We want Marina Hyde’s opinion. We want Giles Coren’s opinion — or we don’t — but we might read it because we don’t like it,” Collao said. “AI can generate a really credible facsimile of that interpretation and the humanity of a war correspondent, but it can’t actually be those things.”
‘Death of serendipity’
Ruth O’Neill, insight parter at Havas Media Network, highlighted that the growth of social commerce, particular live-stream shopping, would be driven by AI and virtual reality.
In China, for example, 50% of people are estimated to have bought something on a live stream in the last month, she said, compared with just 9% in the UK.
“We’re going to see massive growth in ad personalisation and AI is going to help with that,” O’Neill explained. “We might be able to choose our own backdrops in the live streams that we’re watching. We could have different commentators. We could have different angles, different views; with the help of tech and AR and VR, we could be sat in the live stream ourselves.”
There will be a broader shift in increasing personalisation in media, namely from “broadcast to narrowcasting”, according to Route chief strategy officer Euan Mackay.
This does not mean a proliferation of Minority Report-style personalised digital outdoor ads, Mackay said, but we are likely to see more “interactive” outdoor activations in which passers-by can trigger personalised experiences.
Meanwhile, we are also likely to see a “death of serendipity” as AI plays a greater role in content creation, as algorithms are trained on data about what content has performed well in the past.
Mackay added: “The more the models are generating answers on the basis of previous experience, and the more homogenised these things become, the more homogenised the answers are going to become. So there’s going to be a slow, sort of ebbing away with the serendipity of finding new things.”
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