Amplified Discoverability: Curatorial Champions for Music, Sports, TV & Film

AI is tailoring the ever-increasing media bounty to individual interests, meaning personalisation but also the possibility of filter bubbles on steroids. Uber-advanced AI categorisation and search tools present an anti-gatekeeping gamechanger: innovations include TV and film assistants taking a deep dive into streaming services’ libraries, music platforms’ prompt-based, mood-matching playlists, personalised sports highlights and chat discovery apps for Arabic audiences.

Consumer Creativity: UGC for the Amateur AI Curious

A growing cohort of amateurs is wielding generative AI to elevate their creative play, producing content solely as fans and/or to share with friends. From allowing users to design their own animated TV, and fulfil fan fiction and character design passion projects, to offering fun features to make social networking mates-first again, these tools present windows onto the future of audience expression.

Agentic Entertainment: Responsive & Adaptive Gaming Companions

The carefully managed parameters of gaming worlds present perfect opportunities for testing new horizons for interactive characters. Trailblazing American companies Inworld AI, Operative Games and Altera are surpassing repetitive scripts and predictable outcomes with individually responsive non-player character (NPC) companions and adaptive AI-agent players, presenting major possibilities across entertainment and brand promo/outreach. 

Human-AI Social Media & Parasocial Bots

The future of social media will be shaped by shifting definitions of authenticity, as netizens – especially Zalphas – explore mingling with semi-autonomous synth beings and parasocial bonds with synthfluencers. As current sentiment towards virtual influencers is mixed (see Key Stats), promising initiatives – including US-based app Butterflies’ gamified avatar content creators, Meta and Google’s celebrity-clone chatbots, and popstar deepfakes – focus on convincing-but-transparent artifice.

Personified AI for Edifying Entertainment

While some synth beings add a cyborg dimension to online entertainment, others upgrade our cultural knowledge, both digitally and in real life (IRL). These bots give philomaths real-time literary guidance (from renowned authors), history hunters access to great minds from the past, and gallery-goers onsite touchpoints for artistic discovery – including hotlines to legendary artists – illustrating myriad ways of dialling up cultural engagement.

Legitimate Licensing: Artist-Sanctioned AI Collaboration

Audiences firmly believe in artists and creatives being in control of how AI uses their work, especially in entertainment production (see Key Stats), valorising a burgeoning tier of ethical AI tools designed, trained and sent to market with artist consent and input prioritised.