Fox Technology Chief Calls on Entertainment Companies to Be ‘Peers to Big Tech’ While Exploiting AI

Hollywood studios need to approach artificial intelligence as “peers” rather than subordinates to Big Tech, Fox’s chief technology officer Melody Hildebrandt said at TheGrill conference on Tuesday. “There’s incredible opportunity, but I think we really need to think of ourselves as peers to Big Tech in the exploitation of it,” she said.

Hildebrandt spoke on TheGrill panel “The Next Frontier: How AI Is Reshaping the Studio System” alongside Yves Bergquist, director of AI and neuroscience in media at USC’s Entertainment Technology Center.

Bergquist shared a similar view of how the entertainment industry can be a natural partner and parallel to the broader tech world.

“The media industry is very much a technology industry,” Bergquist said. “The media industry is actually the only industry that has been successful at integrating technology and human creativity.”

While expressing a strong belief in AI’s utility, Hildebrandt noted that the entertainment industry can’t just be the creators of content that gets sucked up by AI.

“There’s a real risk where, again, we just become the inputs,” Hildebrandt said. “And I think we’ve kind of been through this rodeo before, a little bit, with technology, where we take a short-term view, and we really need to take a long-term view and participate as equity holders through the exploitation of the technology in a fair way with the right guardrails around it.”

Bergquist explained how AI has already become deeply integrated into film production beyond just effects. He shared that a studio exec recently told him and others, “There’s not a single shot this studio was putting out that hasn’t been touched by AI, in one way or another.”

Hildebrandt foresees a future in the industry where entertainment producers are on the offensive, using AI to expand their own capabilities and remain competitive in the larger marketplace.

“I think we should be embracing the utilization of the technologies ourselves and experimenting,” Hildebrandt said. She noted that there are uses of AI that Fox has already put into use, which she said she believes “actually allows us to be competitive and increase our storytelling, increase our packaging of content, increase our employee productivity and their capabilities.”

Bergquist praised Fox in particular for diving in when it comes to its use of AI.

“Fox is really, and Melody’s team are very unique in just being probably one of the most aggressive, sophisticated users of AI,” Bergquist said. “Not just in sort of the sausage factory of information, content, but also creating, leveraging to create new experiences for the consumer, which I think is super exciting.”

Hildebrandt shared ways that AI is being quietly shared throughout projects in ways that many members of the audience have no idea about, including in Fox’s sports coverage. Hildebrandt also noted that Fox has encouraged the use of AI by its employees throughout the organization in day-to-day activities, giving an example of one staff member who used ChatGPT’s customization options to automate a significant portion of her workflow working with metadata across a variety of systems.

Hildebrandt also wants to see a defensive approach to how AI companies have attempted to seize content without permission, pointing to studios beginning to license content to AI tech companies. While she believes that there is “real opportunity,” she added, “I think we need to make sure that we’re equity holders in that, that then we ensure that there’s a new norm that should be established around how models are built and trained on content.”

Looking to how AI could change who creates the entertainment projects of the future, she pointed to how AI tools could be used by people who’ve begun by releasing short form content on platforms like YouTube and TikTok — and how they could use these generative tools to create an entire film on a budget, backed by a company like Fox.

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