Big Changes Are Coming Based on Personalized Content

More digital content means more personalized content, and better algorithms that will support the wishes and needs of the audience in real-time, said Sofie Hvitved, futurologist and senior advisor and media manager at the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies in an interview with ICT Business. She added that the future of the media industry lies in searching for a balance between digitalization and the immersiveness of content and analog.

In which direction will the media industry change in the coming short and long-term period?

I went to see a presentation from the Danish Broadcasting Association DR. Each year they publish a report on media consumption and 2022 was the first year where all generations and all ages consumed new media more than traditional analog media in Denmark. In the longer perspective, it would be more and more immersive. So creating these new formats where it's moving into our environment, you know, having entertainment in cars, on the windows, interacting with our surroundings - so the new kind of formats will be a big part of our lives. More digital content is better used to get algorithms more personalized, using real-time data to support the constant sort of desires of the users. That is definitely the direction of the journey in the long perspective. We will see some counter-trends where people start using analog media as we have already seen with the record player, or when people have started buying old cameras. For example, in New York, you cannot find a camera because everyone wants one and is using it to create really authentic media for their social media accounts. It's kind of this mix between authentic analog and in Denmark for instance we are looking at how it's going in the direction of the media industry. If you look towards the field of education, there is a huge push towards the analog because there is a lot of new research that is showing that screen time for young kids is not very healthy and we are seeing a lot of stress, anxiety, and a lot of issues in concentrating while reading. A lot of the research points towards the fact that we need to go back to the book instead of reading on screen because we learn much more profoundly while reading books. I think the future of the media industry would also be looking to sort of fine balance between this very exhilarating society and with digitalization and immersiveness and the balance with that and the analog. I think that we will probably, regarding the responsible way to this, figure out and be better at navigating how much time is okay to be wearing augmented glass and when we need to stop and be in the physical world. Those are some of the trends I see coming up, also, with the use of AI.

What impact will Artificial Intelligence have on the media and journalism?

This is something that is being discussed a lot at the moment because on the one hand, let's be clear, it will have a lot of impact, but we're also seeing a lot of errors. I don't know if you've heard about Sydney, which is the subconsciousness of search engines, so this kind of issue that we are facing right now will be interesting to see if it can be solved because AI is only machine learning. AI is not intelligence, but we are right now witnessing this weird schism where it seems like they are intelligent, and we have to figure out again how we stay focused on what is facts, what is truths, and truth has always been something that has been angled. There have always been persons, organizations, institutions, or states saying what is truth and what is fact and this is a whole new level that AI would be bringing on board. And it's going to be so easy to ask AI instead of asking an expert, so we will have to figure out as journalists how we navigate and how we use AI in our daily work within the whole ecosystem in which we are getting ideas to stories and finding out how we structure articles the best. There are many interesting ways to use AI already. I think the perspectives of what we have seen with the likes of CHAT GPs that is based on GPT-3 OR 3.5 which is a sort of language model that they're using (a new system that they're using) which will in a few months probably be on Future Tense. We will be seeing GPT-4 as the next size language model that is going to be a hundred times bigger if not more than the old ones, maybe even a thousand times. Which will be very extreme. If you are a journalist in the media industry and if you are not already looking at this you would have to start looking at this. And be ready when it comes in the long perspective.

What is the effect of the metaverse AI in the media industry, the entertainment industry, and gaming, and the fact that it will have all aspects of our everyday lives?

It's a good question, but we don't know what and how metaverse would be. But we do know that if we start considering and taking all the information that we have and put it in our environment and have it as more interactive, easy to understand visuals and being more surrounding us, so to say. A huge part of the metaverse is sound, but also having access in a completely new way. So that of course would change how we consume media in many ways. For instance, the car industry is approaching XR/extended reality. That industry is really at the fourth run of implementing extended reality and the whole metaverse into their concepts. It's super interesting to see cars are going to be like a smartphone somehow - much more of a computer than actually a car. And in that sense when you don't need to drive yourself anymore or if you have self-driving cars which will eventually come, sooner or later, later or sooner maybe. We will be able to be entertained and consume media there as well. Be ready for that to understand a perspective of where we will consume media and how we will consume media and how will in large part be a more natural thing and be a part of our lives, that is one thing that metaverse is. So that is why media companies should dip their toes in starting to understand these new formats, starting to understand augmented reality in the way that we can see it now for instance, like filters of Instagram. Apple is talking about new glasses that might be presented in January. There are a lot of rumors going around that have been for many years regarding the Apple glasses and whether those will come with a killer app and our way of entering it.

You mentioned the car industry, and can you talk more about the gaming industry? I think it is also one of the industries that are upfront with using AI and metaverse.

Yeah, especially in that perspective, a lot of the games are already using AI to construct the surroundings and enter new landscapes, because AI is generating that. And AI is being used in story-telling, AI is being used in personalization. If you look at the new VR headset from Sony they have iris scan so they can also track human emotions and I think when you look towards the gaming industry they are way ahead of us in regards to understanding gaming dynamics but they are also so ahead of us that they sometime might have lost their ethical codes. That is where other industries need to pay more attention to that part of it. Epic games and the huge gaming companies behind Fortnite are being sued in several countries for luring kids into buying these new forces because that is the skimmification of it. So we are seeing the skimmification of media as well but how far can you take it? How far should we draw the attention of the user like TikTok algorithms you know, how much data should we be allowed to track? I think these are some of the huge discussions. I'm not saying gaming per se is unethical, but there are definitely some aspects of the gaming industry that should not be copied into the metaverse and should not be implemented by the media industry even though it might bring great income. It will have a huge ethical discussion on how to choose these dynamics in the media industry but the metaverse will for sure revolutionize the way that we game as well so they are in the front run and it depends on what new technologies will appear. If you are really going to the future with Elon Musk's Neurolink where he's working on implementing chips in our brain and can control computers in that way. How close to our bodies are we willing to go? Right now we are talking about the haptic suits, we are talking about virtual headsets, you know, and these devices are getting smaller and smaller and easier to implement. Small starters you can also place around your body and then you can actually take your avatar and be an avatar at the same time in the physical world. And it doesn't demand a lot of technology so this whole motion cap/digital twin way of a more seamless convergence in the gaming industry of being in the physical and virtual life.

Last year at the Future Tense conference futurist Mike Bechtel from Deloitte said that in the next phase, we are all going to be technology. We are not going to wear it anymore, it's going to be in us, some sort of chip maybe and people are actually afraid of that a lot, but he believes that it is the next stage in the use of technology in everyday lives.

I agree with that and I think that it is a very long-term perspective because we have some ethical boundaries. But right now Elon Musk and his Neuralink project is expected to be FDA approved so he can have it tested on humans because so far it has been tested on monkeys. So, where do we draw the line? Around 15 years ago, Google glasses that were filming everything that people wearing them saw, and people who wore them were called glassholes because we as a society didn't want them to film us, but now we are so used to being filmed, that I think if you introduced those glasses today would be a different kind of acceptance. Also, how close do we want the technology to go? I'm wearing a ring that is called an 'Aura' and it tracks my data all the time and it knows where I am - kind of a surveillance tool. (I'm using it for research). But, how willing are we to get this technology to get closer and closer, and literally inside our bodies as cyborgs? We still haven't seen this very much. I think that the cyborg phase will take a longer time than we think, but it definitely is something where we are getting more invisible than wearables (from technology). So it will be inside us, we won't notice the technology inside us that is creating the metaverse, it would be more invisible. And we haven't seen that technology yet so that is why we have to be careful and its also why we talk metawashing in the institute in a sense that if we are saying NFTs are approaching, virtual worlds like Decentral, Minecraft, and Fortnite, Sandbox that is a metaverse? That we haven't understood the complexities and future perspectives of these convergences of virtual lives because it's much bigger than that it's also the Internet of Things and all things surrounding us and our lives converging at a different level. If we believe that the things we are seeing now are how the metaverse will be that might cause people to not take it seriously enough in that direction. So we have to have that ethical discussion.