How will generative AI reshape the creative-centric video content industry?
On April 23, the 2024 iQIYI World Conference was held in Beijing. At the main forum of the conference, Liu Wenfeng, chief technology officer of iQIYI, brought his thoughts on the relationship between generative AI and creation in his speech on the theme of "Embracing AI and Creating the Future Together", as well as iQIYI's latest exploration in generative AI.
He believes that AIGC should not be misinterpreted as a content product that competes with PPC, PUGC, AND UGC, but that creators of all kinds of content can use the learning and generative capabilities of generative AI to create higher-quality content. Driven by generative AI, the future content industry will be more "popular" in terms of creative limits, the personalized connection between content and creators and audiences will be closer, and the industry trial and error cycle will be greatly shortened and iterations will be further accelerated. Liu Wenfeng believes that in the era of AI, the value of excellent creativity and excellent aesthetics will become more prominent, and AI will enable every creator to have a new quality of productivity.
As an in-depth participant in the content industry, iQIYI has applied generative AI in all aspects of the planning, production and publicity stages. How to improve the efficiency of text reading in the planning stage, how to improve the production level during the production period, how to make the materials more abundant during the publicity and distribution period? Liu Wenfeng shared iQiyi's practice.
The following is a transcript of Liu Wenfeng's keynote speech:
The theme I am sharing today is "Embracing AI for a Better Future". What role does AI play in our future work and life, and how can we coexist with AI to create a better future?
When it comes to generative AI, don't panic!
Many people may feel anxiety: how far will AI go, and will AI really take away our jobs? This anxiety even led to a general strike in the Writers Guild of America last year, and Hollywood screenwriters were shut down for nearly half a year. In fact, the programmers are the first to feel anxious, because the ability of AI to generate programming languages is so powerful that it can even directly produce executable code. I've asked programmers if AI is going to have an impact on their work. But their answer is that since using AI, they feel more powerful, as if suddenly there are tons of tools to help them write more code, and the barrier to writing code across languages has been lowered. Not only programmers, but also designers feel the same, and designers who can use AI are even more powerful.
What does this mean? Actually, using AI makes us more capable. Douglas Engelbart, the computer scientist who invented the mouse, believes that computers should be used to improve human intelligence and capabilities. AI is a powerful tool that can greatly improve human capabilities.
In the past, in order to describe the core concept and temperament of the project through the picture, the producer needed to hire a professional art team to draw the concept poster, which was time-consuming and labor-intensive, but now, the producer can use AI to easily generate the concept poster he wants, and constantly adjust the mood and expression he wants. Is a producer who can draw concept posters a stronger producer?
Our anxiety may be due to the fact that we have misread the relationship between creators and AIGC. According to the classification of creativity, content is divided into PPC, PUGC and UGC, and it is under this classification logic that AIGC appears, as if all human creators are competing with AI. We think this is a misreading of AI. Essentially, any creator can use AI to generate content for themselves, and generative AI has become a new lever for creators to amplify their creative capabilities and creative value. With the support of generative AI, both ordinary and professional creators can use AI to create better and more valuable works.
AI makes it available to every creator
New quality productivity
From a technical point of view, generative AI has two major capabilities that can be empowered to creators: learning and generating. Learning ability refers to the ability of creators using generative AI to acquire knowledge faster, more broadly, and more deeply than before, while generative ability means that creators can use AI to produce content more efficiently. These two capabilities make creators stronger than before, we call them the new quality productivity of content, and AI allows every creator to have a new quality of productivity.
But in the film and television content industry, the amount of content is not critical, especially in the context of more and more AI-generated content. So what is the most scarce resource in the AI era? We believe that it should be excellent creativity and excellent aesthetics, which are also essential qualities for good creators.
If we look back in the next five or three years, we can see that generative AI has become a force to reshape the creative industry. First of all, the ability of individuals or small teams will become stronger, and the limits of creativity may be further broken through, and there will be "more explosive hits"; if the number of content production is increasing, and the average level is getting higher and higher, it means that the number of short videos is exploding, which makes personalized distribution or the connection between consumers and producers more and more close, and long videos will definitely appear in the development direction of circle and personalization; in terms of industrial iteration, the update speed of user preferences will be accelerated, and the speed of industrial iteration will be faster and faster. It is conceivable that in the next few years, there will be more and more works from everyone, and the industry will become more and more volatile.
Generative AI empowers intelligent production
Promote the acceleration of film and television industrialization
Film and television industrialization refers to the process of using technology to standardize, specialize, and scale the content production process, as well as using modern scientific and technological means to improve production efficiency and quality of works. As an important part of it, iQIYI has been promoting the research and development of intelligent production systems, and has applied technologies including cloud computing, big data, AI, and Unreal Engine to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of content project production. For example, the IQ Stage virtual shooting system independently developed by iQIYI has carried out the filming of multiple drama projects. The just-completed "Dream Returns" has broken through many technical difficulties in virtual shooting, such as the time-lapse matching of virtual scene light and real scene light, rain and snow scene special effects matching, large-area water surface reflection shooting, and WIA high-speed shooting and other applications in virtual scenes. "Big Dream Returns" is also the drama project with the largest amount of virtual shooting and the most scenes in the industry.
An important foundation and accumulation of virtual shooting technology is the digital asset library. iQIYI has built its own digital asset library, so that digital assets such as costumes, characters, virtual props and scene buildings of content projects can be retained in the library and the copyright can be confirmed, and future projects can be re-authorized for application. In the future, iQIYI will train generative AI on the basis of the digital asset library and produce more digital assets for future project applications.
iQIYI's generative AI landing: empowering the whole chain of planning, production, and publicity
Driven by the development of generative AI technology, iQIYI actively implements generative AI in all aspects of creation. At present, there have been some preliminary applications in the planning, production and publicity stages.
In the planning stage, generative AI is used to improve the reading efficiency, creative efficiency and creativity level of scripts and novels for relevant teams. Specifically, studio producers can use generative AI tools to complete three times the amount of reading in one-third of the time, which is equivalent to a nine-fold increase in reading efficiency. In addition, you can use this tool to directly extract information such as world views, story outlines, character introductions, and character diagrams. Higher reading efficiency makes it more likely to evaluate and mine more good IPs. Generative AI's ability to understand language is also being applied to script evaluation. iQIYI's AI algorithm can already identify the plot points of the script and determine which plot points are strong plot points. Therefore, at the beginning of script planning, the creator can predict which parts of the current script will make users lose patience, so as to make targeted adjustments to make the story more engaging.
In the production and distribution stage, generative AI provides strong support for virtual production, sound production, and asset production, as well as the generation of advertising materials and copywriting. iQIYI has established a knowledge base of film and television literature, making it easier for projects with different themes to acquire knowledge, examine details, and inspire inspiration in the creative process. In addition to text-related parts, generative AI can also be used for the conceptual design of imagery, including concept posters. In the film list released this time, some of the project's posters were completed through generative AI. iQIYI already has a project that uses AI-generated buildings as original paintings, and builds real scenes for shooting, with excellent results. When directors, cinematographers, art directors, and other directors need similar scenes as references, the video understanding capabilities of multimodal AI large models can help creators directly locate video clips through keywords. In terms of sound, iQIYI's AI dubbing technology has supported 250 translated films imported into China, and also supported the dubbing of 826 Chinese programs, supporting good content to go overseas.
In the era of AI, let's be wind chasers together, let dreams bloom, and make happiness simple!