Paramount CTO Phil Wiser: AI for Personalization, Yes — Screenwriting, Not So Much

The two big investments a media company makes are in content and marketing, and those are the areas where Paramount Global is focusing its experiments with artificial intelligence.

Speaking in a keynote conversation at NAB Show’s Streaming Media Summit, Phil Wiser, CTO and head of multiplatform operations for Paramount Global, said, “The way we look at AI now is primarily through production and that’s the area where people get very concerned. Is this going to fundamentally change the way we create content? And I think the short answer is, yes, it will.”

Noting that TV and film production processes involve a lot of “text-based functions,” the Paramount CTO says his team is looking “very closely” at script analysis.

“We’ve got teams that are bringing in hundreds, if not thousands, of scripts. They have to summarize those and then maybe modify them to see what’s interesting. AI is a great application to just take that work out.”

Logically, the next stage is to use AI to write an actual script. Paramount has experimented with just this but Wiser says the results are not good enough yet.

“We’ve done experiments with how would it write the next episode of this show versus what we can do with our writing team?

“I think you have to be very sensible about what it can create from scratch, and then how to use it.”

A more viable current use case is in personalizing the navigation experience of Paramount+ users.

“Marketing is a huge opportunity,” Wiser said. “Clearly marketing is based on derivative works, so AI is really good at taking this image and turning it into a video or taking this video and cutting it down to a section that’s 30 seconds.”

He said he likes the way Spotify has applied AI to serve customized preview images based around the preferences of its users. Something similar could be applied to streaming video services based on AI analysis of metadata.

However, even if it becomes possible to customize the actual content of a TV drama for each viewer, Wiser is not keen on that.

“I actually think the communal viewing experience is valuable. I don’t think that creating customized versions of shows is really going to be all that valuable,” he said. “But I do think improving on navigation, making it more natural to flow through, is a frustration point across all the services [that AI can help solve]. Particularly given if you think about how much money has been invested in building these streaming services to have these basic navigational issues.”

Another area the studio is exploring for AI integration is quality control around live workflows, such as monitoring signal integrity. This process has been made easier by moving such systems into the cloud.

Wiser also addressed the concern around deepfakes. The group’s news broadcast, CBS News, announced an AI fact checking initiative last December. Similar to BBC Verify, CBS News Confirmed is funding a team focused on examining misinformation and false videos that can often be generated via AI and demonstrating validity of content to the audience.

READ MORE: CBS Launches Fact-Checking News Unit to Examine AI, Deepfakes, Misinformation (Variety)

READ MORE: Explaining the ‘how’ – the launch of BBC Verify (BBC)

“It’s one thing we’re trying to do to least detect doctored content and then we can react to it. But the big thing that I’m concerned about is that it is so easy to generate these images, or videos, that the general population will stop trusting anything.”

Wiser also applauded the FOX News content validation program, also called Verify, noting, “I didn’t [miss] the irony of FOX putting value content out there.”

READ MORE: Fox Corp. Launches Verify Tool to Check Authenticity of Content, Negotiate With AI Firms (TheWrap)

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