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I chose entertainment as my topic of focus because it is the medium I love best, both as a consumer and as an artist. I grew up watching movies and playing video games. I have even broiled a few short films, trying to direct. I am also interested in working in this space as a project manager, where creative decisions must meet technical limitations and meet deadlines.

AI is part of many of the things in the pipeline that audiences never see. On the streamers, recommendation systems subtly determine what we watch. In the streamers, the order in which the rows of titles are arranged and the picture frames that represent the titles have to do with these recommendation systems. In post-production, AI can clean up sound and dialogue, batch shots, and help the artists iterate faster. For the international audience, we are seeing AI ventures in dubbing and captioning that make localization less expensive and timely, which serves the smaller creators in crossing the language bridges. On the gloss side, neural tools are now in the effects tool boxes from de-aging to face-to-face. Some studios are even experimenting with AI-generated imagery, which is being used for credits and concept imagery, which has raised some legitimate issues with job acquisition, training data, and consents on usage.

What intrigues me is the tension between strategy and spirit. AI can decrease friction in the system and open the doors to new voices, yet it can also constrict choices if it only optimizes for clicks. I want to know the creative possibilities and the operational hazards of these tools as an aspiring project manager. These tools require intention by the human, and these tools require rules, and collaboration with the artists and craftspeople who make movies and games worth giving a damn about.

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Streaming Recommendations - AI in Entertainment  

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Streaming Recommendations - AI in Entertainment  

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Netflix employs a series of machine learning models to determine which title you are most likely to interact with, and then ranks and re-ranks rows in real time. Behind the scenes are deep embeddings for users and videos, learning-to-rank, and bandit approaches that balance accuracy with exploration. Benefits include faster discovery and less time lost to scrolling. Limits include filter bubbles, cold-start for new titles, and opacity about why something is shown. I find this fascinating because the UI feels simple, but it is powered by large-scale systems that shape culture. I would love to see more controls for users and more transparent explanations.

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Foundation Model for Personalized Recommendation

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By Ko-Jen Hsiao, Yesu Feng and Sudarshan Lamkhede

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Meta now lets creators auto-translate and dub Reels on Facebook and Instagram. When you post you can toggle Translate voices with Meta AI to turn English speech into Spanish or the other way around. The tool clones your voice, lines up the new audio with your mouth movements, and you can preview before publishing. Viewers see the reel in their preferred language, and Meta labels it as AI translated. Access started with Facebook creators who have at least 1,000 followers and all public Instagram accounts.

I like this because it helps videos travel across languages without extra editing. I am still watching for qualty, consent, and clear labels, but the feature could lower barriers for small creators and help fans discover content they would have missed. For my own projects, this kind of built-in dubbing could save time while still feeling personal, since it keeps the creator’s voice and tone

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Meta’s AI translation tool can dub your Instagram videos

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You can even have Meta AI match the movement of your lips to the translated audio.

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De-aging in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny - AI in Entertainment

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De-aging in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny - AI in Entertainment

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ILM reviewed decades of Harrison Ford footage, prompting their machine learning forays, before using neural and VFX tools to create “younger” versions. The benefit is flexibility in the storytelling for flashbacks without recasting. The limitations are an uncanny result, much artist time, and ethical issues with likeness controls. I find it interesting but a little creepy. This makes strong union rules on consent and disclosure feel like an imperative, especially as digital doubles improve.

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Near the end of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Nazis attempt to pull off one of the oldest tropes in entertainment: using the movie's titular dial, the Antikythera, to travel back to 1939 and assassinate Adolf Hitler. As their aircraft bears down on a time warp, the scientist Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), tells Indy of his plan to install himself as the führer and win the war. In his mind, history's "greatest moment" is "it's end."

To enter the past, then, is to end history. It's Voller's motto, but also the movie's-a nod to the de-aging technology that has made it possible. Thanks to several tools-machine learning, CGI, other tech-80-year-old Harrison Ford spends roughly 25 minutes of the film looking like the Indiana Jones of the early 1980s. He personifies the end of history brought about by technology's endeavor to pull people out of time, to return Ford or Bruce Willis or Robert De Niro to their younger selves. Ford's is also a face many fear: a visual representation of a future for Hollywood in which aging or deceased actors can be resuscitated via artificial intelligence. That's the promise. But the message that comes through in Dial of Destiny, a film that seems intensely preoccupied with how it was made, is that there is something hauntingly sad about this vision.

The tech-reincarnated Indy of the 1980s makes a poignant contrast to the Indy we see for most of the film: a retired academic, stuck in a crusty apartment and estranged from Marion Ravenwood. Dial's story, like the Jones movies before it, focuses on an ancient MacGuffin (the Antikythera) sought by both Indy and Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge). She seeks to sell it for a pretty penny on the black market; he, of course, thinks it belongs in an American museum. Naturally, they form an uneasy alliance to stop Voller.

So how does de-aged Ford look? An odd mix of impressive and unreal, his face unhumanly smooth as if slathered with magic grease, glowing from within like a Stable Diffusion portrait that moves. Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, who worked with Steven Spielberg on all of his Indy movies in the '80s, recently told Empire that she hoped fans would see the movie and think someone had found footage from 40 years ago. This will probably not be the case-and not just because director James Mangold shot the film in 4K. Ford looks too perfect, his surroundings too clean. It looks like trickery, but of course you are looking for trickery.

The current discourse around AI and Hollywood would have you believe that a Disney executive fed Ford's face into a copier and pressed a big "De-Age" button. New tech always provokes this reaction, explains Andrew Whitehurst, one of the VFX supervisors at Industrial Light & Magic who worked on Dial's de-aging. "People assumed that we all sat down in front of a Silicon Graphics workstation in 1993, pressed D for 'dinosaur,' and Jurassic Park fell out of the back of the computer," he says.

"From my perspective, there's nothing that we can't do. Given enough time and resources, we can accomplish anything."

ILM VFX supervisor Robert Weaver

Instead, ILM used a set of tools it calls FaceSwap. Like the the purpose-built tech ILM developed to let Martin Scorsese de-age actors for The Irishman, Dial of Destiny utilized a proprietary system called Flux that used two infrared cameras perched on either side of the one filming Ford to gather information from his performance. Unlike The Irishman, it also involved what the actor called " dots on my face " that captured even more data. All of that info was then combined to create a "CG mask" that could be placed on Indy in every frame.

To ensure Ford looked like his younger self, the ILM team used machine learning tools to scour years of footage of the actor that Lucasfilm had in its archives. The team also worked with VFX tools from Disney Research and a "smattering" of other sources to fine-tune the de-aged shots. "Each of these things is a pencil; now we have another pencil," says Whitehurst. "So it's just enabling us to make better choices."

Most of the de-aged scenes take place on a train hurtling through the Bavarian countryside. Keeping the suitable "physical configuration of the face," as ILM VFX supervisor Robert Weaver puts it, is a fiendish process involving a blue screen and hundreds of artists. Because the sequence begins at night and ends at dawn, Indy's smirk might require a dash less shadow from one moment to the next, but that tweak could introduce a sheen that highlights new creases and makes the smirk read as a frown.

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How 'Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny' De-Aged Harrison Ford

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Industrial Light & Magic developed a new suite of tools to reincarnate the Indy of the 80s. The effect is haunting-and raises more questions about the use of AI in Hollywood.

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Future Trends and Ethical Considerations

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Future Trends and Ethical Considerations

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I see A.I. advancing entertainment in three main ways. First, games become even more great. There are game studios now developing A.I. characters that talk, scheme, and react in real time, not by saying canned lines. The new A.I. technology from Nvidia, ACE, and the A.I. offerings of other companies like Inworld, show that non-player characters can be much more like fellow team members than props. It’s fascinating stuff, though the game developers are still discussing how and when to apply such marvels.

The second route is hyper-localization, and it’s fully advancing. Amazon is carrying out experiments in A.I.-based dubbing for its Prime Video, where they are using automated copy processes and human organizational talent, so that older or bespoke products can be presented in different language versions to new customers.

Third, the emergence of production copilots is now viewed as a matter of course. Adobe is bringing out new A.I. tools on Premiere Pro, which allow editors to search through vast libraries of old film, stretch clips, recreate subtitles – all from the editing bay! This device will remove the drudgery from laborious work and allow staff to concentrate on artistic decisions.

Regarding ethics, three essentials are what I care for most. They are: consent, consideration, and transparency. In the writers’ contract of 2023, there was a control clause against A.I. It states that studios will not compel writers to use A.I. Of more importance is the statement that the raw product of A.I. is not ‘literary material,’ thus safeguarding authorship and payment.

The performing artists have also found new guarantees. The latest film actors’ agreement produces a written permission and a payment, before companies can either build or use a digital replica of a performer. Labelling is now beginning with platforms. TikTok, for instance, has recently started to use the content credentials label in its watermark for categorizing the AI-produced media. And litigation is altered in the same way, states are passing or using deep fake laws applied to directed, malicious uses like deceptive and explicit fakes.

My view is straightforward. Use A.I. to eliminate drudgery and to generate the introduction to more voices. Human control should exert nerve on creativity. Make labels, consent and proper payments, the standard, not the exception!

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AI is already changing creative labor. New tech and data jobs will be created, ranging from creation to supervision, while new roles emerge in data, tooling, and model evaluation. The writers and performers have unionized to create some guardrails and I think that is a positive sign that they can shape how the tech lands. There are concerns about wage pressure/ deskilling, and concentration of power if only a few platforms control the models and the data. Brookings.

On the audience side, personalization may enhance discoverability, but it may also narrow our perspective if the objective function is merely minutes viewed. Localization may create more cultural exchange, but the synthetic voice issue provides privacy and consent issues, heightened even more around celebrities and dead artists. The policy is catching up to the tech, but union agreements now consist of consent and compensation for forms of persistent digital replicas in film and media. I think all of this should be table stakes for entertainment, video games included. The larger vision is equity. If AI reduces costs, we want more stories told from a diverse cast of creators, not fewer. But this requires solid rights, better systems and investment in people, not merely models.

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SAG-AFTRA union secures AI protections for artists in deal with major record labels

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Hollywood performers and media professionals have reached a tentative deal with major record labels such as Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment that includes increases in minimum salaries and protections against the use of AI.

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This research made me think a lot about separating marketing hype from actual workflows. The technical reading, white papers, and union contracts helped me understand where AI really brings value and where it threatens people. The big challenge for me was balancing the optimism of access and efficiency with the amount of concern over credit and consent, and transparency. The way I overcame it was to get rooted in primary source material like policy papers. Now I see AI as an enormously powerful suite of tools that requires serious human direction and clear guidelines. As a filmmaker and game player, I am interested in AI that empowers the creators and the audience rather than supplanting the human voices that make the industry worthwhile.

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Netflix Technology. (2025, March 21). Foundation Model for Personalized Recommendation - Netflix TechBlog. Medium; Netflix TechBlog. https://netflixtechblog.com/foundation-model-for-personalized-recommendation-1a0bd8e02d39

‌[Rationale: This primary source explains how Netflix builds and deploys large scale recommendation models, which supports my section on personalization in streaming.]

Roth, E. (2025, August 19). Meta’s AI translation tool can dub your Instagram videos. The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/news/761665/meta-ai-translation-facebook-instagram-reels

‌[Rationale: This mainstream report documents Meta’s auto translation and voice cloning for Reels, showing a real example of AI powered dubbing for creators.]

Pulliam-Moore, C. (2023, June 22). Secret Invasion studio under fire for AI art says “no artists’ jobs” were lost. The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/policy/2023/6/22/23770319/secret-invasion-ai-credits-method-studios-statement

‌[Rationale: This article covers the Secret Invasion opening credits controversy, which I use to discuss ethics, credit, and job concerns around generative art.]

Bedingfield, W. (2023, July 7). How “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” De-Aged Harrison Ford. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/indiana-jones-and-the-dial-of-destiny-de-aging-tech/

‌[Rationale: This behind the scenes piece details how ML was used to de-age Harrison Ford, illustrating practical VFX uses and their limits.]

Press, T. A. (2025, March 6). Amazon is now testing AI-aided dubbing for some movies and series on Prime. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/amazon-prime-ai-dubbing-movies-ccf67a44f86e60e69a2677650a05ab3a

‌[Rationale: This wire story confirms Amazon’s testing of AI aided dubbing on Prime Video, supporting my point about hyper localization backed by a major platform.]

Kinder, M. (2024, April 12). Hollywood writers went on strike to protect their livelihoods from generative AI. Their remarkable victory matters for all workers. Brookings; The Brookings Institution. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/hollywood-writers-went-on-strike-to-protect-their-livelihoods-from-generative-ai-their-remarkable-victory-matters-for-all-workers/

‌[Rationale: This analysis explains how the writers’ strike shaped AI rules in Hollywood, which I cite for labor protections and policy context.]

PARVINI, S. (2024, September 25). Can AI make video games more immersive? Some studios turn to AI-fueled NPCs for more interaction. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-video-games-npc-c1327bb9130136d0a5f658f44176c5e7

‌[Rationale: This report shows how studios are trying AI driven NPCs to make games more interactive, grounding my future trends section for gaming.]

Nellis, S. (2024, April 15). Adobe explores OpenAI partnership as it adds AI video tools. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/technology/adobe-explores-openai-partnership-it-adds-ai-video-tools-2024-04-15/

‌[Rationale: This business report shows Adobe adding AI video tools and exploring an OpenAI partnership, supporting my claim that AI copilots are entering standard production workflows.]

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Part 1 of my Overview Video on AI in the Entertainment Industry.