Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1504940
14 FA L L 2 0 2 3 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y KK: I was talking to Tom Holman on this and he summarized it in a really nice way, that if we're talking about a whole mix and AI doing it, it's partly what you said, you have the director, the producer, or the editor, who has to be able to describe it. And the AI has to have ingested the script to know where the dramatic moments are, to know what the style of the show is. There are so many variables that the number of computations for it to perform the mix and the number of ways for it to get it wrong seem prohibitive at this point. On top of that, it's all a matter of personal taste. We've all been in the room where there have been three producers and one says, "That's brilliant," one says, "That's terrible," and one says, "Can we try something in the middle?" How is AI going to manage that? SB: You can talk about AI in the hands of my brother, the lawyer, who listens to music, listens to movies. He's a big movie-goer, he loves them. But I dare say, if you said to him, this is the button to make dialogue louder, he would mess it up every time. KK: Which is why the current deployment of Amazon's "Dialogue Boost" making home adjustments to the mix may seem like a bad idea. SB: With respect to this kind of thing, an AI doesn't know that my dog is sitting next to me panting louder than he was five seconds ago. An AI would increase the volume in rhythm with the pants that increased. I can manage the overall volume and maybe AI could figure it out too, but that's not how Amazon is implementing it. It's a very creative and artistic thing, which brings me to my main point about AI for sound. AI needs to understand active listening. When I think about AI for sound, maybe you and I are the wrong people to ask right now. And this is because I have sat in rooms for hundreds of hours with incredibly fussy people arguing about whether when the dog jumps up and lands on the bed if the collar jingles should be louder than the dog's breath or the land on the bed or whether the collar jingles should be quiet and we hear the breath "If someone is hoping that AI can replace us, they're still going to need us to run the AI. Because there's too much of what we know that I think is unlearnable. I think it's about feeling." —Steve Borne