In a world where AI is capturing every conversation, a series of experts is trying to figure out what it actually means for the world of entertainment. How do you break it down?” Lane made her comments alongside several entertainment and tech personalities during the “Entertainment and Media in the Age of AI” panel, one of several AI-focused conversations happening at Variety’s Entertainment and Tech Summit presented by EY. Moderated by Variety business editor Todd Spangler, the conversation saw executives from Netflix (Girish Balakrishnan, the streamer’s senior director, creative innovation), Lionsgate (Kathleen Grace, its chief AI officer), Hasbro (Bertie Thomson, head of its AI-focused studio Sixth Wall), Teads (Annaka Vasquez, senior vice president of sales) and Adobe (Meagan Keane, Pro Video’s head of business strategy) come together to walk through AI’s place in entertainment and the use cases for versions of the technology — once people figure out how to talk about it.
That comes down to building relationships with creators about how it can be used, including where it fits within the production landscape. Balakrishnan highlighted Netflix’s public framework for how the company uses AI within its production pipeline (on a generative level, for roughly 300 programs), a model he said “builds trust with the creative community” and gives those members ”a pathway to navigate to drive use cases that are meaningful to the creative process.” The industry is already landing on other frameworks surrounding AI’s place in the industry, such as the Kathleen Kennedy and American Film Institute-led “Human Generative Workflows” paper published last month. Lane helped develop the paper, which she said breaks down the use cses in ways that can help AI-backed productions reach a still-elusive goal: being copyrightable.
That allows users who’ve found those use cases to prosper, she said. Some of that trust built between companies and those working in the AI space has offered up another elusive item in the field: intellectual property, including renowned brands and high-profile characters. So what I’m looking forward to, and the brands that we partner [with] look forward to, is what are the guardrails in place?” Hasbro, through its Sixth Wall work, has worked to implement proprietary guardrails for the ElevenLabs-backed AI replicas of characters it licenses, such as those of Cobra Commander and Optimus Prime.
While companies can license those characters for interactive experiences — one hypothetical Thomson offered was a Waymo with the voice of Prime — those can’t be manipulated in the way many unauthorized clips of Hasbro characters have been. It’s a whole process,” Lane said. You choose what’s best for the story, and then, great, you chose the thing that’s best for your story, and it’s better.
It’s not necessarily what people think of in pop culture. We just can’t throw something onto that.” In the end, each leader said they wanted the technology to help creatives tell better — and more — stories, not feel like they have to adopt the technology for the sake of staying ahead. She cited the worlds of “John Wick” and “The Hunger Games” as examples of work the company has done to sell well-liked IP, and that it wants to have “all kinds of filmmakers we work with.” “Just look at the range of our slate from this year: ‘Housemaid,’ ‘Mich
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