SXSW Crowd Boos AI-Spruiking Sizzle Reel

SXSW Crowd Boos AI-Spruiking Sizzle Reel
Tom Fogden
By Tom Fogden



Crowds at SXSW have been booing a sizzle reel featuring conference panellists talking about how AI would transform the world and that people need to “stop resisting and starting learning” about the technology.

The tech and film festival in Texas was playing the 57-second video ahead of a number of sessions and featured prominent tech faces such as journalist Kara Swisher and Sandy Carter, COO of Unstoppable Domains and a former Amazon Web Services exec. She delivered the “stop resisting” line.

Here’s a look at the booing crowd:

Variety noted that members of the audience during the premieres for films including The Fall Guy and Immaculate who were booing were “likely writers and actors who just spent much of 2023 on the picket line trying to reign in the potentially destructive power of AI.”

The boos grew the loudest toward the end of the sizzle, when OpenAI’s VP of consumer product and head of ChatGPT Peter Deng declares on camera, “I actually think that AI fundamentally makes us more human” added Variety.

Here’s a look at the full video:

The video also noted that there are “15 different AI panels at South By this year.” Overkill perhaps?

Check out the agenda for Cannes in Cairns here!

The use of AI in the creative industries has been much debated. Some think that AI would be a godsend for creatives in the advertising and marketing space.

Others, such as Accenture Song’s Nick Law, think it might simply be another piece of kit to add to the arsenal, rather than ushering in a complete paradigm shift, calling it a “parlour trick.”




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