Artificial Intelligence & Intellectual Property – Driving growth for Media Tech & IT

“Alexa! Play me a movie.”

Between fiddling our fingers on the tiny buttons of our TV remote and scrolling through endless menus to find something worth watching and talking to a smart assistant via your remote or your smart TV to find a movie based on your interests, which one of them sounds more absurd?

The former one, right?

The concept of machine-human intelligence coined during the mid-twentieth century and increasingly popular in the sci-fi movies during the early days, has long become a reality and is unfolding more and more potential areas of its application with each passing day.

Instead of having incertitude regarding the notion of pursuing AI, most of the companies are now asking themselves the question of how should they pursue AI as they try to unlock the hidden potentials it can provide, and the creative and informatics industries are no exception to the trend.

E-brain in the creative industry

The highly packed and ambitious media industry is always on the hunt for new ways to compete with the firms adopting newer technologies to stay in pace with rising technological transformation. Leading this rapid transformation are the horses of efficient workflow support, content distribution management and revenue growth support. With the upsurge in the number of OTT streaming services, the creative industry firms are fighting hard to stay in the race with most of the small or middle sized ventures forming alliances to stay in the same track as the bigger ones.

This is where artificial intelligence comes into play, as it not only provides opportunities to automate the basic workflow related to the domain, but also provides an increased insight into the audience. The companies using the AI systems of the tech titans like Google, IBM, Microsoft etc. are at an advantage as these systems allow the automation of repetitive tasks that usually require a great deal of time and resources especially the areas of production, cataloguing and media management. These new age tools are giving birth to a new age of internet-based media, as TV stations are using these tools for generating news and live production. From writing the entire script of a movie to heavily participating in music production, the creative industry has been one of the early adaptors of the machine intelligence and is heavily benefitting from this head-start as the recent technological breakthroughs in the field of machine learning keeps pushing the boundaries of creative landscape.

“Skilled are not the ones that can tell how precious a thing is, but the ones that have the vision to see what potential it holds in the future. “

The skilled visionaries among the media industry have already starting digging the deeper mines of this technological goldmine. BBC’s production team is leading the research in this field to identify the sectors of their work which can benefit from the electronic brains and are seeking opportunities to broaden the scope of their coverage by incorporating machine learning techniques to reduce production cost as well as produce effective media and so far the results have been optimistic enough to keep them digging. Another key area, content management is also seeking great attention. Although the unregulated nature of audio and visual data, makes it hard to classify, with the advancements in Natural Language Processing, these AI based engines are gaining the abilities to predict what type of content and images would draw the desired consumer attention. Every single consumer engagement with these engines is another step at teaching these engines what kind of content they seek and how they want to consume it. The development in this sector is led by Netflix, as the company not only uses artificial brain to categorise their content, but also optimise video compression and delivery. Another successful venture boosted by the use of e-brain is TikTok owned by the Chinese firm ByteDance. The overnight success of the application is completely attributed to the software defined media service entirely programmed by AI which generates unique content for every single user. All of this is just a glimpse of what the technology holds for the future of this sector. The gaming sector as well as the social media sector is also AI driven as all the major platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. make use of artificial intelligence to provide tailored content to their consumers.

Artificial Intelligence and IT industry

If these electronic neural bodies can contribute this much to the media sector, one can easily imagine how much this technology can revolutionize the industry which is all about computers, software and data transmissions. Developers have seen a drastic change in software development, planning as well as quality assurance, the results of which has made this technology an instant hit among the code-crunching individuals.

Artificial intelligence is completely changing how systems are built, how they are programmed and how users interact with them. AI is helping government as well as private organisations seal the security loopholes by developing additional security layers as well as enhancing threat detection as data breach prevention. The technology is also helping developers cut-short the production time by reading code structure and identifying bugs and providing useful suggestions. It also enhances the backend process by automating it and adjusting algorithms by learning from the mistakes to enhance productivity.

Also Artificial intelligence is one of the major contribution areas in the fourth industrial revolution.

Artificial intelligence: The patent landscape

It is too early to predict how big an impact artificial intelligence will have on the patent industry itself as well as on the traditional IP concepts related to other domains like the creative and IT sector.

The widespread use of AI technologies has given rise to the notion of keeping an open-source approach to the technology as all the behemoth tech-giants are promoting the openness of the technology as well as data which drives it. But, the basic idea behind granting IP rights is also of equal importance as it helps us to ensure fair competition as well as providing incentives for investment in the development of new technologies. Lines need to be drawn to create a balance to ensure the open flow of data as well as ensuring closed incentives to those driving the growth of the sector. And although, some thinking is required to bridge this gap, patent offices all over the world are already promoting the development as well as the use of e-brain in all the sectors as they are increasingly making amendments to protect he AI produced media content, inventions as well the inventions related to AI solutions.

Conclusion

AI has established itself as one of the digital frontiers of innovation. The industry which was initially predicted as a USD 250 million market opportunity, is now projected to reach USD 35-50 billion by the end of 2025. The technology is benefiting every sector of almost every industrial area which has been of the key reasons of its quick adoption. The cost-effective as well as quality enhancement solutions provided by the technology are greatly benefiting both the creative and informatics sector. And although, openness is being promoted at the surface level, from start-ups to the players of the big league, every single entity is running to secure as much as machine learning patents to strong arm themselves against the future possibility of machine brain wars and also to benefit from their investments to their vision. Our IP sector is welcoming this rising technology, not with clenched fists if not with open arms. The amendments in the IP sector as well as the advancements in the AI sector, both are driving media and IT sector towards growth and providing motivation to the artists and developers to unlock the chamber of secrets of the technology.

--  Mr Amit Aggarwal, Co-Founder and Director, Effectual Services

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