Last year you listened to 494 hours of podcasts, your favourite genre was probably true crime, but
your top podcast was Media Industries! Perhaps? Well, maybe. We’re so used to algorithms
wrapping our data in a neat ball and presenting it back to us at the end of the year. The trailblazer of
these algorithmic events has been Spotify’s end-of-year celebration, Spotify Wrapped. Taylor
Annabell (Researcher, Utrecht University) and Nina Vindum Rasmussen (LSE Fellow, London School
of Economics and Political Science) help us to unwrap this phenomenon. In particular, they talk us
through insights gained from workshops they organised to get Spotify users thinking critically and
creatively about Wrapped.

Copyright has been predicated on protecting original works of human authorship. When AI generates new works, however, what happens to the status of authorship, originality and protection? For this episode, we are very pleased to welcome back Tanya Aplin Aplin (Professor of Intellectual Property Law, King’s College London). Initially, Tanya outlines how copyright variously covers individual, collaborative and corporate forms of authorship. The discussion then moves on to unpack how the uses of AI problematise established conceptions of authorship and originality in creative production.

Across many industries, a key belief driving the current boom in AI use is the economic logic that certain processes can be streamlined in ways that reduce human effort and thereby bring efficiencies and cost reductions. How possible is this in the media industries, however, which have traditionally relied on high value, skills intensive human labour to create unique, distinct outputs? Putting this economic conundrum into perspective, we are very pleased to have as our guests Gillian Doyle (Professor of Media Economics, University of Glasgow) and Sabine Baumann (Professor of Digital Business, Berlin School of Economics and Law).

Developments in AI changed, transformed and disrupted many industries, but one of the industries where these shifts have been most felt is in music. From the bedroom producer using the assistance of AI in their creation, to multi-billion dollar music companies using AI for data management, AI is appearing everywhere. For this episode, Hazel Savage (VP Music Intelligence, SoundCloud) talks through her own experiences launching and subsequently investing in AI music start-ups, before explaining distinctions between the applications of generative and assistive AI, and some of the ethical challenges arising from the uses of AI in music creativity.

When we think of AI, we tend to think about the chat bot, the prompt that generates the new image, the AI assistant that helps with some of our everyday admin. But, what about everything behind the curtain? The power dynamics, economics, and politics behind AI. Nick Srnicek (Senior Lecturer in Digital Economy, King’s College London) talks about the application of AI in the media industries, but also the how AI industry has achieved a recognizable form through the prominence of key players in hardware manufacturing, cloud computing infrastructure, producers of models, and app developers.

While there is a lot of talk about how AI is transforming creative industries, before this discussion, there was already an industry where artificial intelligence was not only prominent, but a must in most outputs: the digital games industry. Currently, the industry is going through tumultuous times globally, while generative AI is disrupting game development and production processes. Digdem Sezen (Senior Lecturer in Games, University for the Creative Arts) historicizes the application of AI in games, before assessing how the industry is utilising AI tools to innovate the creation and content of games.

Generative AI challenges the human monopoly on creativity, and consequently, when addressing the impacts of AI on the media industries, one of the highlight concerns that has emerged is the extent to which applications of AI may disrupt, and potentially also displace, the work of creative practitioners. Hye-Kyung Lee (Professor of Cultural Policy, King’s College London) reflects on how uses of AI have intensified a range of uncertainties concerning the status and value of human labour in creative work. She discusses how AI introduces insecurities over the role, rights, protection and distinctiveness of human creativity.

Streamed video entertainment services are well known for their systemic collection and processing of big data. For the users of those services, the application of that data will manifest itself in the form of computer-generated recommendations. But amongst creative practitioners in the screen industries, what relationships and interactions do they form with that type of data? Nina Vindum Rasmussen (LSE Fellow, London School of Economics and Political Science) outlines how various power dynamics emerge from the interactions which emerge between screen workers and the data produced and held by major streaming services.

Traditionally, copyright has been predicated on protecting and sustaining human creativity. From the pen to the camera, human creativity has involved the use of tools. With digital forms of creativity, computing technologies have variously become the tools for creative action. What happens to the status of copyright, however, when the machine is no longer just a tool, and actively makes decisions in the creative process? In the first of two episodes on AI and copyright, Tanya Aplin (Professor of Intellectual Property Law, King’s College London) guides us through some of the issues emerging from current debates over relationships between AI, copyright and creativity. For this episode, Tanya outlines how the status of AI generated works varies between jurisdictions, and also reflects on disputes arising from the uses of copyrighted works as AI training data. In a subsequent episode, she returns to pick up the conversation on copyright and the protection of AI-generated outputs.

Orçun Can and Paul McDonald (King’s College London) Opening series two of the Media Industries podcast, Orçun and Paul offer a sneak peek of what to expect from the upcoming episodes.