At Banff, Media Leaders Debate AI as Job Killer

Bing Chen, executive chairman and CEO of Gold House, issued a dire warning on Monday about artificial intelligence: the emerging digital technology stands to eliminate entry-level entertainment industry jobs.
'The notion of replacing entry-level jobs for our children, we have yet to have a solution. Because this is no longer about upscaling. This is about full replacement of you when you were 22, 27 or 28,' Chen told the Banff World Media Festival.
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But Kevin Johnson, CEO of WPP Media Canada and president and WPP Media, countered the jury was still out on whether AI will cut a swathe through the economy and take over jobs, never to be replaced, or instead could create new opportunities and reshape the workspace.
'I think it's way to early for us to press the button and say our kids are not going to have a job anymore, or worrying about what I feel was the same when computers came in,' Johnson argued during a panel moderated by The Hollywood Reporter's Mikey O'Connell.
The panel was held against the background of escalating industry disruption, which includes advertising woes and licensing declines and movie theater uncertainty and a shake-up in streaming. That left global media executives in Banff to unpack the forces transforming the industry, and how they were responding.
John Morayniss, CEO of Blink49 Studios, said content creators these days were forced to work with more collaborators and go for increased creative finesse. 'The business of making traditional content is getting harder and harder, and it requires way more partnerships and way more creative ways,' Morayniss said.
He pointed to Blink49 Studios making an investment in Stapleview, the Los Angeles-based digital-first comedy producer launched in 2022. 'They have direct relationships with their audience, they understand their audience and they're marketing to their audience,' Morayniss said of Stapleview getting closer to the coal face to mine new viewers for content exploitation.
That was a theme picked up by Prentiss Fraser, president of Fox Entertainment Global, who argued having more distribution channels for content at her major studio had helped discover more ways to monetize content in turbulent times.
'There's just a lot of ways to exploit content in our ecosystem that's been created, and then pairing that with the opportunity to build a distribution infrastructure that has the ability to finance projects just seemed like a recipe for great success,' Fraser said.
Whether escalating tech innovation, including YouTube and artificial intelligence, industry consolidation, Wall Street market gyrations or just general belt-tightening among content consumers and creators, such economic headwinds and challenges were on the mind of media leaders on stage in Banff.
But Gold House's Chen cautioned Banff delegates about getting too caught up in the current debate about whether YouTube can outlast Netflix as the most popular streaming platform amid continuing industry consolidation. We've been here before, he urged.
'Life is so cyclical. It contracts and expands. It contracts and expands, and narratively we are in a similar phase where we were literally a decade ago in 2014, where everyone thinks YouTube is the new hot thing because of time spent,' Chen remarked.
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