CONTEXT-AWARENESS MODELS HAVE NOW ADVANCED TO THE POINT OF HUMAN-LIKE CAPABILITIES of Autodesk’s acquisition of dailies review platform Moxion and 3D animation pipeline LoUPE. TRANSLATOR DROIDS Tim Jung co-founded his company XL8 with a view to making translation and localisation fast and pain-free, thanks to AI. XL8’s AI-driven localisation engines were built from the ground up for media and entertainment, trained using post-edited ‘golden data’ from some of the world’s top LSPs, with prime studio and broadcast content. “Our AIs are not, if you will, diluted from other outside sources, as with the big mass translation companies,” says Jung. Its engines are built with extremely low-latency functionality, which allows for live captioning, subtitling and synthetic dubbing into multiple languages at speed. “Now broadcasts and livestreaming events can be held on a global level, in virtually real time, without significant expense or delay,” he continues. “This time and cost saving can be realised immediately, then funnelled back into the creative process and quality of production – where it belongs.” For AI to really show off what it can do, it needs to predict – or intuit – and not just translate. XL8 is also bringing to market new developments in the size and accuracy of language models, particularly for translation. Context awareness (CA) is beginning to contribute significantly to quality. Instead of translating sentences on a one-by-one basis, context-aware models feed in information surrounding the source sentence, to interpret subtle nuances of gender, slang, multiple word meanings and colloquial phrases or idioms. “Context-awareness models have advanced to the point of human-like capabilities. When XL8 recently released its CA models, many translators were surprised and awed by the accuracy of the results.” Jung sees XL8’s easy translation tech as a game-changer for smaller companies and creators.
“AI/ML is extremely beneficial to smaller companies in the M&E space. An explosion in the FAST/CTV market (free advertising-supported streaming television and connected TVs) in the last few years has created huge bandwidth for content publishing on a global level. “But until now, traditional localisation is still very expensive,” he goes on. “As such, smaller content owners and publishers are flying blind into new territories, where their Revshare piece may not even cover the cost of the localisation. On average, traditional subbing and dubbing for two hours of content from English to French costs about $25,000. Multiply that by several languages and it becomes prohibitively expensive for small companies. However, using technologies like XL8, this media can now be localised for under $500 a language, and even less if it’s multiple at the same time.” ART-IFICIAL INTELLIGENCE What about using AI for real creativity, and helping build content? When will we be able to say: ’AI, one sci-fi thriller with a strong female character and an opening for a sequel please – oh, and in the style of a spaghetti western, too‘? “A tremendous number of research projects have been released in 2022 alone,” says Jung. “Among these are large language models in NLP (natural language processing), such as Google’s Pathways, which can even explain why a given joke is funny; OpenAI’s Dall-E 2 generates images from a text description. The impact this new approach brings to media creation will be fundamental.” C-3PO tells us in Star Wars : “I’m not much more than an interpreter, and not very good at telling stories.” But in Return of the Jedi , he actually does tell a story to a rapt audience – the liar. We’re going out on a not-very-long limb and saying that AI will be creating moving-picture content, at scale, in the next ten years. There is such demand for content and such unwillingness to pay people to make it, that the only way forward – all things remaining equal – would seem to be AI-generated. In the spring 2022 issue of FEED , we went to some length to show that content was no longer king. In fact, it’s now just fuel to power an attention engine. It doesn’t matter if it’s great; it only has to be something people are compelled to watch. That’s a pretty dystopian outlook on the future of content, but let’s go back to our original premise – that AI is just there to superpower whatever humans want to do. If we all desire a
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