​03.04.2019

Artificial intelligence in everyday life and in the creative industry - Interview with Jochen Voß

by Eyes & Ears of Europe

Jochen Voß, Managing Director next step next crossmedia, will present the Eyes & Ears event "Storytelling & AI" on 15 May 2019 in Cologne. We were interested to find out how the digital and cross-media expert views technological development and the influence of artificial intelligence on our industry.

To what extent do you already use AI in your daily work?

Artificial intelligence is imperceptibly omnipresent in my daily work. From spell-checking to voice commands, from search and suggestion algorithms for daily web research to advertising and the associated advertising media or video games after work, artificial intelligence has long since found its way into everyday life. New, however, are the countless possibilities and applications for this highly complex form of information processing.

What development opportunities do you see for technology? Where, for example, can language assistants be used effectively?

To put it simply: wherever language is used - whether spoken or written. An obvious step is to make the rather cumbersome communication with machines, which we currently handle at the touch of a button, touch, gesture or keyboard input, more organic for us humans. But this requires more than just voice input based on simple commands such as "Hey Siri, what's on at the cinema today". One of the next steps could be an almost natural dialogue in almost all situations, where - at least in terms of speech quality - it's no longer noticeable that I'm talking to a machine and the machine understands me even if I deviate from the protocol.

There is a lot of creative potential in this segment alone. When it comes to purposeful communication, for example in marketing, all the brand values and messages that are still visually conveyed today have to be expressed linguistically - the assistants need a personality that can express itself through sentence structure, word choice, modulation and many other aspects. A highly creative conceptual task!

How can technology and creativity make a productive connection? How will the creative industry change when complex algorithms take over creative tasks such as writing scripts?

Artificial intelligence means that automated systems make decisions based on knowledge, observation and prediction. It can be an exciting support for creative people everywhere where it is necessary to keep large and complex amounts of data manageable and draw the right conclusions from them - for example in complex game actions or countless individual variants of interactive stories in the form of chats or conversations that perhaps complement the novel as a narrative form. In the long run, automation through artificial intelligence will do the so-called hard work, as we have seen in other industry segments. Depending on how you see it, creative people can or have to focus more on the supreme discipline: Idea and concept.

Is artificial intelligence here to stay or is there a short-lived hype behind the technology?

Artificial intelligence is a long-term topic that has preoccupied people since the 18th century - if not since ancient times. Only now, however, are the technical possibilities available to accelerate the everyday realization of this vision at an exponential pace. Similar stages of development could also be observed, for example, in digitisation and virtual reality. Moreover, the concept of artificial intelligence does not stand alone, but can be integrated into other technologies - from mobile computing to biotechnologies - to develop completely new dimensions of media and humanity that are difficult to grasp with current concepts.

Many thanks to Jochen Voß for the interesting answers!

These and other topics will be discussed at our event "Storytelling & KI - From Aristotle to Alexa" with the City of Cologne and Mediennetzwerk.NRW on 15 May in Cologne.

For further information about the event: https://eeofe.org/de/kalender/events/mai-2019/storytelling-ki/

For further information on the moderator of our event: https://www.nextstepnext.de/ and https://www.crossvoss.com/