Powered by Samba AI, a suite of generative AI and machine learning technologies available worldwide, Lenovo is among the first brands to leverage this solution to understand its return on sponsorship investments.

Samba TV says Samba AI “will automatically and instantly recognize when a company’s logo appears on screen — for sports programs, that could be on the track, field, jersey, or car — or when a brand is mentioned during a program, offering comprehensive viewership analysis that spans both traditional media and streaming TV. The product also analyzes the surrounding sentiment of brands, providing companies with a detailed understanding of their portrayal throughout the programming. The AI solution provides rapid analysis delivered to brands in-flight. It’s also interoperable within Samba TV’s outcome-based measurement suite, enabling brands to quickly activate targeting shifts based on the analysis.”

“Samba TV has been investing in R&D for generative AI and machine language (ML)-based analysis of video for more than a decade,” said Ashwin Navin, Samba TV co-founder and CEO. “We’re now taking our years of AI innovation a step further by working with some of the world’s most recognizable brands like Lenovo to transform the way media investments are evaluated. We are using our powerful first-party data to train best-in-class AI models to inform the most important decisions made by advertisers.”

As an early adoptee of this new AI solution, Lenovo has already been able to collect insights on its Title Race at Circuit of the Americas (COTA) in Austin. Samba TV said that on Oct. 22, 2023, there were 4,471 instances of the Lenovo brand throughout the race. “This frequency translated to strong exposure of the brand for the average viewers and was, in fact, higher than any other brand being advertised at the race. Lenovo sponsorship proved particularly successful as it generated 34% more exposure frequency than a comparable race and its title sponsor.”

Rick Corteville, Lenovo global media center of excellence executive director, said: “Measuring data and tracking analytics have always been critical in modern marketing to better gauge and understand the value of comprehensive brand appearances, including sponsorships and ad spend. Working with Samba TV has been a step forward in taking our data and better retargeting key audiences to build frequency and drive awareness of Lenovo’s brand and tech innovations. Thanks to Samba TV’s insights, we have been able to more accurately measure the value of our F1 partnership across North America. We are looking forward to further testing this solution and linking it to our brand lift and demand generation KPIs.”

Samba TV said Samba AI “goes beyond traditional monitoring and offers recommendations, tactics, and strategic insights into competitor’s activities and audience overlaps between events. These insights can then provide brands with massive opportunities to create incremental reach, eliminate waste, and create a competitive edge, allowing them to adapt their strategies based on the comprehensive market dynamics captured by the solution and help drive expanded monetization capabilities. Additionally, brands can leverage Samba TV’s comprehensive first-party viewership data to create new audience segments for targeted advertising. This feature helps brands to amplify their reach by connecting with the right audience, at the right time, in the right context.”

Samba TV will be hosting demonstrations of this product at CES, Jan. 9-12, for partners and clients.

The post Samba TV Extends Samba AI To Holistically Measure ROI From Paid Media, Product Placement, Sports Sponsorship appeared first on TV News Check.

This year’s show, which runs Jan. 9-12, should be bigger than the 2023 edition. That show drew 117,000 attendees and 3,200 exhibitors and represented a significant bounce-back from the 45,000 attendees and 2,300 exhibitors that came in 2022, the first show after a one-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Consumer Technology Association (CTA), which owns and produces CES and is celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2024, is projecting attendance to be 130,000 with more than 3,500 exhibitors.

“We are seeing huge momentum for CES 2024,” says Kinsey Fabrizio, CTA senior vice president of CES and membership.

A Bigger Footprint

As of early December, CTA had already booked 2.4 million net square feet of exhibit space, Fabrizio says, which is over a 10% jump from CES 2023. The CES 2024 exhibition and conference will be spread across the North, Central and West Halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center as well as several Las Vegas hotels, including 1,000 startup companies exhibiting in “Eureka Park” at the Venetian. Over half of Fortune 500 companies will be in attendance, including Amazon, Google, Intel, Qualcomm, LG, Samsung and Sony.

AI’s Big Year

AI is the “hottest topic in the tech industry right now,” says John Kelley, VP and show director, CES. AI will be “pervasive” across the show floor and conference sessions, Kelley says, including a keynote from Intel CEO Patrick Gelsinger discussing the critical role that chips and software play in making AI more accessible.

“What’s changed in the last year is generative AI has taken the world by storm, and every company is thinking about how to use it,” says CTA President-CEO Gary Shapiro. “And I know many, many, many companies are going to be talking about AI and introducing and showing products that take advantage of that.”

Another growth area for CES is automotive and mobility, Kelley says, with more than 300 companies exhibiting in an at-capacity West Hall including Honda, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai and Kia. The “C Space” Entertainment and Content conference at the Aria, which features brands like Amazon Ads, Netflix, NBC Universal, Roku and Snap, has also expanded with additional space in the Cosmopolitan hotel this year including new exhibitors Disney, NVIDIA, Paramount and Reddit.

Noteworthy “C Space” panels for broadcasters include “2024: The AI Inflection Point — Entertainment, Internet & Media” featuring Steve Canepa, GM, Global Industries, IBM and Richard Kerris, VP/GM, media and entertainment, NVIDIA; “Future of TV & Streaming: Cable, Internet TV & FAST Strategies,” with executives from Tubi, Disney, PBS and Nielsen; “Monetizing the TV/Streaming, Programming Platforms: The Strategies” with executives from Uber, Amazon Ads, Vizio, Disney and Estrella Media; and “Transforming An All-American Brand: Technology Inside The Weather Channel,” with Tom O’Brien, EVP, Allen Media Group; Nora Zimmett, president, news and original series, Allen Media Group; and Alexandra Wilson, meteorologist, The Weather Company.

‘A Good Way To Kick Off The Year’

With many top network and station group executives at CES, many media technology vendors will also be there, if not to exhibit but to simply meet with their customers and partners. One of them is IP transport provider Zixi, which has been experiencing big growth in its live event business due to the explosion in streaming sports coverage. Zixi won’t have a booth or suite at CES but is still sending a team of six, including members of its executive team as well as technical support personnel. That is double the number of people it sent in 2023.

“The number of companies that is going is starting to grow again,” says John Wastcoat, Zixi SVP business development and marketing. “We’re not going to be able to handle it with just a handful of people this year, so that’s why we’re doubling our team that’s going to go out and meet with everybody. And it’s an easy hop from L.A., so people can make a day trip if they need to … they’ll be in and have three or four meetings and be out, without a significant investment.”

Zixi has two motivations to attend CES that are interconnected.

“One is that our customers and our partners are looking for different ways to monetize their content,” Wastcoat says. “That could be sending it directly to a new smart TV, we do that with Bloomberg around the world. We have conversations with the automobile manufacturers about sending content directly to their screens as well. So, we’ve got that angle.

“And then our customers and partners are still looking at what’s going to be new and interesting for them over the next few years,” he adds. “So, we’re there to talk with them about what we need to do together in 2024, whether that aligns with anything that’s found at CES or not. But it’s a good way to kick off the year.”

While over time the overall focus at CES has shifted away from television sets and Blu-ray players to a range of different consumer technology products, Zixi is still very interested in how its IP transport technology integrates with TV sets to deliver programming to the living room.

“We are seeing a tremendous increase in our business because of the reallocation of sports rights to digital-first platforms that didn’t have infrastructure for it before,” Wastcoat says. “We’re forecasting a million live sports events in 2024 that will use Zixi, and two years ago we probably would have said we’re not very interested in occasional use business like that, we’re looking for the 24/7 constant traffic. But it has become such a volume pay that it has got our attention. So, companies like Amazon Prime [Video] are coming to us and asking us for new features and functionality, like scheduling tools to be able to manage these thousands of events that they’re doing.”

Another broadcast vendor making the trip is robotic camera specialist Mark Roberts Motion Control (MRMC), which will be exhibiting in the booth of its parent company Nikon. MRMC will once again collaborate with virtual production specialist Vu Studios to deliver the “Unreal Ride.” For CES 2024 the Unreal Ride environment will take place in a virtual jungle, where participants will get to experience the thrill of riding through it in a futuristic Jeep and once again be able to take away a video of themselves travelling through the virtual world.

MRMC’s technology can also be seen elsewhere on the show floor as several companies rent MRMC’s robotic arms just to draw attention to their booths.

“One of them has a light wand on it, and it attracts people because they see it doing funny patterns,” says Paddy Taylor, MRMC head of broadcast.

While MRMC does makes some products that it is actively marketing at CES, such as automatic tracking software and low-cost sliders for PTZ cameras, Taylor doesn’t expect to get many new customers for the company’s high-end specialized robotics at CES.

“It’s more of a positioning exercise,” Taylor says.

One of the messages that MRMC is looking to get across is that Nikon is serious about video, as more broadcasters and other professional videographers start to use DSLR-style cameras for content capture.

“With the Z 9 Nikon probably has the best DSLR-style mirrorless camera for video, and Nikon’s starting to make a really big thing about that,” Taylor says. “And we’re doing some things to move that camera and make it do interesting things.”

The other message that Taylor wants to emphasize is that MRMC expects full-frame cameras like the Sony HDC-F5500, which use the same type of large sensors as digital cinema cameras, will start to be used en masse in broadcast production in 2024 to provide a different look for live sports and news. And MRMC sees an opportunity there for its robotic systems.

“We have a few customers using Sony Venice [digital cinema cameras] with our robotics, but in live current affairs and sports studios,” Taylor says. “And I think with the Olympics and a few other events next year you’ve got more full-frame system cameras coming onto the market. You’re going to see a marry-up, where people are trying to mix different types of full-frame cameras in different workflows for sporting events, festivals, concerts — anything with a creative edge people are trying to strive for.”

New Services For NextGen TV

Broadcasters will also use CES 2024 to promote the continued rollout of the ATSC 3.0, or NextGen TV, digital television standard through demonstrations put on by ATSC and the Pearl TV coalition of station groups.

“There’s going to be a focus on the consumer, both on the services side and device side,” says ATSC President Madeleine Noland. “You’re going to see a proliferation of devices, more set-top boxes, more television models and a few extras.”

NextGen launched in 12 more markets in 2023, including top 10 markets Philadelphia and New York, and CTA says that 10 million NextGen TV sets have been sold in the U.S. to date. With planned launches in Chicago, San Diego and Tucson coming next month, 3.0 signals should be lit up in 75 markets covering 75% of U.S. TV households by the end of January, Noland says. She notes that 3.0 is also making significant progress internationally, with Brazil having chosen 3.0 technology for most of its new mandated digital TV standard and a final decision on the physical, or RF transmission, layer due next year.

Big Four networks ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC are all sponsors of the ATSC booth in Central Hall, which will have 13 different TV models, four different set-tops and one prototype mobile phone. The booth will also feature various demonstrations of high dynamic range (HDR) and enhanced audio content, including an “immersive entertainment room” sponsored by Dolby and major-league sports programming. There will also be a mosaic of various interactive applications enabled by 3.0’s broadband backchannel including “Start Over” capability developed by E.W. Scripps; an interactive music service from Sinclair; and sports statistics, gaming and news applications.

“What you’ll see at CES are almost fully-baked services that will hit the consumer this year, the gaming applications, the sports interactivity, the Start Over application,” says Mark Aitken, president, ONE Media and SVP of advanced technology for Sinclair. “There are a number of broadcasters, beyond us, who are now beyond the planning phase of adding HDR to their programming. Some of these become more and more relevant in respect to sports coming back to local broadcasting.”

Another new capability that ATSC and Pearl TV will be demonstrating is “broadcast IP,” which is a way to deliver a local station’s enhanced 3.0 programming to a 3.0 TV set as a “virtual channel” over broadband. This is a capability that is particularly important given the current spectrum landscape for 3.0, where often there is not enough capacity for every station that wants to offer 3.0 to be supported in a market.

Pearl TV first tested broadcast IP in Phoenix several years ago, says Pearl TV Managing Director Anne Schelle, working with set makers LG, Sony and Samsung, and successfully deployed it last spring for South Florida PBS’s stations in Miami.

The way that broadcast IP works is that a host 3.0 station transmits tiny bits of metadata within its over-the-air stream that can be picked up by a NextGen TV set and point to an internet server carrying the “virtual channel” of another station in the market that isn’t actually broadcasting in 3.0 due to capacity constraints. The virtual channel is displayed like a 3.0 channel in the over-the-air electronic program guide (EPG) on the NextGen TV set. When a viewer clicks on it that station’s 3.0 programming is then streamed to the set via the broadband connection.

However, the broadcast IP “virtual channel” shouldn’t be thought of as simply another FAST or streaming channel because it’s only available through the OTA guide, Schelle says. And it does require an agreement between two stations to enable transmission of the “tiny bits” of data necessary for the guide info.

“Our first goal was to bring up the PBS stations in South Florida to ensure that TVs can see it,” Schelle says. “It’s geofenced, you’re transmitting the URL in your stream, and it goes out and grabs the content from a server and puts it up in the OTA EPG. But you can only get it if you have antenna, you can’t get it otherwise.”

In Las Vegas, Sinclair is working with Gray Television and Fox to enable the broadcast IP transmission of KVVU, Gray’s Fox affiliate in the market, which couldn’t find traditional RF capacity for 3.0 programming.

“They want to offer their Fox station in 3.0 so they can enhance it with the same capabilities as if they were on-air in 3.0, to do 1080p and HDR, or even do 4K,” Schelle says. “They can also do [interactive] applications, the RUN3TV app works in the IP channel as well. They can basically do everything they can do in 3.0.”

The post For Broadcasters And Their Vendors, AI And IP Delivery Are Top Of Mind At CES appeared first on TV News Check.

Here’s a look back at some of the biggest stories in social media in 2023 — and what to watch for next year:

Goodbye Twitter

A little more than a year ago, Elon Musk walked into Twitter ‘s San Francisco headquarters, fired its CEO and other top executives and began transforming the social media platform into what’s now known as X.

Musk revealed the X logo in July. It quickly replaced Twitter’s name and its whimsical blue bird icon, online and on the company’s San Francisco headquarters.

“And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” Musk posted on the site.

Because of its public nature and because it attracted public figures, journalists and other high-profile users, Twitter always had an outsized influence on popular culture — but that influence seems to be waning.

“It had a lot of problems even before Musk took it over, but it was beloved brand with a clear role in the social media landscape,” said Jasmine Enberg, a social media analyst at Insider Intelligence. “There are still moments of Twitter magic on the platform, like when journalists took the platform to post real-time updates about the OpenAI drama, and the smaller communities on the platform remain important to many users. But the Twitter of the past 17 years is largely gone, and X’s reason for existence is murky.”

Since Musk’s takeover, X has been bombarded by allegations of misinformation and racism, endured significant advertising losses and suffered declines in usage. It didn’t help when Musk went on an expletive-ridden rant in an on-stage interview about companies that had halted spending on X. Musk asserted that advertisers that pulled out were engaging in “blackmail” and, using a profanity, essentially told them to get lost.

Continuing the trend of welcoming back users who had been banned by the former Twitter for hate speech or spreading misinformation, in December, Musk restored the X account of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, pointing to an unscientific poll he posted to his followers that came out in favor of the Infowars host who repeatedly called the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting a hoax.

LGBTQ and other organizations supporting marginalized groups, meanwhile, have been raising alarms about X becoming less safe. In April, for instance, it quietly removed a policy against the “targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals. In June, the advocacy group GLAAD called it “the most dangerous platform for LGBTQ people.”

GLSEN, an LGBTQ education group, announced in December that it was leaving X, joining other groups such as the suicide prevention nonprofit Trevor Project, saying that Musk’s changes “have birthed a new platform that enables its users to harass and target the LGBTQ+ community without restriction or discipline.”

Hello X. And Threads. And Bluesky

Musk’s ambitions for X include transforming the platform into an “everything app” — like China’s WeChat, for instance. The problem? It’s not clear if U.S. and Western audiences are keen on the idea. And Musk himself has been pretty vague on the specifics.

While X contends with an identity crisis, some users began looking for a replacement. Mastodon was one contender, along with Bluesky, which actually grew out of Twitter — a pet project of former CEO Jack Dorsey, who still sits on its board of directors.

When tens of thousands of people, many of them fed-up Twitter users, began signing up for the (still) invite-only Bluesky in the spring, the app had less than 10 people working on it, said CEO Jay Graber recently.

This meant “scrambling to keep everything working, keeping people online, scrambling to add features that we had on the roadmap,” she said. For weeks, the work was simply “scaling” — ensuring that the systems could handle the influx.

“We had one person on the app for a while, which was very funny, and there were memes about Paul versus all of Twitter’s engineers,” she recalled. “I don’t think we hired a second app developer until after the crazy growth spurt.”

Seeing an opportunity to lure in disgruntled Twitter users, Facebook parent Meta launched its own rival, Threads, in July. It soared to popularity as tens of millions began signing up — though keeping people on has been a bit of a challenge. Then, in December, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a surprise move that the company was testing interoperability — the idea championed by Mastodon, Bluesky and other decentralized social networks that people should be able to use their accounts on different platforms — kind of like your email address or phone number.

“Starting a test where posts from Threads accounts will be available on Mastodon and other services that use the ActivityPub protocol,” Zuckerberg posted on Threads in December. “Making Threads interoperable will give people more choice over how they interact and it will help content reach more people. I’m pretty optimistic about this.”

Mental Health Worries

Social media’s impact on children’s mental health hurtled toward a reckoning this year, with the U.S. surgeon general warning in May that there is not enough evidence to show that social media is safe for children and teens — and calling on tech companies, parents and caregivers to take “immediate action to protect kids now.”

“We’re asking parents to manage a technology that’s rapidly evolving that fundamentally changes how their kids think about themselves, how they build friendships, how they experience the world — and technology, by the way, that prior generations never had to manage,” Dr. Vivek Murthy told The Associated Press. “And we’re putting all of that on the shoulders of parents, which is just simply not fair.”

In October, dozens of U.S. states sued Meta for harming young people and contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly and deliberately designing features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to its platforms.

In November, Arturo Béjar, a former engineering director at Meta, testified before a Senate subcommittee about social media and the teen mental health crisis, hoping to shed light on how Meta executives, including Zuckerberg, knew about the harms Instagram was causing but chose not to make meaningful changes to address them.

The testimony came amid a bipartisan push in Congress to adopt regulations aimed at protecting children online. In December, the Federal Trade Commission proposed sweeping changes to a decades-old law that regulates how online companies can track and advertise to children, including turning off targeted ads to kids under 13 by default and limiting push notifications.

What To Watch For In ’24

Your AI friends have arrived — but chatbots are just the beginning. Standing in a courtyard at his company’s Menlo Park, California headquarters, Zuckerberg said this fall that Meta is “focused on building the future of human connection” — and painted a near-future where people interact with hologram versions of their friends or coworkers and with AI bots built to assist them. The company unveiled an army of AI bots — with celebrities such as Snoop Dogg and Paris Hilton lending their faces to play them — that social media users can interact with.

Next year, AI will be “integrated into virtually every corner of the platforms,” Enberg said.

“Social apps will use AI to drive usage, ad performance and revenues, subscription sign ups, and commerce activity. AI will deepen both users’ and advertisers’ reliance and relationship with social media, but its implementation won’t be entirely smooth sailing as consumer and regulatory scrutiny will intensify,” she added.

The analyst also sees subscriptions as an increasingly attractive revenue stream for some platforms. Inspired by Musk’s X, subscriptions “started as a way to diversify or boost revenues as social ad businesses took a hit, but they have persisted and expanded even as the social ad market has steadied itself.”

With major elections coming up in the U.S. and India among other countries, AI’s and social media’s role in misinformation will continue to be front and center for social media watchers.

“We’re not prepared for this,” A.J. Nash, vice president of intelligence at the cybersecurity firm ZeroFox, told the AP in May. “To me, the big leap forward is the audio and video capabilities that have emerged. When you can do that on a large scale, and distribute it on social platforms, well, it’s going to have a major impact.”

The post The Year Of Social Media Soul-Searching: Twitter Dies, X And Threads Are Born, AI Gets Personal appeared first on TV News Check.

Experts warn it will likely be worse in the coming presidential election contest. The safeguards that attempted to counter the bogus claims the last time are eroding, while the tools and systems that create and spread them are only getting stronger.

Many Americans, egged on by former President Donald Trump, have continued to push the unsupported idea that elections throughout the U.S. can’t be trusted. A majority of Republicans (57%) believe Democrat Joe Biden was not legitimately elected president.

Meanwhile, generative artificial intelligence tools have made it far cheaper and easier to spread the kind of misinformation that can mislead voters and potentially influence elections. And social media companies that once invested heavily in correcting the record have shifted their priorities.

“I expect a tsunami of misinformation,” said Oren Etzioni, an artificial intelligence expert and professor emeritus at the University of Washington. “I can’t prove that. I hope to be proven wrong. But the ingredients are there, and I am completely terrified.”

AI DEEPFAKES GO MAINSTREAM

Manipulated images and videos surrounding elections are nothing new, but 2024 will be the first U.S. presidential election in which sophisticated AI tools that can produce convincing fakes in seconds are just a few clicks away.

The fabricated images, videos and audio clips known as deepfakes have started making their way into experimental presidential campaign ads. More sinister versions could easily spread without labels on social media and fool people days before an election, Etzioni said.

“You could see a political candidate like President Biden being rushed to a hospital,” he said. “You could see a candidate saying things that he or she never actually said. You could see a run on the banks. You could see bombings and violence that never occurred.”

High-tech fakes already have affected elections around the globe, said Larry Norden, senior director of the elections and government program at the Brennan Center for Justice. Just days before Slovakia’s recent elections, AI-generated audio recordings impersonated a liberal candidate discussing plans to raise beer prices and rig the election. Fact-checkers scrambled to identify them as false, but they were shared as real across social media regardless.

These tools might also be used to target specific communities and hone misleading messages about voting. That could look like persuasive text messages, false announcements about voting processes shared in different languages on WhatsApp, or bogus websites mocked up to look like official government ones in your area, experts said.

Faced with content that is made to look and sound real, “everything that we’ve been wired to do through evolution is going to come into play to have us believe in the fabrication rather than the actual reality,” said misinformation scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

Republicans and Democrats in Congress and the Federal Election Commission are exploring steps to regulate the technology, but they haven’t finalized any rules or legislation. That’s left states to enact the only restrictions so far on political AI deepfakes.

A handful of states have passed laws requiring deepfakes to be labeled or banning those that misrepresent candidates. Some social media companies, including YouTube and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, have introduced AI labeling policies. It remains to be seen whether they will be able to consistently catch violators.

SOCIAL MEDIA GUARDRAILS FADE

It was just over a year ago that Elon Musk bought Twitter and began firing its executives, dismantling some of its core features and reshaping the social media platform into what’s now known as X.

Since then, he has upended its verification system, leaving public officials vulnerable to impersonators. He has gutted the teams that once fought misinformation on the platform, leaving the community of users to moderate itself. And he has restored the accounts of conspiracy theorists and extremists who were previously banned.

The changes have been applauded by many conservatives who say Twitter’s previous moderation attempts amounted to censorship of their views. But pro-democracy advocates argue the takeover has shifted what once was a flawed but useful resource for news and election information into a largely unregulated echo chamber that amplifies hate speech and misinformation.

Twitter used to be one of the “most responsible” platforms, showing a willingness to test features that might reduce misinformation even at the expense of engagement, said Jesse Lehrich, co-founder of Accountable Tech, a nonprofit watchdog group.

“Obviously now they’re on the exact other end of the spectrum,” he said, adding that he believes the company’s changes have given other platforms cover to relax their own policies. X didn’t answer emailed questions from The Associated Press, only sending an automated response.

In the run-up to 2024, X, Meta and YouTube have together removed 17 policies that protected against hate and misinformation, according to a report from Free Press, a nonprofit that advocates for civil rights in tech and media.

In June, YouTube announced that while it would still regulate content that misleads about current or upcoming elections, it would stop removing content that falsely claims the 2020 election or other previous U.S. elections were marred by “widespread fraud, errors or glitches.” The platform said the policy was an attempt to protect the ability to “openly debate political ideas, even those that are controversial or based on disproven assumptions.”

Lehrich said even if tech companies want to steer clear of removing misleading content, “there are plenty of content-neutral ways” platforms can reduce the spread of disinformation, from labeling months-old articles to making it more difficult to share content without reviewing it first.

X, Meta and YouTube also have laid off thousands of employees and contractors since 2020, some of whom have included content moderators.

The shrinking of such teams, which many blame on political pressure, “sets the stage for things to be worse in 2024 than in 2020,” said Kate Starbird, a misinformation expert at the University of Washington.

Meta explains on its website that it has some 40,000 people devoted to safety and security and that it maintains “the largest independent fact-checking network of any platform.” It also frequently takes down networks of fake social media accounts that aim to sow discord and distrust.

“No tech company does more or invests more to protect elections online than Meta – not just during election periods but at all times,” the posting says.

Ivy Choi, a YouTube spokesperson, said the platform is “heavily invested” in connecting people to high-quality content on YouTube, including for elections. She pointed to the platform’s recommendation and information panels, which provide users with reliable election news, and said the platform removes content that misleads voters on how to vote or encourages interference in the democratic process.

The rise of TikTok and other, less regulated platforms such as Telegram, Truth Social and Gab, also has created more information silos online where baseless claims can spread. Some apps that are particularly popular among communities of color and immigrants, such as WhatsApp and WeChat, rely on private chats, making it hard for outside groups to see the misinformation that may spread.

“I’m worried that in 2024, we’re going to see similar recycled, ingrained false narratives but more sophisticated tactics,” said Roberta Braga, founder and executive director of the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas. “But on the positive side, I am hopeful there is more social resilience to those things.”

THE TRUMP FACTOR

Trump’s front-runner status in the Republican presidential primary is top of mind for misinformation researchers who worry that it will exacerbate election misinformation and potentially lead to election vigilantism or violence.

The former president still falsely claims to have won the 2020 election.

“Donald Trump has clearly embraced and fanned the flames of false claims about election fraud in the past,” Starbird said. “We can expect that he may continue to use that to motivate his base.”

Without evidence, Trump has already primed his supporters to expect fraud in the 2024 election, urging them to intervene to ” guard the vote ” to prevent vote rigging in diverse Democratic cities. Trump has a long history of suggesting elections are rigged if he doesn’t win and did so before voting in 2016 and 2020.

That continued wearing away of voter trust in democracy can lead to violence, said Bret Schafer, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Alliance for Securing Democracy, which tracks misinformation.

“If people don’t ultimately trust information related to an election, democracy just stops working,” he said. “If a misinformation or disinformation campaign is effective enough that a large enough percentage of the American population does not believe that the results reflect what actually happened, then Jan. 6 will probably look like a warm-up act.”

ELECTION OFFICIALS RESPOND

Election officials have spent the years since 2020 preparing for the expected resurgence of election denial narratives. They’ve dispatched teams to explain voting processes, hired outside groups to monitor misinformation as it emerges and beefed up physical protections at vote-counting centers.

In Colorado, Secretary of State Jena Griswold said informative paid social media and TV campaigns that humanize election workers have helped inoculate voters against misinformation.

“This is an uphill battle, but we have to be proactive,” she said. “Misinformation is one of the biggest threats to American democracy we see today.”

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon’s office is spearheading #TrustedInfo2024, a new online public education effort by the National Association of Secretaries of State to promote election officials as a trusted source of election information in 2024.

His office also is planning meetings with county and city election officials and will update a “Fact and Fiction” information page on its website as false claims emerge. A new law in Minnesota will protect election workers from threats and harassment, bar people from knowingly distributing misinformation ahead of elections and criminalize people who non-consensually share deepfake images to hurt a political candidate or influence an election.

“We hope for the best but plan for the worst through these layers of protections,” Simon said.

In a rural Wisconsin county north of Green Bay, Oconto County Clerk Kim Pytleski has traveled the region giving talks and presentations to small groups about voting and elections to boost voters’ trust. The county also offers equipment tests in public so residents can observe the process.

“Being able to talk directly with your elections officials makes all the difference,” she said. “Being able to see that there are real people behind these processes who are committed to their jobs and want to do good work helps people understand we are here to serve them.”

Fernando reported from Chicago. Associated Press writer Christina A. Cassidy in Atlanta contributed to this report.

The post As Social Media Guardrails Fade And AI Deepfakes Go Mainstream, Experts Warn Of Impact On Elections appeared first on TV News Check.

With this latest innovation, the company says, “users can now generate a complete audio ad simply by uploading a picture such as a product image, billboard ad or even a photo of a storefront. This cutting-edge feature leverages the latest AI technology to analyze visual elements to create an engaging script before selecting suitable AI voices, music and sound effects to deliver a fully produced audio ad.”

The platform uses AI to analyze the content of a picture, identifying brands, slogans, styles, target audience and much more to write a creative brief. From the creative brief an ad script is created, voices, music and sound effects are curated before mixing all the elements together in a matter of minutes.

“Adthos is committed to revolutionizing the way audio advertising is produced,” says Raoul Wedel, Adthos CEO. “Our new feature is a game-changer, instantly unlocking the potential of audio advertising for anyone that can take a picture.”

Adthos Creative Studio’s new feature is an addition to the Self-Service portal, “designed to streamline the ad creation process and bring the power of AI to businesses of all sizes.”

The makers of Adthos have created a short video introduction to the feature to provide more insight on the possibilities. Those interested in experiencing the creative power of this new feature for themselves can apply for a free trial via the website.

The post Adthos Uses AI To Create Fully Produced Audio Ads From A Picture appeared first on TV News Check.

Several groups have undertaken large-scale digitization efforts to tackle the problem, with some exploring new AI and ML (machine learning) tools to more efficiently tag and index video. Regardless of the method, generating accurate metadata is key to any archive efforts, both for old content and fresh material being created today, said broadcasters last week at TVNewsCheck’s NewsTECHForum in New York City.

Metadata’s Critical Role

“Before we can actually monetize the archives in a reasonable way, we have to have metadata on it,” said Mike Palmer, AVP, advanced technology/media management for Sinclair. “And in many cases, most cases, we have not been putting good metadata on it.”

Palmer, speaking on the panel “Harvesting the Archive for New Content and Opportunities” moderated by this reporter, said archive metadata must not only include enough information to find content using a media asset management (MAM) system. It also needs to have information about the rights attached to the content, since most call-letter stations have a mix of content they shot themselves, and fully own the rights to, and derivative content originally sourced from a network news service.

There isn’t any technical means today to tell whether a station owns a piece of content or not, Palmer said. That question can usually be answered only by calling and (hopefully) finding an employee who was there when it first aired.

“How long have we been talking about archives and metadata, but we’re not bringing back basic information about ownership, what camera it was shot on, the date, the geolocation, all this metadata that is in the cameras that we should be carrying forward,” Palmer said. “And we’re recreating the same problem that we’re trying to solve today with AI and ML because we’re simply not putting the right metadata on that content as it moves into the archive.”

Palmer said the culprit for lost camera metadata is often nonlinear editing systems that strip it out during the production process. To combat the problem going forward he sees a solution in the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) standard, as promoted by the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI). C2PA specifies provenance metadata that survives all the way from camera to distribution. C2PA not only addresses content ownership, but also content authenticity, an issue of growing importance in the age of AI-generated fake images.

‘A Wildly Human Process’

To improve accessibility of content for its journalists and producers, Hearst Television began digitizing the archives across its stations in 2021. To date it has digitized about 20%-25% of its archive material, representing roughly 45,000 hours of video.

“We parachute into a couple of stations at a time and help them digitize their archives in a systematic way,” said Devon Armijo, director, digital news integration for Hearst Television. “We bring in archival staff that handles not only the physical media but also the paper data that associates with it. Not only do we focus on digitization, but they also are not only tagging. They are looking at it in a discovery way. making sure they’re telling about the editorial opportunities, the promotional opportunities and sometimes the sales opportunities that are there in the archives — things that are sealed in the tapes that folks may know or not know that they have.”

While Hearst makes some use of automation, Armijo said that digitization remains “a wildly human process,” particularly when dealing with physical media that is beyond its end of life, such as 40-50 year-old tapes. That is where Hearst’s archivists serve as “the first line of defense.”

“They’re putting tapes through on a daily basis and making so many human decisions, up front at the beginning of digitization, that helps you with any sort of automation that rolls through afterwards,” Armijo said. “We had some automation processes throughout, like black [frame] detection. But that stuff is all secondary to the human decisions, the conversations, and understanding the history of not only the station but the content that’s there in your archive.”

Hearst licenses archive content to third parties, Armijo said, but the group itself remains “our first customer.” So far this year, Hearst has used its archive to produce over 370 pieces of digital original content along with a handful of linear specials and some local streaming content, including the popular true crime series Hometown Tragedy.

Fox is digitizing the archives across its station group as well as Fox News and Fox Business and bringing them into cloud storage. It has taken a different approach than Hearst by outsourcing the work, which encompasses tens of thousands of U-matic, one-inch and two-inch tapes, 16mm and 35mm film and various digital tape formats.

“We have tractor trailers come and pick up the entire library and it goes off to one of our five digitizing vendors, and then it works through their process,” said Ben Ramos, VP, Fox Archive, field and emerging tech, Fox News. “They have around 35 metadata enhancers who watch every frame of it, and kind of tag it as they’re going through it. It’s very manual, we haven’t gotten to too many AI/ML tools yet.”

Fox’s first goal was to preserve “at-risk” content like one-inch, two-inch and U-matic libraries, with the second objective being to generate ROI by licensing content to third-party documentary filmmakers. The initial effort was aimed at 5,000 U-matic tapes.

“What do we have in there, what’s the failure rate, and can we find ROI?” Ramos said. “We found ROI within six months, so that kind of supercharged the process, and then we got to do the rest of the 70,000 U-matic, two-inch and one-inch, and then we started dipping into the more expensive 16mm.”

Fox has experienced a failure rate of 3%-5% on that older content, and those impaired assets are now sitting on two pallets “awaiting further remediation,” Ramos said. That could involve baking them for several weeks to remove moisture, or even cracking tapes open to clean them and rehouse them.

Overall, it is a slow process, and so far, Fox has only digitized about 8% or 9% of its total physical media assets. One of the surprising findings is that newer formats like Beta, DV and DVCPRO tapes are also experiencing similar 3%-5% failure rates during the digitization process, and some of the older one-inch and U-matic tapes are actually playing better depending on how and where they were stored.

“Now everything feels a little bit at risk,” Ramos said.

Finding Answers With AI, ML

Sinclair was early in archiving some of its content in the public cloud, and last year struck a deal with producer Anthony Zuiker to mine its news archives to create original content that can be licensed to third parties. The group has around 23 million assets that were “born digital,” Palmer said, which means they been archived from a newsroom computer system with a script attached to it. Those assets have accurate metadata, allowing one to search that content across the entire enterprise and access it. Sinclair also has another roughly 10 million assets sitting on shelves on varied physical media.

“The question at this point is what do we want to invest in to bring this back?” Palmer said. “We look at news content, and it’s a fact that most news content has no value in the archive. It is the rare jewel that justifies the expense of all the rest of the work that you put into that. So, we’re focused right now in trying to determine, to the best of our knowledge, which portions of the archive have the highest probability for containing those jewels, and then go mining in that direction. And we may not — I say may, because there are no hard decisions at this point — but we may not want to go back to those 10 million assets and actually digitize them all. It depends on what we find.”

Sinclair has worked with archiving vendor Memnon to digitize cutsheets and tape labels on stored media at a few stations. It plans to use AI tools like optical character recognition (OCR) to analyze them and hopefully generate good descriptions that it can then use to determine what is worth digitizing.

Fox Sports has spent several years on its own complex archive project with Google to create a system that allows producers to quickly call up old footage, such as to enhance a halftime package. Ramos said he has been given access to it and “playing with it for about six months.” The system uses two kinds of metadata: metadata created by human loggers, as well as metadata created by the same ML algorithms that form the basis of YouTube search. A user has a choice of searching by either type.

“It’s definitely working,” Ramos said. “It’s a massive, massive archive, it’s huge. They’ve got a lot of content in there, so it would be really hard to search otherwise.”

Ramos’ own budget for AI/ML tools is more modest, so his team has focused on the least expensive AI tools, speech-to-text and OCR, and runs content through the AI tools themselves.

“Usually when there’s an anchor or a reporter talking about something, it relates to the video that’s covering that,” Ramos said. “So that’s been a really good way for us to inexpensively find most of what we need. But it’s not 100% of the way there.”

Finding Affordability

French company Newsbridge wants to make indexing archive content and searching through it more affordable. The company has developed a cloud-based AI engine called MXT-1 that can quickly sift through archive video and generate human-like descriptions, and do it more affordably than conventional AI systems, said Newsbridge CEO Phillippe Petitpont. Its indexing technology can also be applied to ingesting live content.

“With 1,000 hours of archive, there might be three hours that are hidden gems that have a lot of value,” Petitpont said. “So, you need to analyze 1,000 hours but there are maybe only three or four that are relevant. The problem is that current AI, monomodal indexing technology is very expensive. You don’t want to spend $10 million to index something that might be valuable for just two or three hours. So, we took this problem and have been working on it for a few years. We need AI with video understanding that is able to be very efficient, so that it can meet business realities in terms of pricing.”

Petitpont said a key differentiator for Newsbridge’s AI that it is multimodal, which means that it doesn’t just analyze speech or recognize text but considers multiple types of data within video as a human would. And instead of analyzing each individual frame of video, MXT-1 employs “smart subsampling” and only looks at a few key relevant frames. This cuts down on the use of expensive graphics processing units (GPUs) on public cloud compute and avoids wasting money by “overindexing” content.

“We only process a frame that will really best illustrate the content,” Petitpont said. “So then we’ve reduced by an order of magnitude a lot of traditional sampling.”

Sinclair is not currently a customer of Newsbridge, but Palmer said when he spoke with them he was impressed by their smart subsampling approach. The company obviously had arrived earlier at the same conclusion that his team at Sinclair had reached.

“That was, that you don’t need to look at every frame of video,” Palmer said. “You don’t need to do some of these massive tagging things for every frame of video. Some of these AI models will create pages and pages of metadata for each frame of video, and that is not appropriate for news. Less in some cases, and probably this case, is better.”

Read more coverage of NewsTECHForum 2023 here. Watch this session and all the NewsTECHForum 2023 videos here.

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VideoVerse’s software as a service (SaaS) platform leverages artificial intelligence models, computer vision and machine learning to transform full-length video footage into short-form content and highlights in real-time for rights-holders and content creators.

VideoVerse says its flagship product, Magnifi, “streamlines traditional labor, time and cost-intensive editing processes through cloud-based AI-driven analysis, empowering hundreds of sports leagues, news and entertainment broadcasters, and streaming platforms around the world to quickly and easily curate, edit and distribute short-form content and highlights.” Earlier this year, Magnifi earned the National Association of Broadcasters Product of the Year award.

“With media companies and streamers now producing millions of hours of video every minute, demand for curated content has skyrocketed,” said Vinayak Shrivastav, VideoVerse CEO/co-founder. “VideoVerse’s editing solutions are now an indispensable asset within the video creation ecosystem, with Magnifi, in particular, facilitating a seamless and highly-efficient process for curation, production and distribution,” Shrivastav highlighted. “Our partnership with Bluestone marks an exciting phase as we forge ahead with global expansion, and driving innovation in the realm of media technology by unlocking the boundless potential of AI.”

“The demand for intelligent software automation of short-form content and highlights is growing exponentially,” said Bobby Sharma, Bluestone founder/managing partner. “The applications for VideoVerse’s technology are limitless, extending across Sports, Media and Entertainment, and into other industries, such as education and security. Today, rights-holders and content creators sit on mountains of raw content, and consumers want the ability to watch short-form content and highlights as soon as a play is over, or when news breaks. With Magnifi’s market-leading AI technology and a suite of supporting SaaS technologies, VideoVerse meets this demand in terms of quality and efficiency, unlike any other company in the marketplace. We’re excited to help VideoVerse take the next step on its journey to revolutionize the curation and monetization of next generation video and media.”

Headquartered in the United States and India, VideoVerse works with sports leagues and teams, broadcast networks and content producers including: the UEFA Champions League, FA Cup, Bundesliga, Australian Open, U.S. Open, Wimbledon, NCAA Basketball, Indian Premier League, Women’s Premier League and various U.S. collegiate sports programs at major universities and athletic conferences.

VideoVerse marks the third investment for Bluestone, and its first in a SaaS company.

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“My job is to be the champion of our news directors, our news leaders across the country, and the stress that they are under is different than I’ve ever seen before,” said Ellen Crooke, Tegna’s SVP of news. “So many of the day-to-day conversations that I have with news leaders are about dealing with the stress of the journalists due to the type of stories they face.”

Frequent mass shootings and other dangers have forced TV-station newsrooms to carefully consider every decision to send a news team out to cover an event and even to reduce exposure by choosing not to report from the field when it’s not deemed necessary.

“That’s one of the things I think that’s changed the most,” Crooke said. “When I started, news leaders were in charge of safety and security. It’s too much now.”

Newsrooms today are employing security consultants and teams and holding careful conversations to determine the best course of action before sending teams out in a knee-jerk reaction to breaking news.

“Good leaders will evaluate every story, every assignment, every situation to ensure that when we need more than what we have, we’re providing that,” said Barb Maushard, SVP of news, Hearst Television.

And those conversations aren’t only around news teams, but around all teams going out to cover any event, including the weather.

“A few years ago, we hired a head of security, but we also mandate that security teams go with every single crew that’s out in the field,” said Nora Zimmett, president, news and original series, Allen Media’s The Weather Group.

Weather is another area that’s changed dramatically in recent years, as reporters and producers increasingly face dramatic weather situations.

“I was raised in the business when it was like ‘suck it up,’ but we don’t do that anymore,” Zimmett said. “There is no mandate to go out and cover anything. We have people who are like ‘OK, I’ll do snow and hurricanes, but I no longer do tornadoes,’ or ‘I’ll do tornadoes and snow. I don’t do hurricanes,’ and that’s OK. Because there is nothing worth that level of stress, that level of PTSD.

“It was a shift for myself, my direct reports and our executive leadership team that just because we were taught that you just deal with it, that doesn’t mean it’s right,” she added. “And that also certainly doesn’t mean you’re going to get the best out of your employees. If you have a reputation in your shop for throwing caution to the wind, you’re not going to retain the best talent. That is not a way to lead your team. I think the news industry has to evolve out of this sort of militaristic attitude of ‘it’s our way or the highway.’”

Newsroom leaders also have had to take steps to support employees’ mental health, which can become fragile while performing difficult jobs in stressful situations.

“Back in the day, it was ‘go do this and write this and send it in,’” said Sam Singal, group VP, Charter Communications’ Spectrum News. “Now I find that we spend a lot of time walking through the newsrooms, pulling up a chair and talking to people and understanding what they’re going through.”

Companies also have made mental health services available to employees.

“We’ve made sure that our employees have places to go to seek support for those who want to stay in and want to be able to manage the challenges of the job,” Maushard said.

Of course, part and parcel of these conversations is the issue of pay — journalism has always been a notably low-paying field except for perhaps the biggest names. But companies have recently been forced to increase salaries as it’s become harder to retain employees.

“We are actively and constantly looking at equity and analyzing what are our competitors paying what our colleagues paying just to make sure that we’re up to par with everybody else,” Singal said.

“We have to pay the right amount of money for the jobs, whatever that amount is supposed to be,” Maushard said. “But I think it’s more than that. It’s about the benefits. It’s about the environments we create. It’s about the purpose. It’s about people wanting to do this and then us having to make these into the kind of environments where they’re going to want to be because our communities depend on it. Democracy depends on it.”

Adding to the stress is the cadence of the 24-hour news cycle — including at TV stations where streaming apps and FAST channels have increased the content burden — as well as the pressure to stay connected with audiences through social media. Technology that automates some of those tasks can help, said Joe DiGiovanni, head of North American sales at The Weather Company.

For example, if a station group like Tegna, which owns 64 stations in 51 markets, is covering one weather crisis in one market and a completely different one in another, technology can help stations communicate with and assist one other.

“There may be somebody out West who is an expert in wildfires, while there may be somebody down South who’s an expert in hurricanes. That’s still a news story in other markets, but they may not have that content. So, through our cloud technologies, they can grab that content from those markets and use it in other places,” DiGiovanni said.

In addition, storing content on the cloud in searchable databases means it’s easy to find in crisis situations.

The Weather Company also provides weather forecasting technology that helps meteorologists tell weather stories to viewers in a way that’s comprehensive but also easy to understand. That type of technology has become increasingly essential as climate change has become a central focus of newsrooms’ ongoing coverage.

“Our job at the Weather Channel is to predict the future, and this uncertain future is scary,” Zimmett said. “We view our job now as not just to predict what’s going to happen in terms of extreme weather, but what’s going to happen to your mortgage, what’s going to happen to your insurance? That is something that is now a fabric of our coverage.”

“It’s not about climate change from where we sit. It’s about climate and weather impact,” Maushard said.

When covering anything from climate change to financial markets, political campaigns or even local traffic, technology remains both a useful tool and a potential threat, especially as newsrooms experiment more and more with artificial intelligence (AI).

“We look at AI in three different ways,” Crooke said. “The first is ethics: How will we as journalists use AI appropriately and transparently? Second: how can we innovate using AI? And third, which is what worries me most: How will we be duped by AI, especially in the 2024 presidential election?”

To avoid the third scenario, Tegna is training all of its journalists in the first quarter of 2024 on how to detect and deflect disinformation propagated with the use of AI.

Because journalism is more stressful and challenging than ever, it’s even more driven by the passion and purpose of those who pursue it, panelists said. That’s the secret sauce that keeps people in the business.

“News really is a calling. You have to have a passion and want to do it because you’re gonna make sacrifices,” Maushard said.

“One of the things that makes people stay in their jobs is feeling that they are part of a purpose, that they are doing work that matters,” Crooke said. “I think we’ve seen so much loss in journalism because there’s not always strong work happening that’s making a difference in our communities. The more we focus on purpose, the better our retention will be.”

Read more coverage of NewsTECHForum 2023 here.

Watch this session and all the NewsTECHForum 2023 videos here.

The post News Leaders Focus On Journalist Protection, Stress In Fraught ’24 appeared first on TV News Check.

Ray Thompson, senior director of partners and alliances at Avid, said AI’s assistance with transcript creation has already proven valuable. Not only does it construct word-for-word transcripts, but it also produces summaries of interviews, allowing TV news producers to make quicker decisions about which portions of the footage to use in stories. Thompson added that the tech can then churn out a new transcript for a finished package, locate where key phrases were said within it and drop permanent markers onto it to aid in searches. He also said that Avid recently added a “mix searches” feature to its MediaCentral platform, allowing users to combine metadata and phonetic searches into one. 

“It’s driving efficiencies,” said Thompson about gen AI. “It’s basically making things go faster, and hopefully allowing you to … deliver more content and deliver at scale and do so much faster.”

From the publisher’s perspective, Aimee Rinehart, senior project manager for AI strategy at the Associated Press, said that her organization has leveraged AI for nearly a decade. Starting in 2014, the AP used the tech to build earnings reports, growing the number of reports that year tenfold, from 300 (written by humans) to 3,000. 

“There was actually a white paper that indicated that there was an uptick in the stock market around the time those were released because there were 2,700 companies that had never been written about and suddenly they had some visibility,” Rinehart recalled. “So those continue to run today and we’ll keep experimenting around workflow efficiencies.”

Over at the BBC, Laura Ellis, the company’s head of technology forecasting, said the company is using generative AI for “lots of language work translation, transcription and personalization.” She said the tech is helping dyslexic workers at the company write more quickly, and it’s also being used to generate story headlines — with human oversight.

Ellis went so far as to say that the BBC is “a technology organization as well as a content organization,” one that is not “cutting humans out of the loop.” However, she also noted that the company is not blind to the potential pitfalls of AI. 

“We’re now trying to work out how all these new capabilities [help us] can create new things, new products for our audience, and how we can do that ethically and safely, because if we lose trust with our audiences, we lose everything,” Ellis said. “Generative AI has its moments and has its foibles, so [we’re] just trying to create a cross organization conversation about where we want to go with it, what we want to do with it, and how we do that safely.”

Adobe is one organization trying to figure out ways to help newsgroups navigate this minefield. Also sitting on the panel was Santiago Lyon, head of advocacy and education content for the Authenticity Initiative at Adobe, who said the effort he oversees involves a “community of over 2,000 media and technology companies and others, working to set and implement an open standard around provenance,” referring to the origin of digital files and the tracking of potential manipulation. Such information, Lyon said, can be shared with viewers, boosting transparency about the content in front of them.

“You can think about it sort of like a digital nutrition label, in the same way that you might look at a food product in the supermarket and understand what’s in it,” Lyon said. “We’re also doing this work with hardware manufacturers, so it’s already in production cameras out there, working with smartphone manufacturers working with editing tools, working with publishers and CMS manufacturers, and the whole initiative [is] underwritten by Adobe and [the tech] is incorporated into Adobe products.”

Claire Leibowicz, head of AI and media integrity at the Partnership on AI, a nonprofit coalition committed to the responsible use of artificial intelligence, said that there will certainly be “unintended consequences” with greater deployment of gen AI in journalism. However, her group is working on guidelines for AI use in newsrooms to help address related issues. It includes suggestions for newsroom leaders about how to approach AI integration, what problems to look out for and how to talk to production teams about its use. 

“Journalistic standards are the helpful conduit to making a decision about what you disclose,” Leibowicz said. “What do you have as a starting place in terms of journalistic ethics about what requires a correction or what requires explanation of methods? … There’s certain precedent that we do have on our side to help us in the AI moment, in the sense of what we do in terms of disclosure.”

Another ongoing effort is in place to generate guidelines for generative AI tech use and transparency associated with it. Lyon said that literature from the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) has emerged as a “best-in-class” standard for such guidance. He advocated for its use in newsrooms, saying it is even consulted by legislators charged with building policy on the matter. 

But in-house discourse among publishers and other decision makers will only be impactful if consumers understand gen AI and what role it plays in content production. “We’ve done a fair amount of research and consumers get confused quite quickly, depending on the demographic, as to what they are looking at, what is being conveyed,” Lyon said. “So you’re trying to find that balance to simplify it and make it effective.”

Consumers are also going to have to learn to trust gen AI. Leibowicz cited an Axios poll that said half of Americans believe AI will be used to create content that will impact the upcoming presidential election. 

“If you’re implementing AI in your newsroom, that’s amidst an ecosystem of public literacy that AI is kind of going to be infused in all types of content,” she said. “So this question of, what responsibility do you have to both meet people where they are in terms of thinking that most content is AI generated to date, but also not to induce a degree of skepticism, that’s going to make an already distrusting population more distrusting of the news media — and there’s no perfect answer.”

According to research, Leibowicz said that consumers don’t just want a label that says news producers use AI, they want to understand where it is being used and what it is being used for. “There’s even a question of how noticeable they are” in broadcasts, she added. “That’s a design consideration more so than it is a linguistic one, but you want to make sure people can see these things.”

On top of all that, news stakeholders and consumers have varying perspectives on the threshold for conveying disclosures of AI use, Leibowicz said. Some people might want to know whether or not a writer used Google to generate some ideas for headlines, while others might not think it crucial at all.

Education initiatives can’t arrive quickly enough. Not only is AI already used in newsrooms on a growing scale, it’s also relied upon in spaces covered by journalists, creating yet another impetus to stay in lockstep with the tech.

Reinhart said, “If you live in a town with a bank or school or a police bureau, chances are they’re using some type of algorithm to determine where they do arrests, or how many people are going to graduate,” as well as other data that informs policy. She said local reporters should ask community leaders what is being used and how, and noted the Tampa Bay Times recently won a Pulitzer Prize for a story about a sheriff executing preemptive policing based on AI forecasting. 

“So, AI is happening at your level, no matter what happens in Silicon Valley,” Reinhart said.

Read more coverage of NewsTECHForum 2023 here.

Watch this session and all the NewsTECHForum 2023 videos here.

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Catalyzing a year of AI fanfare was ChatGPT. The chatbot gave the world a glimpse of recent advances in computer science even if not everyone figured out quite how it works or what to do with it.

“I would call this an inflection moment,” pioneering AI scientist Fei-Fei Li said. “2023 is, in history, hopefully going to be remembered for the profound changes of the technology as well as the public awakening. It also shows how messy this technology is.”

The post 2023: The Year We Played With AI — And Weren’t Sure What To Do About It appeared first on TV News Check.

Broadcasters are continuing to adopt cloud technology and IP networking while maintaining a strong defense against cybersecurity threats. And they are also exploring the potential benefits — and hazards — of artificial intelligence (AI) to their operations.

Those were some of the key takeaways from Technology Leaders on Trends in 2024, a TVNewsCheck webinar moderated by this reporter that gathered top broadcasters and vendors to examine the current state of media workflows and forecast key technology trends for the new year and beyond. “Hybrid” was a theme that came up repeatedly, both in the context of business models and broadcasters’ technology architectures. (To watch the video of the full webinar, click here.)

Tackling Hybridity

Paul Cheesbrough, CEO of Tubi Media Group for Fox Corp., noted the “key milestone” when Nielsen Gauge data in July 2023 showed broadcast and cable TV linear viewing fell below 50% of overall TV consumption for the first time as streaming viewing continued to grow (to 38.7% over the same month).

“That key tipping point is pretty material, and it kind of summarizes nicely where we are as a business, which in terms of consumer distribution of our content is very hybrid with the traditional platforms but also the new emerging platforms like streaming,” Cheesbrough said. “As a technology organization, supporting that hybrid of platforms where the consumer exists is really central to how we’ve invested and how we structure ourselves. Now, the big focus on ’24 is obviously to keep those platforms running, but really lean in to making sure streaming is a good long-term business for us, that it monetizes well, and that the economics of it really start to pull through.”

Fox has already created a cloud-first technology infrastructure based around its Tempe, Ariz., content hub to support this hybrid distribution model of linear TV and streaming, and there are other broadcasters like Sinclair that are also aggressively shifting their workflows to the public cloud. But Bryan Bedford, head of IoT and verticals for Cisco Systems, said that most customers are looking to implement hybrid technology infrastructures that combine cloud compute with a healthy dose of private cloud or on-premise hardware. That is largely due to the cost of running broadcast workflows on public cloud platforms.

“Now people are coming to us and asking, how can we look at a hybrid environment?” Bedford said. “Not to discredit that [the cloud], there are a lot of great uses cases for public cloud, it’s awesome. But they’re looking at cost innovation and what can we do in our own data center, to maybe alleviate some of that opex sourcing.”

Bedford added that investment in 2110 IP routing infrastructures continues to grow. He said the industry has moved out of the “bleeding-edge adoption phase” as workflows have solidified and integration expertise has grown, and that Cisco has seen a “steady increase across all major areas” for 2110 including studios, production control rooms, master control rooms, stadiums and mobile production units. The company now has several hundred live 2110 deployments around the world.

“We don’t see it slowing down for some time,” Bedford said.

Lawo is also seeing interest in hybrid architectures, said Jeremy Courtney, senior director in the company’s CTO office. He estimated that most Lawo customers are still using on-premise hardware for 70%-80% of their technical infrastructures.

“There are some customers that have absolutely embraced the cloud and have gone all in, but we’re seeing more who favor the hybrid approach,” Courtney said. “If you are going to use the cloud 24/7, there are some costs that come with that. And I think it’s not unreasonable to say if you are using functionality on a 24/7 basis there’s no advantage to having that all in the cloud, by egress costs, ingress costs, etc. Then to be honest, run it on premise.”

Courtney said many broadcasters used to equate “agility” with working in the cloud, but that the industry has learned that is not necessarily true. While public cloud can help at peak times, he said, “you can absolutely have a level of agility in your data center on premise.”

As it looks to help its customers support live production, Lawo is busy developing a three-layered “dynamic media facility” with IP as the key enabler, Courtney said. The bottom layer is connectivity and edge compute, with the ability to take in and pump out signals from legacy standards like SDI, as well as “tactile” surface like pushbuttons and consoles that operators “can feel and be creative with.”

The middle layer is the local network, where broadcast technology is transitioning from “FPGA purpose-built devices with fixed functionality” to standard servers with “agile functionality, the ability to spin things up and spin them down as and when you need it.” The top layer is the public cloud, used in combination with low-bandwidth transport technologies like SRT to help manage the unpredictable nature of the internet.

“We’re bringing this all together in one package, and underpinning this package you need a cloud-native software platform that allows you to discover devices, to control those devices, and coming back to that agile piece, that platform needs to enable you to spin things up and spin them down as you see fit,” Courtney said. “And we very much believe that as our customers learn to leverage this, they’ll absolutely see much better utilization in how they consume products and services.”

NextGen TV Developments

Along with its cloud initiatives, Sinclair continues to march ahead with the rollout of the ATSC 3.0, or NextGen TV, standard, said Mark Aitken, president of ONE Media and SVP of advanced technology for Sinclair. Close to 75% of the country is now reached by a 3.0 signal, he said, and an important development in 2024 will be adding second and even third 3.0 stations in markets where 3.0 is already on-air to enable new businesses like data distribution.

“[ATSC] 3.0 is headed into the picking-upsteam phase,” Aitken said. “We’re doubling up in major markets we’re already deployed in. What’s important about that is having additional capacity. The ability to bring more stations in the same market leads to additional capacity to do things other than simply television programming.”

Given the capacity crunch, 3.0 stations are also looking to use guide data broadcast in the over-the-air signal to steer consumers to “virtual channels” and interactive applications like betting and gaming that can be delivered to smart TVs through a broadband connection. Aitken said that functionality will be demonstrated at CES in Las Vegas next month.

“It’s enabling the broadcast equivalent on the internet, that’s tied directly into the ‘store’ that a station represents,” he said.

AI’s Prospects And Pitfalls

Not surprisingly, the opportunities and pitfalls of AI dominated much of the discussion. Cisco has just published an “AI readiness index” polling 8,000 businesses across 30 different markets, said Bedford, which indicated that plans are already in place for many companies, but actual rollouts are lagging behind.

“AI is the number one topic in both C-suites right now,” Bedford said. “Our data says that 95% of CEOs have an AI strategy documented, and they’re trying to figure out how they implement it.”

Tegna is still in the exploratory phase with most AI applications, said Kurt Rao, Tegna SVP and CTO. However, he noted that Tegna, like many other large broadcasters, has already been using AI-based closed captioning systems for years.

“What’s really new in the last 12 months is generative AI, the large language models,” Rao said. “We’re very bullish on what we think it could do on a number of fronts. On the content side of the house, we think there are opportunities there to create better products and/or improve the production workflow internally. That’s one vertical use case.”

Gen AI could also be used to automate back-office functions like invoice processing or T&E, he said, as well as in IT applications like monitoring network or device logs for cybersecurity purposes.

“We’re at the very beginnings of experimenting with this, so I don’t want to say we’ve proven anything out,” Rao said. “But in pilot mode or experimentation mode, we’re certainly seeing signals that it could be very helpful.”

Aitken said that Sinclair is collaborating with Korean broadcasters on using AI to add sign language functionality as an assistive service in ATSC 3.0 broadcasts. He also thinks AI could be helpful in optimizing data flows for data distribution applications that use 3.0 in combination with other wireless delivery networks like 4G or 5G, such as delivering software updates or infotainment to automobiles.

Fox appears to be farther ahead than most broadcasters in addressing AI. Cheesbrough described how Fox has already trained AI algorithms to produce catch-up highlights for streaming viewers who are joining a game already in progress, something it first did for FIFA World Cup coverage last year and is now providing with NFL coverage this fall.

Fox has worked with OpenAI to develop search and discovery functionality for its Tubi streaming app, which allows a viewer to type in a generic theme like “romantic Christmas movies from the ’80s” instead of having to search for a specific title. And Cheesbrough said Fox is also experimenting with “caution” on various production applications for news and sports coverage, including assistive tools for journalists and AI-generated match commentary.

“In the last year we’ve seen a lot of organic adoption, which is both a blessing and a curse, given some of the security rails you need to put around some of the public large language models,” said Cheesbrough of the rapid rise of AI in general.

On that note, Fox has created a method to protect its content as it is being “crunched up and spat out on the other end” by large language models from AI companies, Cheesbrough said. He described the system, which Fox aims to open-source in 2024, as “modern-day digital rights management.” Every piece of content that Fox publishes digitally is now fingerprinted using blockchain technology, with commercial terms of trade attached to it. That becomes the integration point for companies like OpenAI and Google to start working with Fox’s content.

“It’s very early days on that, but one of the biggest things it does is it allows attribution,” Cheesbrough said. “So, if you’re in ChatGPT and you search for something and some of our content has helped produce that result, we get attribution back for the generation of that result, and ultimately, we’d like to get paid for that as well. So those rails that we’re starting to build are super-strategic and critical from a distribution point of view.

“We’re pretty cautious about [AI],” he continued. “You know, the first wave of the internet, a lot of IP and content was harvested, and media companies and publishers didn’t get fair payment for that. We’re making sure that we go into this with optimism, but also some level of caution and control.”

To watch the video of the full webinar, click here.

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As part of the partnership, Cuebric has been integrated with the Disguise platform. This means creatives can now use AI to create the shape and depth of 2.5D environments, then import them into Disguise. The result is a plug-and-play scene that can be executed on an LED stage in only two minutes, the companies said. “This allows anyone to tell immersive stories, no matter the production environment or virtual art capabilities they have, saving weeks of pre-production work.”

“Real-time environments look spectacular on-camera, yet often require many hours of artistic and technical build,” said Addy Ghani, Disguise VP of virtual production. “Thanks to our partnership with Cuebric, there’s now another option. Using generative AI, artists can build 2.5D plates, helping them go from concept to camera in minutes so they can tell unique stories in a way that works for them.”

To create 2.5D scenes, users can either add purely generative content or import images from elsewhere into the Cuebric platform. Cuebric then leverages AI rotoscoping and inpainting to segment the images into layers, transforming them from 2D to 2.5D based on the depth of objects.

Once the Cuebric 2.5D scenes are imported into Disguise’s Designer software, each individual layer is depth-mapped with an auto generated mesh. This means that the individual plates are not limited to flat planes, as 3D shapes can be built into each of the plates — resulting in a more realistic parallax effect that works no matter how you move the camera on set.

Using Disguise and Cuebric, “users can easily make changes and iterations in virtual environments during production, allowing for a more dynamic and creative process and avoiding costly reshoots,” the companies said.

“Cuebric democratizes filmmaking, removing the cost barrier to creating gorgeous, immersive sets and backgrounds with its plug-and-play 3D effect solution. Leveraging AI to minimize the tedious and maximize the extraordinary in the creative process will breathe new life into the production industry,” said Cuebric co-founders, Pinar Seyhan Demirdag and Gary Lee Koepke. “Desire and demand for extraordinary content has never been greater, so there is no better time to be partnering with Disguise to put the full power of generative AI into the hands of the world’s greatest creators and filmmakers.”

The post Disguise And Cuebric Launch AI-Driven Photorealistic Content Generator For Virtual Production appeared first on TV News Check.

These new tools are already revolutionizing media sales by addressing existing resource constraints and boosting operational efficiency. These AI tools are a game-changer for sales teams, allowing them to automate a wide range of tasks, from routine administrative work to more complex data analysis.

This automation streamlines workflows and frees up valuable time for sales teams to focus on more impactful tasks.

Moreover, AI’s advanced data processing abilities enable sales teams to analyze trends and customer data more effectively, leading to more informed decision-making and targeted sales strategies. Creating personalized, relevant content has become more efficient with AI, enhancing engagement with potential clients and improving the success rates of marketing campaigns. In lead generation, AI tools are already making strides by identifying potential leads through pattern recognition and predictive analysis, further optimizing the sales process.

Looking ahead, the potential of AI in media sales is vast. It could revolutionize customer relationship management, refine predictive analytics for forecasting sales trends, and even aid in developing more nuanced sales strategies based on real-time data.

As these technologies continue to mature, they promise to open up new avenues for innovation in media sales, empowering teams to not only meet but exceed their sales goals in an increasingly digital world.

Yet, the recent turbulence at OpenAI in November, particularly the leadership changes involving Sam Altman, underscore the urgency for companies to adopt a strategic and balanced approach to AI adoption. Questions about stability and reliability are now at the forefront, necessitating a careful approach to utilizing third-party AI tools like ChatGPT. While OpenAI dealt with leadership challenges, their products went offline, shutting down numerous businesses and features across all their customers.

In what seemed like a knee-jerk reaction to the bad press, they expedited a product feature release to create a distraction. This fast pace and uncertain future surrounding LLMs makes it crucial for media companies to evaluate the long-term reliability and ethical implications of these tools.

Data Privacy and Protecting IP

Data privacy takes on heightened significance with the quick adoption of tools like ChatGPT. It’s essential to understand that any content entered into ChatGPT’s web or mobile interfaces may be leveraged to train future models, potentially contributing to its expanding knowledge base.

This underscores the adage that “if the product is free, you are the product,” drawing a parallel to how social media platforms utilize user data for various approaches to revenue generation like targeted advertising. Similarly, OpenAI uses its widely adopted solution to gather valuable data for future model training and improvements.

Consequently, companies must be vigilant in safeguarding sensitive and proprietary information. Internal data usage policies are essential safeguards against unauthorized intellectual property use, ensuring adherence to data privacy standards within the ever-evolving AI landscape.

OpenAI has recently assured its customers that inputs and outputs from their APIs will not be used for training future models. While this provides a means to utilize GPT without contributing to its training data, it requires a level of trust in OpenAI to uphold this promise. Moreover, using these API services necessitates development resources and continual maintenance, given the trajectory of these technologies.

Companies must also stay vigilant in understanding OpenAI’s frequently changing terms of service and privacy policies, which have undergone several revisions since ChatGPT’s public release nearly a year ago.

Planning for AI Hallucination

Generative AI, crucial for content creation and streamlining processes, faces the challenge of AI hallucination. This phenomenon occurs when AI generates false or misleading information, often due to limitations in its training data or interpretation of input queries. While it’s assumed that the risk of hallucinations will decrease as models improve, we are not yet at that stage.

We’re in the early phases of our journey towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), where such issues remain prevalent. Therefore, companies must implement robust processes for reviewing AI-generated content, focusing on identifying and correcting inaccuracies or biases. This strategy is vital for maintaining content quality and building and sustaining audience trust in an AI-centric media environment.

AI is More Than Just ChatGPT

With companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook recently taking up much of the news about this space, AI is more than just LLMs. Artificial intelligence is considered an umbrella term for many things like machine learning and more.

In response to the challenges and risks of trusting LLMs, custom AI solutions emerge as a viable alternative. Tailored to specific needs, custom AI models offer more control and align more closely with individual company goals, presenting a more secure and reliable option compared to generic third-party AI tools.

Companies can benefit from partnering with AI solution providers like ShareBuilders, who offer customized AI solutions like Precision Pending and Smart Forecasts to empower their sales teams and help save them time.

The ShareBuilder Approach to Assisting Media Companies with AI

Amidst the rapid evolution of AI, the ShareBuilders data science team offers a distinct approach to helping media companies harness AI’s potential. Its members focus on custom AI solutions like Precision Pending and Smart Forecasts, tailored to the unique needs of media sales, without needing third-party AI solutions.

These tools empower sales teams, streamline processes, and offer control and alignment with company goals not always achievable with generic third-party AI tools.

ShareBuilders prioritizes customer data safety, offering clear communication about in-house and third-party AI tools. This includes building solutions with powerful LLMs from OpenAI when necessary while providing customers the option to opt in to share their data, ensuring transparency and control.

ShareBuilders also commits to anonymizing as much data as possible when using these third-party services to help protect their customer’s privacy while still benefiting from these robust solutions.

ShareBuilders’ commitment to custom and meaningful solutions positions the company to assist media companies in navigating the AI-driven future, balancing innovation with a strategic and cautious approach.

As AI reshapes the media industry, companies like ShareBuilders play a crucial role in guiding this innovation.

To learn more about how ShareBuilders is using AI to boost the success of media sales team while protecting customers against the potential downsides of this rapidly evolving, powerful technology, please contact us here.

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The interdisciplinary consortium of seven partners includes leading companies from the movie, broadcast, streaming and live entertainment technology sectors (BBC, Brainstorm Multimedia SL, Disguise Systems Ltd., Filmlight Gmbh and MOG Technologies SA) supported by two major European universities (Universidad Pompeu Fabra and Trinity College near Dublin).

Francisco Ibáñez, Brainstorm R&D project manager, said: “Emerald strives to pioneer ground-breaking tools for the digital entertainment and media sectors by harnessing the potential of AI, machine learning, and big data technologies. The overarching goal is to revolutionize processing, enhance production efficiency, minimize energy consumption, and elevate content quality through cutting-edge innovations.

“Currently, there is a massive increase in the volume of video-based and extended reality content, with an unsustainable demand for skilled human resources, data processing and energy. This project aims to address this challenge through the development of process automation for sustainable media creation.”

Emerald aims to apply ML to automate some of the most labor-intensive tasks involved in video content production, which have considerable implications for both time and energy use. Javier Montesa, Brainstorm R&D technical coordinator, says that Brainstorm in collaboration with University Pompeu Fabra (UPF) will develop DL-based methods and tools for video matting. “The main objective is to produce high-quality results for the automated real-time integration of remote presenters or performers into virtual scenes and sets for broadcast/streaming media using DL without the need of a trimap. With the AI enhancement of BRA’s InfinitySet, we will bring the quality of green-screen methods to simpler configurations.”

Javier explained that Brainstorm plans to integrate InfinitySet with UPF Deep Learning systems for the estimation of the head and body pose that will allow the operator to trigger content that will be displayed automatically on different parts of the scene, virtual screens, 3D graphics place holders, or simply in front of the presenter as he or she moves around. Francisco added that “we will explore new ways to improve the presenter insertion, to billboard and twist its silhouette, or to calculate its shadow with more precision and realism.”

Furthermore, Brainstorm will be involved in the creation of tools designed for automated color balancing and matching shots. Color manipulations are required in post-production, in VP and in broadcast virtual studios. Javier said that automating the color grading of the presenter to match the virtual scene will be particularly valuable for broadcast virtual studios that do not have colorists. “The integration of this automated color correction in InfinitySet will simplify the use of the tool and improve the presenter-scene integration when lighting conditions are not controlled or when virtual scene lighting conditions are meant to vary during a program.”

The progress of the project and the results obtained can be followed here as well as on the project’s social networks.

The post Brainstorm Participating In EC-Funded Emerald AI & Automation Project appeared first on TV News Check.

Campaigns on the state and federal level will be required to clearly say which political advertisements airing in Michigan were created using artificial intelligence under legislation expected to be signed in the coming days by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat. It also would prohibit use of AI-generated deepfakes within 90 days of an election without a separate disclosure identifying the media as manipulated.

Deepfakes are fake media that misrepresent someone as doing or saying something they didn’t. They’re created using generative artificial intelligence, a type of AI that can create convincing images, videos or audio clips in seconds.

There are increasing concerns that generative AI will be used in the 2024 presidential race to mislead voters, impersonate candidates and undermine elections on a scale and at a speed not yet seen.

Candidates and committees in the race already are experimenting with the rapidly advancing technology, which can create convincing fake images, video and audio clips in seconds and in recent years has become cheaper, faster and easier for the public to use.

The Republican National Committee in April released an entirely AI-generated ad meant to show the future of the United States if President Joe Biden is reelected. Disclosing in small print that it was made with AI, it featured fake but realistic photos showing boarded-up storefronts, armored military patrols in the streets, and huge increases in immigration creating panic.

In July, Never Back Down, a super PAC supporting Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, used an AI voice cloning tool to imitate former President Donald Trump’s voice, making it seem like he narrated a social media post he made despite never saying the statement aloud.

Experts say these are just glimpses of what could ensue if campaigns or outside actors decide to use AI deepfakes in more malicious ways.

So far, states including California, Minnesota, Texas and Washington have passed laws regulating deepfakes in political advertising. Similar legislation has been introduced in Illinois, Kentucky, New Jersey and New York, according to the nonprofit advocacy group Public Citizen.

Under Michigan’s legislation, any person, committee or other entity that distributes an advertisement for a candidate would be required to clearly state if it uses generative AI. The disclosure would need to be in the same font size as the majority of the text in print ads, and would need to appear “for at least four seconds in letters that are as large as the majority of any text” in television ads, according to a legislative analysis from the state House Fiscal Agency.

Deepfakes used within 90 days of the election would require a separate disclaimer informing the viewer that the content is manipulated to depict speech or conduct that did not occur. If the media is a video, the disclaimer would need to be clearly visible and appear throughout the video’s entirety.

Campaigns could face a misdemeanor punishable by up to 93 days in prison, a fine of up to $1,000, or both for the first violation of the proposed laws. The attorney general or the candidate harmed by the deceptive media could apply to the appropriate circuit court for relief.

Federal lawmakers on both sides have stressed the importance of legislating deepfakes in political advertising, and held meetings to discuss it, but Congress has not yet passed anything.

A recent bipartisan Senate bill, co-sponsored by Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri and others, would ban “materially deceptive” deepfakes relating to federal candidates, with exceptions for parody and satire.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson flew to Washington, D.C. in early November to participate in a bipartisan discussion on AI and elections and called on senators to pass Klobuchar and Hawley’s federal Deceptive AI Act. Benson said she also encouraged senators to return home and lobby their state lawmakers to pass similar legislation that makes sense for their states.

Federal law is limited in its ability to regulate AI at the state and local levels, Benson said in an interview, adding that states also need federal funds to tackle the challenges posed by AI.

“All of this is made real if the federal government gave us money to hire someone to just handle AI in our states, and similarly educate voters about how to spot deepfakes and what to do when you find them,” Benson said. “That solves a lot of the problems. We can’t do it on our own.”

In August, the Federal Election Commission took a procedural step toward potentially regulating AI-generated deepfakes in political ads under its existing rules against “fraudulent misrepresentation.” Though the commission held a public comment period on the petition, brought by Public Citizen, it hasn’t yet made any ruling.

Social media companies also have announced some guidelines meant to mitigate the spread of harmful deepfakes. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, announced earlier this month that it will require political ads running on the platforms to disclose if they were created using AI. Google unveiled a similar AI labeling policy in September for political ads that play on YouTube or other Google platforms.

Swenson reported from New York. Associated Press writer Christina A. Cassidy contributed from Washington.

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San Francisco-based OpenAI said in a statement late Tuesday: “We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board.”

The board, which replaces the one that fired Altman on Friday, will be led by former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, who also chaired Twitter’s board before its takeover by Elon Musk last year. The other members will be former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo.

OpenAI’s previous board of directors, which included D’Angelo, had refused to give specific reasons for why it fired Altman, leading to a weekend of internal conflict at the company and growing outside pressure from the startup’s investors.

The chaos also accentuated the differences between Altman — who’s become the face of generative AI’s rapid commercialization since ChatGPT’s arrival a year ago — and members of the company’s board who have expressed deep reservations about the safety risks posed by AI as it gets more advanced.

Microsoft, which has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI and has rights to its current technology, quickly moved to hire Altman on Monday, as well as another co-founder and former president, Greg Brockman, who had quit in protest after Altman’s removal. That emboldened a threatened exodus of nearly all of the startup’s 770 employees who signed a letter calling for the board’s resignation and Altman’s return.

One of the four board members who participated in Altman’s ouster, OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, later expressed regret and joined the call for the board’s resignation.

Microsoft in recent days had pledged to welcome all employees who wanted to follow Altman and Brockman to a new AI research unit at the software giant. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also made clear in a series of interviews Monday that he was still open to the possibility of Altman returning to OpenAI, so long as the startup’s governance problems are solved.

“We are encouraged by the changes to the OpenAI board,” Nadella posted on X late Tuesday. “We believe this is a first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance.”

In his own post, Altman said that “with the new board and (with) Satya’s support, I’m looking forward to returning to OpenAI, and building on our strong partnership with (Microsoft).”

Co-founded by Altman as a nonprofit with a mission to safely build so-called artificial general intelligence that outperforms humans and benefits humanity, OpenAI later became a for-profit business but one still run by its nonprofit board of directors. It’s not clear yet if the board’s structure will change with its newly appointed members.

“We are collaborating to figure out the details,” OpenAI posted on X. “Thank you so much for your patience through this.”

Nadella said Brockman, who was OpenAI’s board chairman until Altman’s firing, will also have a key role to play in ensuring the group “continues to thrive and build on its mission.”

Hours earlier, Brockman returned to social media as if it were business as usual, touting a feature called ChatGPT Voice that was rolling out to users.

“Give it a try — totally changes the ChatGPT experience,” Brockman wrote, flagging a post from OpenAI’s main X account that featured a demonstration of the technology and playfully winking at recent turmoil.

“It’s been a long night for the team and we’re hungry. How many 16-inch pizzas should I order for 778 people,” the person asks, using the number of people who work at OpenAI. ChatGPT’s synthetic voice responded by recommending around 195 pizzas, ensuring everyone gets three slices.

As for OpenAI’s short-lived interim CEO Emmett Shear, the second interim CEO in the days since Altman’s ouster, he posted on X that he was “deeply pleased by this result, after (tilde)72 very intense hours of work.”

“Coming into OpenAI, I wasn’t sure what the right path would be,” wrote Shear, the former head of Twitch. “This was the pathway that maximized safety alongside doing right by all stakeholders involved. I’m glad to have been a part of the solution.”

The post Sam Altman Is Back As OpenAI CEO Just Days After Being Removed appeared first on TV News Check.

Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella tweeted that the U.S. tech giant is committed to its partnership with OpenAI, whose chatbot kicked off the generative AI craze by producing human-like text, images, video and music.

Nadella wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, that he looked “forward to getting to know” OpenAI’s new chief executive, former Twitch leader Emmett Shear, and the rest of the management team.

Microsoft invested billions of dollars in the startup and helped provide the computing power to run its AI systems. Now, it’s bringing two of OpenAI’s co-founders directly into the fold.

“We’re extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team,” Nadella said.

In reply on X, Altman said “the mission continues,” while OpenAI co-founder and former President Brockman posted, “We are going to build something new & it will be incredible.”

The moves come after a weekend of drama and speculation about how the leadership would shake out at OpenAI. Altman was active on X, posting a photo of himself with an OpenAI guest pass on Sunday and saying this is “first and last time i ever wear one of these.”

Hours earlier, he tweeted, “i love the openai team so much,” which drew heart replies from Brockman, who quit after Altman was fired, and Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer who was initially named as interim CEO.

It’s not clear what transpired between the announcement of Murati’s interim role Friday and the hiring of Shear, who co-founded Twitch, an Amazon-owned livestreaming service popular with video gamers.

An OpenAI spokeswoman didn’t immediately reply to an email seeking comment.

The company said Friday that Altman was pushed out after a review found he was “not consistently candid in his communications” with the board of directors, which had lost confidence in his ability to lead the company.

Altman helped catapult ChatGPT to global fame and in the past year has become Silicon Valley’s sought-after voice on the promise and potential dangers of artificial intelligence.

He went on a world tour to meet with government officials earlier this year, drawing big crowds at public events as he discussed both the risks of AI and attempts to regulate the emerging technology.

Altman posted Friday on X that “i loved my time at openai” and later called what happened a “weird experience.”

OpenAI declined to answer questions on what Altman’s alleged lack of candor was about. The company’s statement said his behavior was hindering the board’s ability to exercise its responsibilities.

The Associated Press and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement allowing OpenAI access to part of the AP’s text archives.

The post Microsoft Hires OpenAI Founders To Lead AI Research Team After ChatGPT Maker’s Shakeup appeared first on TV News Check.

The approach focuses on understanding inventory relevance to an audience. Dstillery says its CTV solution “understands the complex relationship between a brand’s audience’s online content consumption patterns and CTV genres and networks. That understanding, in combination with brand keywords, enables Dstillery to determine the best content to drive performance on CTV.”

“Dstillery’s solution is altering premium CTV targeting as we know it. Advertisers can now take powerful AI-driven audience insights and apply them to CTV without using identifiers,” said Mark Jung, vice president of product at Dstillery. “It has been designed so brands can target the most pertinent CTV bid opportunities to maximize ROI.”

The solution, designed to make CTV advertising more data-driven and efficient, doesn’t require traditional CTV device graph layering. Dstillery works directly with Supply-Side Partners (SSPs), including Xandr Curate and OpenX, to create custom PMPs for easy activation on Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs).

“As CTV continues to grow, the ecosystem will require solutions that improve targeting and transparency in biddable environments,” said Michael Guzewicz, OpenX vice president of strategic partnerships. “With that, partners like Dstillery are a key part of OpenX’s commitment to prioritizing both innovation and quality as programmatic continues to evolve.”

Dstillery recently announced its 19th patent for its unique machine-learning capabilities.

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It says Relo Census “removes traditional barriers that have impacted sports sponsorship decision-making, allowing agencies, brands rights holders (teams and leagues), and media companies to benchmark performance, identify trends in the market and gather real-time competitive intelligence about their sports sponsorship portfolios.”

Relo Census allows users to drill down and compare specific team-to-team or placement-to-placement performance, between different sports and between all the brands present in sports to make smarter sponsorship deals and execution. “Offering the most comprehensive set of sponsorship data about every team, brand and asset across all major U.S. sports leagues, Relo Census removes data from their silos to deliver overarching visibility to all stakeholders in the sports ecosystem. Relo Census is now available via a new software interface, API and in the Snowflake data marketplace.”

These are key steps in the path for creating a transactional currency in sports marketing and sponsorship that are based on brand integrations vs. advertising.

“The sports marketing market is ready for a currency grade data set that unlocks value at a granular level for all parts of the ecosystem, this means valuing everything that is on camera during a broadcast and in social media,” said Jay Prasad, CEO of Relo Metrics. “The current data available to date doesn’t provide the granularity required to make accurate decisions about placements, nor the ability to surface and report on macro level trends such as share of voice between brands, value provided by sports team, down to actual placements in a timely manner or allow you to see what returns could be achieved with other teams in other leagues. Relo Metrics has made significant investments in our data capture, computer vision AI technologies to address these marketplace gaps and launch something with scale, and the result is Relo Census.”

Using Relo Census, the company added, “agencies and brands can more easily maximize their return on sponsorship investments, comparing placements within or between leagues to make more informed partnership decisions based on competitive intelligence.”

“Measurement needs to keep pace with the growing sophistication in sports marketing. Relo Metrics’ innovative technology and significant scale has allowed Optimum Sports to dig into sponsorship measurement beyond traditional restraints,” Tom McGovern, president, Optimum Sports said. “The Relo Census product offers a look into categories and competitive brand activity that supplements our research and analytics capabilities. In a space that traditionally lacks data transparency, Relo Census is a great data source to help inform us of trends and support our decision-making.”

Rights holders and leagues will also see tremendous benefit from Relo Census, the company said. Teams can filter and benchmark by region or their league to understand where they excel and their opportunities at both of those levels. They can also look at the entire nation to understand trends and see which brands across all sports within a category, like automotive or travel, have actual valuation data for each placement that is driving the overall numbers.

Media companies that hold media rights to sports and are also brands themselves with sponsorships for streaming services, have use cases to leverage this data as buyers and as sellers of sponsorships, including complex virtual executions and content integrations into programming.

Organizations can access the census data through Relo’s AI-driven platform. Users can leverage the platform’s open API architecture to combine Relo Census with their own in-house data to create highly targeted and customized datasets for tracking sponsorship investments and connecting this data to ad performance, ticketing sales, product sales lift, and improving deal flow in different markets.

Relo Census uses a UI design for guiding users to meaningful insights and relevant case studies to demonstrate the data’s potential. The interface will be continually updated to add new functionality and maintain a dynamic and intuitive user experience including interactive visualization, inline filtering for more granular data analysis and automated insights using layered-on generative AI.

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The end-to-end content system, which combines automation system integration, Futuri’s TopicPulse story discovery AI, large language model (LLM) technology, and AI voice, offers enhanced multiple features and added new capabilities. In response to industry demand, it’s also now accessible to television broadcasters, digital publishers, streaming stations, and others wanting to capture growth opportunities in live audio.

The new Futuri AudioAI integrates multiple LLMs — beyond the GPT-4 integration that was a component of RadioGPT — to develop content based on up-to-the-minute TopicPulse insights. Using multiple LLMs “means the content Futuri AudioAI delivers is even stronger, and it better enables Futuri to improve the system continuously,” the company says.

This enhancement also benefits Futuri AudioAI’s weather report capabilities, which enable stations to strengthen their live and local positioning by running sponsorable weather reports with live conditions around the clock — even overnights and weekends.

Futuri has also partnered with a network of voice AI companies to augment its in-house AI voices, including ElevenLabs, PlayHT and Resemble AI, to make voices from their portfolios available alongside those powered by in-house Futuri voice AI. These selections are all housed in Futuri’s Voice Choice Library, giving users access to a broad array of options all in one place. Futuri AudioAI users can continue to clone their own talent to add to their own AI voice libraries.

“AI is evolving at warp speed, as are Futuri’s capabilities,” said Futuri CEO-Founder Daniel Anstandig. “Futuri AudioAI takes the best of RadioGPT, which has received an extraordinary worldwide response, and makes its core features more powerful. Plus, adding these esteemed AI voice partners to our Voice Choice Library gives our users unparalleled options to differentiate their sound. Futuri is proud to lead the way in AI innovation for media companies and content creators.”

The launch of Futuri AudioAI follows the July launch of SpotOn, the state-of-the-art AI solution that delivers end-to-end production — original scripts, music, and voiceover — for radio and television broadcasters looking to streamline the production of promos, spec spots and commercials. In its first three months, SpotOn has generated more than 150,000 different pieces of custom audio with original, never reused scripts for its partners, according to Futuri.

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The task force Graham put together to tackle issues related to AI realized “how critical it was for us to make sure we had clear guidelines,” Newman said. But at the same time, “we wanted to bottle up that excitement into something that we could share and optimize and use to serve our communities better.”

Newman made his remarks during a TV2025 panel session Wednesday that focused on how station groups are finding ways to cut costs and potentially generate more revenue through the use of generative AI technology. And the panelists also discussed what they’re doing to guard against gen AI usage that could get station groups in big trouble.

Stations have used of older forms of artificial intelligence for years. “We have six local newsrooms, some of them in the smallest markets in the country. And we’ve centered AI around making our jobs easier. Using it for social media and understanding what consumers might be interested in have become commonplace. Captioning is another example. Transcriptions have been standard,” said Colin Benedict, VP of news at Morgan Murphy Media. “We look at generative AI through a similar lens: how do we use it to help our journalists do a better job?”

“The cost of ASR [automated speech recognition] is a fraction of what it costs us to do live captioning,” added James Finch, VP of news services at Gray Television. That said, Finch also noted that gen AI technology needs to be properly trained. The company is keenly conscious that garbled messages created through gen AI could result in FCC complaints.

While tasks like transcriptions have been available through AI programs in the past, generative AI brings the advantages up to a whole new level, explained Philippe Petitpont, CEO/co-founder, Newsbridge. “Transformers can train massive amounts of datasets very, very quickly. This is opening up massive opportunities.” By transformer, Petitpont referred to gen AI’s deep learning architecture.

As an example, Petitpont said that creators of a scripted show could conceivably come up with new ideas for storylines based on gen AI’s ability absorb and analyze what’s been discussed on social media. And it could also generate 10 to 15 teasers that would be targeted to different audiences.

Ahron Young, CEO, managing editor of Ticker, said his team also uses ChatGPT to develop questions for presenters and to form 300-word summaries of interviews his service has produced. Ticker also uses gen AI to identify potential native advertising clients on LinkedIn who might be interested in being featured in Ticker interviews. With gen AI, team members can produce customized, six-page PowerPoint presentations that use the potential client’s graphics and color scheme as well as Ticker’s own.

“And it takes five seconds,” Young said. “I’m not going to say that we send out the first version.” But it helps the marketing and sales team members imagine what a polished presentation could look like, he explained. And that speeds up the process.

The session’s moderator, TVNewsCheck Editor Michael Depp, noted that there has been no small amount of worry about the negative implications of gen AI. In response, Graham’s Newman said: “I think a lot of the fears are well-founded.” Among the concerns are news stories entirely created by gen AI that could have been produced by humans in newsrooms. And it’s difficult to sort through stories produced solely with gen AI and what’s been produced with actual journalists.

“Losing the human content is really an important piece. AI does provide really good first drafts of items, but a human needs to be there to tell the critical pieces of the story,” Newman said. “The other thing to keep in mind is a lot of us cut our teeth rewriting stories and turning them into a narrative format. And AI does that really well.”

“Our quest for efficiencies can’t override our service to the public,” added Gray’s Finch. “If we’re not producing a product that the public needs, then what are we doing?”

As with Graham, Gray formed a task force to monitor how the staff is using gen AI, the technology’s developments, as well as ways to communicate with the public about how the company is using it, Finch said. The task force meets quarterly and includes the leaders from critical areas of the company, including news, engineering, sales and marketing. And the company has also placed information for the public on station sites that explains that all the company’s journalism is created by humans, with links to another page that goes further into depth about Gray’s AI policies.

Gray serves 113 markets. Keeping track of what the huge workforce is doing with gen AI makes that task force essential. “The more people you have, the more concern you have that someone is going to do something to violate copyright or breech trust with the audience,” Finch noted.

Read more coverage of TV2025 here.

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Highlights will include the company’s new Baton 9.0 engine, which will make its U.S. debut, as well as its AI-powered captions solution, its award-winning Orion monitoring suite, and Vega media analyzer. These comprehensive solutions, which automate media processing, address key challenges in meeting the ever-increasing demand for quality in today’s competitive media landscape. This includes audio/video QoE and QoS, efficient metadata management — including captioning — and orchestrating cloud and hybrid deployments.

“As the media ecosystem in the United States continues to transform, Interra Systems remains dedicated to evolving alongside it to help service providers, OTT streamers, and broadcasters elevate viewer experiences, while maximizing their opportunities to monetize content,” said Anupama Anantharaman, Interra vice president, product management. “Coping with the intensely competitive media landscape demands a keen focus on high-quality audio-video output and comprehensive video monitoring. Our efforts have been directed toward advancing our solutions, ensuring impeccable video quality and seamless delivery across evolving video delivery technologies and platforms, encompassing the cloud, virtual machines, and machine learning. Anticipating what lies ahead, we are enthusiastic to unveil these advancements and share the excitement with our valued customers and partners at NAB Show New York.”

On display will be:

Baton — Optimizing QC Workflows | Visitors will have a chance to experience the most recent upgrades to Interra Systems’ industry-leading Baton solution — the company’s award-winning AI-/ML-enabled automated QC platform — in the shape of the new Baton 9.0 engine. Baton 9.0 includes major framework updates, performance enhancements for QC and analysis of UHD content, optimized IMF analysis, enhanced video quality checks, and more.

Enhancements to Interra Systems’ Baton Media Player — which allows media professionals to play, inspect, and verify audio and video content, and enable optimized playback of 4K content — will be available to experience at the company’s NAB Show New York booth. The solution provides support for Dolby Atmos storage formats like AXS-R7, REDCODE audio, “dng”, and more options to review errors along with recaptioning/subtitling tasks.

Baton Captions is an automated solution utilizing cutting-edge ML and automatic speech recognition technology, allowing broadcasters and media professionals to address caption-related requirements such as generation, live to VOD repurposing, post-production editing, and localization for different geographies for the global distribution of media. New enhancements on display at NAB Show New York will include RHEL support and the ability to browse and download log files from the web browser.

Orion Content Monitoring for OTT and Linear/IP Video Ensures Better QoS/QoE |
Interra Systems’ Orion and Orion-OTT are comprehensive monitoring solutions addressing a variety of hybrid and cloud deployment scenarios for linear broadcast, IP-based delivery infrastructures, and live/VOD OTT content. The latest updates to Orion on display will include support for Dolby Atmos, while new capabilities for Orion-OTT will include support for Nagra and Comcast DRM, and updates to dynamic ad insertion monitoring post server-side ad insertion.Orion 2110 Probe Future-Proofs End-to-End Monitoring in IP Environments | Interra Systems’ Orion 2110 Probe supports the SMPTE ST 2110 standard and enables broadcasters to future-proof the end-to-end monitoring of video quality in IP environments. Features include QoS/QoE monitoring of ST 2110 essence streams, ST 2110 main and redundancy signals, and NMOS integration.

OCM (Orion Central Manager) for End-to-End Visibility of Video | Through its OCM solution, Interra Systems will demonstrate the power of centralized management of IP and OTT probes, which provide seamless control and monitoring of all streams from a single, user-friendly interface. The company’s advanced centralized management system makes error detection and isolation faster and more efficient with recent enhancements that include localization and end-to-end ad insertion monitoring.

Vega Media Analyzer (VMA) — Powerful Analysis for Next-Generation Media Workflows | Interra Systems’ Vega is an analysis platform for standards compliance, debugging, and interoperability of encoded streams. It offers support for the highest number of industry compression standards, such as HEVC, AV1, VVC, Dolby Vision, ATSC 3.0, Dolby Atmos, and more. Recent enhancements include support for the JPEG XS image format and viewing HDR in the HEVC/H264 codecs.

Interra Systems will also showcase its most recent addition to the VMA platform: Vega Vista. The innovative analyzer, which can be part of automated workflows, performs comprehensive analysis of MPEG-2 transport streams, providing reports with root-cause analysis for errors that can cause problems related to transmission or audio/video quality.

AI/ML-Based Custom Services | Interra Systems will highlight its AI/ML-based services for broadcasters and OTT service providers. Revolutionizing content management by introducing automation at scale while maintaining uncompromising precision, the company’s suite of custom AI/ML services spans a multitude of applications across four categories — computer vision, optical data recognition and data capture, audio and NLP services, and intelligent document processing — each addressing critical challenges within the media industry.

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