The Concept
With my masters thesis I want to explore existing use-cases for AI and machine learning in media production. During my internship at Ingenuity Studios in Hollywood, CA, I noticed that one of the highest prioritised disciplines of any media production process is efficiency. One of the greatest learning experience was to identify which steps in the creative process can be sped up without affecting the quality and or creative vision of the final product. Ideally, I would like to find a niche that may benefit from the use of AI and explore possible use-cases in a media production pipeline.
As far as I can tell, AI is already being used in concept phases with production stages still relying heavily on human input. There are already promising technologies on the rise, a few of which I show below. I believe that many of these technologies are still in early stages of development but due to the exponential nature of machine learning and AI proficiency, I believe that they will be implemented in professional fields very soon.
Stable Diffusion for 3D software
With stable diffusion for Blender, a user may create a text prompt. Stable diffusion will then use the user’s 3D scene to approximate a render result according to the text prompt. While this technology is still in development, its potential looks promising for look development, storyboarding and concept art stages of media production.
AI generated textures
A similar use case to the aforementioned viewport stable diffusion AI, this workflow may speed up the process for the actual production stages for various fields of media design such as motion graphics, VFX or game design. Making use of stable diffusion once again, this add-on for blender allows the user to generate a text prompt upon which the AI will generate seamless PBR textures. The neural network of the AI understands a multitude of surfaces and art styles. In a world where high quality textures are expensive to purchase and technically complicated to produce, this could offer a high-quality alternative for lower budget productions.
Literary research
In a very brief literary research attempt, my main goal was to establish whether or not there were already promising literary sources I could refer to in my potential master’s thesis. Since AI and machine learning are very rapidly developing technologies, I was not too sure about this step of the research process.
As it turns out, there are more than enough scientific papers that talk about AI, both technically, creatively as well as ethically. I’m not sure how much research I want to dedicate to the ethics of AI yet but that is for another research session to decide. So far, I have prepared some sources that seem promising. For my next blog entry, I plan on doing a deep dive into the definitions behind the the terms ‘AI’ and ‘machine learning’.
