philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

How UFC is employing AI

... That’s where UFC Insights Engine - a generative AI platform developed collaboratively by UFC and IBM using Watsonx technology—comes in. The platform captures live fight data and translates it into clear analytics, statistical insights, and narratives. This allows fans to better understand rivalries, interpret judging decisions, and gauge who has the upper hand. AI-generated insights are displayed during live broadcasts, on social media, and at event venues, making fights easy to follow,...

The process of adopting AI is different, requiring considerable planning and support across the organization. Without such a disciplined approach, companies run the risk of employees becoming frustrated, stressed, or even resentful of the new technology. ...

Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles is reportedly introducing a new free-flow facial authentication system called Go-Ahead Entry—a non-IBM technology—that allows fans to enter the venue without presenting a physical ticket. By registering in advance and submitting a selfie, fans can use a dedicated entry lane for faster, contactless access. ...

See the full story here: https://www.fastcompany.com/91346610/how-ufc-is-employing-ai-to-elevate-the-fan-experience-and-give-its-own-workers-a-leg-up-on-the-competition

What Gets Measured, AI Will Automate

Summary: In the age of AI, what gets measured gets automated. As models grow more powerful, any task that can be turned into data—from spreadsheet analysis to therapy sessions—is increasingly within reach of automation. The underlying playbook is clear: define the task, feed it data, attach rewards, and apply compute. As AI slashes the cost of measurement, even minor activities become economically viable to automate, expanding the reach of AI into nearly every industry. What remains defensible are tasks defined by ambiguity, creativity, or uncertainty—places where outcomes can’t be easily quantified or where human judgment still prevails. For leaders, the challenge is to manage both the measurable and the unmeasurable, investing not just in automation, but in the intangibles—taste, trust, vision, and adaptability—that AI can’t yet replicate.

Read the full article here: https://hbr.org/2025/06/what-gets-measured-ai-will-automate

Midjourney Set to Release its First Video Model

... This is not a photorealistic model. Founder David Holz says the goal is aesthetic control, not realism. Think art direction over live action. ...

See the full story here: https://shellypalmer.com/2025/06/midjourney-set-to-release-its-first-video-model/

MIT Looks at How AI Agents Can Learn to Reason Like Humans

PhilNote: this work appears to view human intervention as a flaw, rather than as an AI/human partnership.

“These findings underscore a fundamental reality: Most GenAI tools remain tethered to humans. The reason: Most enterprise functions are complex, interdependent and context-rich—conditions that challenge today’s GenAI capabilities,” the report added.New research at MIT suggests that could be the case. A report Tuesday (June 17) from the university’s Sloan School of Management covers some of MIT’s studies involving agentic artificial intelligence (AI), including an exploration into how these digital entities can be trained to reason and collaborate more like humans. ...

The research found that AI’s strict adherence to rules could be relaxed when exposing models to human reasoning, letting them be more flexible in making exceptions in scenarios like hiring and customer service. ...

In the meantime, generative AI (GenAI) still “requires human operators for prompting and assessing the outcomes of most tasks,” as PYMNTS wrote in the recent report, “AI at the Crossroads: Agentic Ambitions Meet Operational Realities.”

See the full story here: https://www.pymnts.com/artificial-intelligence-2/2025/mit-looks-at-how-ai-agents-can-learn-to-reason-like-humans/

Elon Says He’s Working to ‘Fix’ Grok After AI Disagrees With Him on Right-Wing Violence

PhilNote: this is why we need to scrap the click license for AI and create QC-checked contract requirements between AI developers and their customers/users. There is a market for AIs that would agree to and comply with this.

Billionaire conspiracy theorist Elon Musk really doesn’t like it when Grok says anything that contradicts his far-right worldview. And that’s exactly what his AI chatbot did late Tuesday when an X user asked whether people on the political right or the political left have been more violent since President Donald Trump was first elected in 2016. Grok said it was people on the right. Musk responded that he was working to fix Grok so it wouldn’t do that again. ...

See the full story here: https://gizmodo.com/elon-says-hes-working-to-fix-grok-after-ai-disagrees-with-him-on-right-wing-violence-2000617420

Moonvalley Hires VFX Trailblazer Ed Ulbrich to Lead Strategic Growth in AI-Powered Entertainment

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In this role, Ulbrich will help shape the company’s broader growth strategy while deepening Moonvalley’s relationships across studios, brands, agencies, and creative communities. He will also collaborate closely with Moonvalley’s studio arm, Asteria Film Co., to accelerate adoption and integration of its technology within professional filmmaking communities and workflows. ...

Ulbrich brings over 30 years of experience driving innovation at the intersection of storytelling, production, and technology. ...

The announcement reflects Hollywood’s evolving relationship with AI technology. Following industry strikes partly centered on AI concerns, studios are seeking partners who can deliver professional tools while respecting creators’ rights. Moonvalley’s approach of building models exclusively from licensed content directly addresses these concerns. ...

See the full story here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250618829097/en/Moonvalley-Hires-VFX-Trailblazer-Ed-Ulbrich-to-Lead-Strategic-Growth-in-AI-Powered-Entertainment

A.I. Might Take Your Job. Here Are 22 New Ones It Could Give You.

... Even if the A.I.-written version of this piece was entirely factual, submitting it to my editors would have represented a fundamental misunderstanding of why they hired me. In freelance journalism, as in many fields where the work product is written text, you aren’t just being paid for the words you submit. You’re being paid to be responsible for them: the facts, the concepts, the fairness, the phrasing. ...

It’s not just a question of where humans want A.I., but also: Where does A.I. want humans? To my mind, there are three major areas where humans either are, or will soon be, more necessary than ever: trust, integration and taste. ...

Trust

A.I. auditors — people who dig down into the A.I. to understand what it is doing and why and can then document it for technical, explanatory or liability purposes. ...

A.I. translator: someone who understands A.I. well enough to explain its mechanics to others in the business, particularly to leaders and managers. ...

... a whole new breed of fact checkers and compliance officers ...trust authenticatoror trust director. ... A.I. ethicist. It will be these ethicists’ jobs to build chains of defensible logic that can be used to support decisions made by A.I. (or by hybrid A.I.-and-human teams) to a wide variety of interested parties...

At its core, trust is about accountability ... “There should be a human who ultimately takes responsibility,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the digital economy lab at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and also a founder of the A.I. consulting company Workhelix. ...

 legal guarantor: someone who provides the culpability that the A.I. cannot. ...

 consistency coordinator. ... when A.I. isn’t consistent, it can’t be trusted. ...

 escalation officer. ... But our preferences will almost certainly also require someone to step in when the A.I. just feels … inhuman. ...

Integration

A.I. integrators: experts who figure out how to best use A.I. in a company, then implement it. ...

...  people who fix the A.I. when it breaks, which will look a little different than traditional I.T. specialists ... A.I. Plumber ...

Deciding which tools to use, and when, is a complex problem. ... A.I. assessor ...

Integration jobs are already on the rise, ... In the future, they might carry more specific titles, like integration specialist. ...

A.I. trainer: the person whose job it is to help the A.I. find and digest the best, most useful data a company has and then teach it to respond in accurate and helpful ways. ...

A.I. personality director ... an organization’s A.I. personality could become as core to its brand as its logo. ...

Healthcare... drug-compliance optimizer — a person who develops A.I.-driven systems to make sure patients take the right medications at the correct time. ...  A.I./human evaluation specialist: someone who determines where A.I. performs best, where humans are either better or simply needed and where a hybrid team might be optimal. ...

Taste

... music producer Rick Rubin ... “The confidence I have in my taste, and my ability to express what I feel, has proven helpful for artists.” ...

In that future, provided my editor and I can trust the A.I., the job of writing this article may very well come down to selecting the inputs, then picking and choosing phrases, paragraphs and lines of reasoning offered by Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and others. I will still be the “author” of the article, but perhaps not the writer. ...

Rather than go away, in the future, the term “designer” might actually grow to cover a whole range of jobs in which a person’s main function is to steer A.I. to create something compelling — a product, a service, a process — based largely on their taste. ...

product designers will have a much greater ability to own products, from top to bottom... not be a writer but an article designer. Story designer might become a more popular title in film and TV. We could see a lot more world designers in everything from marketing — where a person fabricates an entire universe, complete with fictional characters and locations, which then feeds all the images and videos of a campaign — to video games. ...

human resources designer who can more thoroughly control everything from training materials to detailed benefits-and-leave policies, giving them a more pronounced ability to personally shape the entire culture of an organization. We might see civil designers, who are more focused on the creative part of the job than the math and physics, favored over civil engineers. ...

This means that rather than have rookie employees compile reports or write memos — things the A.I. is good at — you might have them start, say, creating new ideas for products right away. ...

differentiation designer, whose remit combines branding, philosophy, product, risk tolerance and creative execution. ...

 “I will have it do research in advance, but I will never let it write before I write,” Mollick said of A.I. “I have to write messily to think something through. Otherwise, the A.I. will dominate my thoughts.” ...

Brynjolfsson said. “We have to think, OK: What is it we really want to accomplish? What are the goals here? And we have to think a little bit more deeply about that than we have in the past.” ...

See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/magazine/ai-new-jobs.html

Nvidia’s pitch for sovereign AI resonates with EU leaders

• Nvidia's AI projects highlight Europe's lack of AI infrastructure
• EU leaders emphasize AI infrastructure for digital sovereignty
• High electricity costs challenge Europe's AI data center expansion

See the full story here: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/nvidias-pitch-sovereign-ai-resonates-with-eu-leaders-2025-06-16/

Social media now main source of news in US, research suggests

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More than half (54%) of people get news from networks like Facebook, X and YouTube - overtaking TV (50%) and news sites and apps (48%), according to the Reuters Institute.

"The rise of social media and personality-based news is not unique to the United States, but changes seem to be happening faster – and with more impact – than in other countries," a report found.

Podcaster Joe Rogan was the most widely-seen personality, with almost a quarter (22%) of the population saying they had come across news or commentary from him in the previous week. ...

It said populist politicians around the world are "increasingly able to bypass traditional journalism in favour of friendly partisan media, 'personalities', and 'influencers' who often get special access but rarely ask difficult questions, with many implicated in spreading false narratives or worse". ...

• The use of AI chatbots to get the news is on the rise, and is twice as popular among under-25s than the population as a whole.
• But most people think AI will make news less transparent, accurate and trustworthy.
• All generations still prize trusted brands with a track record for accuracy, even if they don't use them as often as they once did

See the full story here: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93lzyxkklpo

Its time for sovereign AI

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been crisscrossing the continent making a compelling case for “sovereign AI,” which has been defined as localized AI models that reflect each country's unique language, culture, and values. ...

Behind the policy speeches and funding pledges is a very clear business case: Nvidia wants to ensure that when Europe builds its own AI capabilities, it does so using Nvidia GPUs. It’s also a direct response to Europe’s growing discomfort with being dependent on a small number of U.S. tech giants.

...

See the full story here: https://shellypalmer.com/2025/06/its-time-for-sovereign-ai/