Kim Littler

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly progressing, and each week’s news seems filled with announcements of fresh developments. AI has the potential to revolutionise the way we create, distribute, and consume digital media. However, AI-powered content creation tools can also be abused to generate masses of content at the cost of quality. So, how can we ensure that AI in digital media is both ethical and useful? Let’s explore how AI advancements can be used to our advantage, and how we can improve that technology moving forward:

1. Personalization

Sick of seeing irrelevant posts flooding your timelines? With user data-driven AI algorithms evolving constantly, this will become ancient history. AI will soon be capable of recommending only the most relevant and engaging content for you. However, the way these algorithms currently generate reward and punishment contributes to social media addiction. To avoid the negative impact on user mental health that using social validation metrics like ‘favourites’ fosters, AI recommendation algorithms could perhaps analyse viewing time instead. Using this method, future AI can help educate people through reading that stimulates their interest. 

2. Accessibility

AI is already making digital media more accessible for users with disabilities. AI-powered tools like copy.ai or veed.io, can automatically generate captions, subtitles, and audio descriptions for social media clips, videos, and podcasts. This technology lightens the workload for creators while making their content available to users with visual and auditory impairments. So how can AI accessbility tools progress further? Perhaps the answer lies with video-to-text technologies that can transcribe even unclear audio based on lip-reading alone.

3. Digital storytelling

Digital entertainment can be enhanced by utilising AI’s analytic and adaptive skills to improve interactivity, ranging from simple dialogue flexibilities in webnovels, to AI conversations so realistic they could help alleviate social isolation.

For example, natural language processing (NLP) forms can analyse human dialogue and behaviour to develop more detailed characters, even allowing users to have realistic real-time conversations shaped by verbal input.

AI expert, Anil Tilbe, suggests that AI NLP models are the future of gaming. However, is this positive development so assured? Before AI can be called the future, we need to address this issue: the industry is overwhelmingly male and white, and thus limited in the voices and ideas feeding it. It takes countless perspectives to build an AI knowledge base. For AI to interact meaningfully with broad userbases, the human management developing it needs to be diverse enough to represent those communities. 

Overall, considering how AI can and will alter our digital media, as well as where it currently falls short, we must ensure future technologies are developed ethically and responsibly. This requires ongoing education, the responsibility of which lies with governments, companies, and academics, to ensure that we account for common machine errors and ethical issues, including natural human biases and how they transfer to AI. If we overcome this, a bright future of possibilities for AI developments in digital media lies ahead.