Paramount CTO Likens Present State of AI to Early Days of Internet

Thomas K. Arnold

April 15, 2024

LAS VEGAS — Artificial intelligence (AI) is not a product or a service but, rather, a technology that is part of a larger platform, Streaming Summit chair Dan Rayburn noted April 14 during his welcome remarks at NAB Show 2024 at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

“AI is important,” he said, “However, what’s important is seeing actual practical use cases.today. For any of the vendors running around the show floor saying they’re selling AI, they’re wrong. You can’t buy AI. You can buy a platform that has AI functionality in it.”

The topic of AI, as it pertains to entertainment, Hollywood and streaming, was discussed further in a “fireside chat” with Phil Wiser, EV, CTO and Head of Multiplatform Operations at Paramount Global.

“People get a little confused about whether this is hype or whether this is reality, so let me pull back a little bit,” Wiser said. “Let’s look at this the way we always look at technology trends, which is when is it going to impact our business, when is it going to impact my company, and how much hype versus reality is there in the market.

“We did this for blockchain, we did this for NFT a coule of years ago, and that clearly doesn’t have utility other than for people who still believe in buying numbers.”

But AI is different, Wiser maintains. He said he’s been following AI his entire career, from his early days working in a neurosystems lab, “focused on encoding and understanding how the brain processes media … and watching the progression over that time frame, and then now, looking at the level of investment, this is very, very real. When I look at other similar technology trends, I look back to the internet, and the reality is, 30 years ago, when Netscape launched, that Web 1.0 is kind of where we’re at right now. So all the companies out there saying they AI-based, 90% of them will be gone. But after that there’s this rationalization of the market, and if you look out the 10-year window, it’s going to fundamentally change the way we operate.”

Wiser said AI is currently studied mostly for how it will be used in production, “and that’s the area where people get very concerned.”

But he sees AI as more of “a very interesting tool” rather than a substitute, and ultimate replacement, for human creativity. AI, for example, could be used for text-based functions such as script analysis, helping executive weed through the thousands of scripts they receive, instead of actually writing a script.

“We’ve done experiments with that, with AI writing the next episode of this show versus with what we can do with our writing team, and it’s very boring,” Wiser said. “So I think you have to be very sensible about what it can create from scratch.”

Wiser sees a bigger potential for AI in marketing, including image creation. “Marketing is a huge opportunity,” he said. “A media company’s two big investments are content and marketing. And marketing is based on derivative works, which AI is really good at — ‘take this image and turn it into a video,’ or ‘that this video and cut it down to a section that’s 30 seconds and has these characteristics.”

Wiser notes that AI already is being used to personalize recommendations, “based on what it knows about you.”

Asked whether the personalization capabilities of AI could be stretched to the point where the technology could be used to create custom episodes of series, based what the viewer likes and doesn’t like, Wiser said he doubts it will ever get to that point. 

Down the road, Wiser said, he could see AI and AR work together, noting that while AR is becoming increasingly popular. “It’s now showing up on many screens. If you look at what we did with the Super Bowl and Nickelodeon, we went in and replaced the sportscasters with SpongeBob and other characters, and we just had a lot of things going on in the stadium.

“I think that’s going to continue to advance, and when you add that with AI and what AI can do to naturally put other scenes on topof it — we’ve seen what it can do with deep fakes, although there are a lot of concerns with that in this election year — I think they’re going to merge a little bit and AR and AI will create new experiences.”