Think back to the last time you were at a concert, festival, or football match. What stood out to you the most? Maybe it was the music, the smoke effects, or incredible LED visuals. Whatever it was, one thing probably made it special: it was a shared memory, created with everyone around you.
It might seem strange, then, to think that this distinctly human experience could soon be created with the help of AI. For many people, in fact, that’s a worrying thought. But in reality, early forms of AI have existed in the live events space for many years, starting from the early days of machine learning algorithms being used to calibrate projectors in the late 2010s.
As an industry, we’re always trying to do something new. Every show tries to be bigger, brighter, more spectacular, or more immersive, and AI is swiftly becoming another vehicle towards that. Soon, we’ll be using it to create events in ways that would have once been deemed impossible.
The current state of AI in live events
AI is already being used in the industry in several ways, including:
- Knowledge access. This is where you can use chat-based AI interfaces to get answers on how to build professional shows, even if you don’t have much previous experience, or find a particular workflow tip without the need to dive into full release notes or user guides.
- AI assistants. Here, AI isn’t just answering questions; it’s actually acting as another member of your team. There are AI workflow assistants on the market today that enable media server operators to create bespoke, scripted integration tools for LED visuals, without having to build them from scratch. Creating a live event involves many repetitive tasks, so this type of workflow assistant can take a task that used to take an hour and shorten it to just five minutes.
Already, both AI knowledge access and AI assistants are democratizing a lot of live events production, paving the path to enabling indie artists, DJs, theater troupes, and more to create impressive headline-worthy shows even on much smaller scales and budgets. These state-of-the-art models are leveraging LLMs to generate code, call tools and interact directly with individual projects, enabling users to supercharge their knowledge and accelerate workflows by prompting instead of clicking – a gamechanger for productivity. AI also means live events admin is now taking less time to complete, so professionals have more time to focus on perfecting the quality of the show, rather than using valuable time on repetitive setup tasks.
How AI will change live events for the future
One of the most interesting next steps for AI in live events is leveraging image generation AIs during concepting to help convey a visual idea and get early buy-in from stakeholders. While there is no substitute for an artist on the team, sometimes conveying visually what you want through a quickly generated image can shortcut the need for repetitive content cycles once you get to professional content production.
While we’re now seeing the emergence of AI that can generate video in seconds, it still isn’t capable of generating them at the frame rate and resolution needed for live events. But as generative AI moves more into a world of better fidelity, higher resolutions and frame rates, it’s natural that the live events world will want to explore this technique as part of their hunger for constantly experimenting with the new.
Looking a little further ahead, AI world models could then take this even further. World models won’t just give you the possibility of rendering a video with a prompt. They’ll actually generate an entire world that can then be manipulated in real time. Unlike traditional pipelines where everything needs to be prepared in advance, even real time scenes of today need to be built to be manipulated. With world models, you can command something new into the scene which has never been seen before. This has the potential to completely revolutionize the creative process for media and entertainment, opening up the possibilities to unique, one-off experiences and a new world of creation. If you’re at a festival and a musician makes an off-the-cuff joke about flying, for instance, AI world models could generate a bird that flies across the sky on stage seconds after, or even move the whole scene into a new dimension, all with just a quick prompt.
AI challenges and ethical considerations
While these future possibilities might be exciting, there are also a lot of ethical and practical considerations that come with using AI in live events. For instance, many of the cutting-edge models need to be run in AI data centers, which means you need to be connected to the internet to use them. That’s something you may not want to rely on during a live event, where any connectivity issues would break immersion for your audience.
IP ownership is also a problem for live events professionals. The last thing you want is to generate visuals for an event and earn revenue from those visuals, all while using IP that you didn’t pay for. Nobody really knows what the best solution is yet for avoiding this. One option is for LLM providers to be upfront about where visuals are coming from. Certification is another answer, where LLMs indicate their training data sources, similar to licensed models from companies like Getty.
A third solution would be for live events industry professionals to create in-house AI models using proprietary data to avoid IP infringement issues. This method allows for a closed-loop system, mitigating privacy concerns about cloud services as well as removing the possibility of IP problems, as any video you generate will only use in-house data rather than pulling from the internet.
The ultimate goal: storytelling
However the industry decides to address the challenges that AI brings, the most successful projects will probably be the ones run by teams that embrace, adopt, and experiment with AI.
That said, it’s also crucial not to get lost in the technology. AI is a tool that can expand creative possibilities, but the fundamental goal of any live event should still be about storytelling, not new tech. After all, no matter how advanced your AI solutions are, your audience is human. They’ll be spending their precious time and money coming to your live event, and if you’re able to use AI to improve your workflow, you could have more time to create meaningful content and emotionally intuitive stories.
That’s the biggest opportunity AI can bring to live events. If we play our cards right, together, we can make more memories that last a lifetime for all.
