philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

If anyone can make a movie now, what does Hollywood still stand for?

PhilNote: Yves gets extensive screen time in this story!

... Yves Bergquist leads the AI in Media Project at USC’s Entertainment Technology Center, a studio-backed think tank where Hollywood, academia and tech converge. An AI researcher focused on storytelling and cognition, he has spent years helping studios brace for a shift he sees as both inevitable and wrenching. Now, he says, the groundwork is finally being laid.

“We’re seeing very aggressive efforts behind the scenes to get studios ready for AI,” Bergquist says. “They’re building massive knowledge graphs, getting their data ready to be ingested into AI systems and putting governance committees in place to start shaping real policy.”

In an algorithmically accelerated landscape where trends can catch fire and burn out in hours, staying relevant is its own challenge. To help studios keep pace, Bergquist co-founded Corto, an AI startup that describes itself as a “growth genomics engine.” The company, which also works with brands like Unilever, Lego and Coca-Cola, draws on thousands of social and consumer sources, analyzing text, images and video to decode precisely which emotional arcs, characters and aesthetics resonate with which demographics and cultural segments, and why.

“When the game is attention, the weapon is understanding where culture and attention are and where they’re going.” Bergquist says, arguing media ultimately comes down to neuroscience.

Corto’s system breaks stories down into their formal components, such as tone, tempo, character dynamics and visual aesthetics, and benchmarks new projects against its extensive data to highlight, for example, that audiences in one region prefer underdog narratives or that a certain visual trend is emerging globally. Insights like these can help studios tailor marketing strategies, refine storytelling decisions or better assess the potential risk and appeal of new projects.

With ever-richer audience data and advances in AI modeling, Bergquist sees a future where studios can fine-tune stories in subtle ways to suit different viewers. “We might know that this person likes these characters better than those characters,” he says. “So you can deliver something to them that’s slightly different than what you’d deliver to me.”

But adapting won’t be easy, especially for legacy studios weighed down by entrenched workflows, talent relationships, union contracts and layers of legal complexity. “These AI models weren’t built for Hollywood,” Bergquist says. “This is 22nd-century technology being used to solve 21st-century problems inside 19th-century organizational models. So it’s blood, sweat and tears getting them to fit.” ...

See the full story here: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2025-08-07/hollywood-tomorrow-ai-studios-storytelling-luma-asteria