Producer, director, and deepfake pioneer Benjamin Field spoke to FutureWeek about how artificial intelligence is transforming media production. Field’s journey with AI began with Gerry Anderson: A Life Uncharted, where the Thunderbirds creator was brought back to life using deepfake technology. He is also the creative force behind an upcoming AI-driven podcast hosted by the late Sir Michael Parkinson, which was announced shortly after Field spoke to FutureWeek.
As the founder of Deep Fusion Films, an ethical, AI-focused production company, Field champions a responsible approach to technology in the industry. He highlights the opportunities AI can create and presents a counterpoint to the dominant narrative that technology will inevitably erase creative jobs.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What inspired you to start using AI in your work?
So I made a documentary in 2021 about the Thunderbirds pioneer called Gerry Anderson: A Life Uncharted. At that point, I think it’s fair to say I was a fairly regular TV producer—had some successes, apparently not a terrible producer, but a regular TV producer. Nothing particularly remarkable.
Anderson’s son, Jamie, was a co-producer on the project and he’d given me 36 hours of unheard audio archive of Gerry talking about his life. We got the commission and thought, ‘Oh God, how are we going to create visuals to go with this audio?’ It was just the time that the deepfake Tom Cruise thing had come out on TikTok and I rang Jamie and asked ‘how do you feel about resurrecting your dead dad?’ That’s verbatim, by the way.
‘How’d you feel about resurrecting your dead dad?’ Not an everyday question—how was that received?
Jamie and I had known each other for a little while at that point and he was really open to it. So we gave it a go. At first, we didn’t have a clue what we were doing. I don’t think anybody did.
Gerry had quite a contentious life, fell out with pretty much everybody, so we knew that if we used AI or if it looked like we were using AI to create new versions of Gerry, we might be in trouble for doctoring his life or presenting a narrative that was false, especially if his son was involved.
So we wrote ourselves a set of guidelines. Things that we would do and things we wouldn’t do to remain authentic and ethical. That was the route we took. We flagged at the very beginning that it had deepfake in it and so on, to make sure nobody was being fooled.
What was the reaction to the project?
When the project was initially announced by ITV, there was a lot of commentary on Twitter saying it was going to be awful. Of course, Twitter is the place for reasoned debate. I remember some people were using terms like ‘digital meat puppetry,’ I think that’s the phrase that stuck with me the most. All in all, it got a fairly abhorrent reaction, but we knew that so long as we followed our own ethical guidelines, it would be ok in the end. When it came out, the reaction flipped as we’d hoped. A lot praised it and said it was the most ethical use of AI I’ve ever seen, and so forth.
How has your use of AI evolved since A Life Uncharted?
Since that, I’ve been involved in a lot of the discussions surrounding the use of AI in the industry since. As a production company, we use it quite a lot too. Two of our recent commissions are heavily underpinned by AI, we signed the first ever AI development deal with a US network in July and there’s a development deal we got yesterday with a UK network. I can’t talk about it or say who it is with yet but I think it’s fair to say they’ve probably not done something like this before.
And all of those are in-house productions that don’t trample on anybody else’s copyright. They don’t use generative images and generative AI in the way that tools like Midjourney and Runway and Stable Diffusion and all of those do. We use AI to underpin the machinations under things. What we realised quite early on, after having made all the mistakes that all the other companies are now making like saying let’s use clever visuals that have been generated by AI, was that AI was particularly good at was drawing on data points and forging new links to explore things in a different way. Once we’d unlocked that, we’ve been incredibly busy.
There’s a lot of fear about AI replacing jobs in media. Yet, your experience seems to challenge this narrative.
AI is such a difficult thing to discuss currently without having your head blown off. Of course everybody is terrified that the work will go and won’t come back. But often people look at AI job losses and they’re really, really not. Take the (Parkinson) podcast. Somebody will probably say, oh, that’s a job loss for X or Y in the industry. And what they’ll fail to pick up on is the fact that it would never have been commissioned before. It’s actually a net gain to the industry because that’s actually created jobs to produce it.
I think where people are stuck or what they’re concerned about, understandably, is about this evolutionary pathway that we’re on within the media industry. Forty years ago, 60% of today’s jobs didn’t exist, and in another 40 years, another 60% won’t exist either. It’s evolution
Will AI spell the end for creatives or is that a myth?
Developments in AI mean you need to constantly learn and develop and shift skills. That’s what people need to do in the industry at the moment. They need to keep training and learning new things.
This whole argument that the creative industry is going to be swallowed up by tech and AI is absolute bollocks. The idea that the whole creative sector will just be wiped out by AI requires a level of passivity from the industry that has never been seen before.
We set up a charity to take in a percentage of the money from any of our AI jobs and invest it into training underprivileged and underrepresented groups within the media industry for next generation of media jobs.
Looking back, is there anything you’d change or have done differently?
I wish I’d been part of it earlier. But that’s everybody’s wish, isn’t it? I wish I was better connected to be able to do bigger work and help shape the rules and regulations for all this. A lot of the things we come up against come from the fact that there are no rules and there’s no legal framework for any of this, just guidelines.