29-07-2025
AI Impact Awards 2025: Media Execs Say AI Won't Replace Human Creativity
AI advances in industries like software development or health care are largely understood to improve efficiencies when dealing with numbers and data. But there is still concern about the use of automation and generative AI in creative industries, where a unique human touch is paramount.
The winners of Newsweek's AI Impact Awards in the category of Arts & Media represented three different industries that are using this emerging technology. For them, using AI doesn't eliminate human input. It increases efficiency, democratizes their fields and allows for more creativity to hit the marketplace.
Interdependence
Interdependence is a PR and strategic communications firm, with offices in every major market across the U.S., that works with clients across industries, including entertainment, consumer and travel brands. It is the winner of Newsweek's AI Impact Award for Best Outcomes, Digital Media & Arts.
In addition to traditional media relations, the company manages social media, influencer marketing, branding and SEO. Interdependence now uses generative AI on a platform called Interviewed to identify trends based on what customers are searching for online.
"The trend alerts are based on click rates," Interdependence President Sarah Schmidt told Newsweek in an interview. "So when our AI determines that a click rate is spiking, that's when we know that a certain topic or trend is emerging to trend, and that's our cue to go out with it."
For their client Overtone, a semipermanent hair dye company, Interdependence identified major hair trends on social media.
When celebrities like Kylie Jenner, Busy Philipps and Megan Fox dyed their hair pink last year, Interviewed picked up a rapid spike in conversations around pink hair in both traditional media and social media, as audiences were eager to re-create the look.
Interdependence gathered trend data and alerted beauty editors, journalists and influencers covering the trend to pitch Overtone's product that was relevant to the trend. Interviewed has a database of 25,000 journalists to identify who has written about emerging trends or similar topics.
The AI tools' rapid response allowed Interdependence to "get ahead of" the trend in a way that was timely and relevant, Schmidt said.
"By aligning with celebrity-driven beauty trends, we secured top-tier placements at the peak of interest, positioning Overtone as an industry leader in on-trend hair color," Interdependence said in its awards application.
The "King Kylie Pink" hair trend garnered nearly 79 million impressions, and the brand's product was placed in eight major media outlets, including Byrdie, Glamour, MSN, Allure and Yahoo Lifestyle, according to Interdependence.
Schmidt said the company is constantly adjusting the tool by updating specific keywords that will pick up trends quicker, "before they blow up," and track better data for clients.
And when teams can spend less time tracking and making dashboards, Schmidt said, they can focus on higher-level tasks, like developing creative strategies to help clients continue to innovate and expand.
Integrating technology internally will be "a game changer" for PR firms, like Interdependence, which, Schmidt said, relies on storytelling and personal relationships.
AI Impact Awards: Arts & Media
AI Impact Awards: Arts & Media
Newsweek Illustration
"We want to maintain our competitive advantage; we are continuing to push the boundaries, continuing to innovate, and we are committed to having the most advanced tech stack in public relations," she said. "We want our team to have every tool at their disposal that is going to make them efficient, optimized and smart so we can continue to add that value to our clients."
Automation of lower-level tasks through AI tech is encouraged throughout the company, but, Schmidt said, there is still that human touch to everything teams do.
"We really are living at the corner of tech plus human plus innovation," she said. "We never will downplay the importance of our humans and their strategy, their creativity, their ability to make relationships and connect. That's something that AI can never do. And so from that perspective, PR still needs to be uniquely human. We just power our team through these innovations to get to fully optimize them and make their work as strategic and propped-up with tech as possible."
Spines
AI is not only helping improve internal and external efficiency but also increasing accessibility in arts and media creation.
Thirteen years ago, Israeli author Yehuda Niv encountered many roadblocks and inefficiencies when trying to publish his book. He later founded Niv Publishing, which grew into one of Israel's largest publishing houses, with more than 1,200 titles published annually. But still, the publishing process remained slow, costly and inaccessible for so many people.
Using AI technology, Niv founded Spines, an AI-driven publishing platform that "removes the barriers that prevent authors from bringing their books to market," the company said in its application.
Spines is now the winner of Newsweek's AI Impact Award for Best Outcomes, Written Media & Arts.
A book normally takes six to 18 months to get published. But with Spines, Niv said, the process takes two to three weeks. And it costs thousands of dollars instead of tens of thousands of dollars.
To circumvent those challenges, Spines deploys AI to automate key stages like spelling and grammar checks, page formatting, cover design and audiobook creation. Spines also offers marketing services to create and manage campaigns for authors across a wide distribution network. This drives down costs and saves time, while allowing authors to retain 100 percent of their net royalties and full control of their content post-publication.
"We take care of everything, and then the authors can focus on what they are doing best, which is writing books," Niv told Newsweek in an interview. "We are ready to empower authors with the power of AI to help them to boost their writing, to boost their stories [and] to make them reach more."
The company has published over 2,000 titles in 2024 and is on track to reach 8,000 by the end of 2025, the company said. Beyond revenue and volume growth, Spines also measures its success by author satisfaction and retention, noting a high percentage of returning authors who publish multiple books. Post-publication tracking also indicates that the platform is able to drive book sales and visibility to a wide range of audiences.
One of the biggest challenges of the platform was resistance and skepticism from those coming from a traditional publishing background. But Niv assured Newsweek that Spines is not trying to replace the authors—Spines is here to help authors realize their dreams in the most efficient way.
To those who assume increasing access to publishing will decrease the quality of the books, Niv says, "Who are you to choose what is high quality and what isn't?"
"Because the publishing space was controlled for a very long time by the elite publishers who [decide] who is worthy and who isn't worthy to become an author," he said. "And I am here to say that if someone spent a year of his life writing a manuscript, he's worthy of getting his book published. Let the readers decide if it's good writing or not. Let's give him a chance."
Moonvalley
Like Spines, Moonvalley aims to eliminate the traditional barriers for filmmakers by cutting production costs and helping artists realize their vision faster. The company won Newsweek's AI Impact Award for Best Outcomes, Visual Media & Arts.
It was founded to "make generative video technology" for filmmakers and creative professionals. It provides AI tools to creatives "that enhance their vision rather than replace their craft," the company said in its application.
CEO Naeem Talukdar told Newsweek that Moonvalley is focused on the creators and building control for them to best execute their work.
"We're building models that can go in and move cameras around, change the lighting and have people decide who's involved and where they're moving and how they're moving," he said, adding that this process is broadly defined internally as generative filmmaking.
The company built Marey, an AI video model designed for professional filmmakers. It's also the first clean AI model, where the data, video and imaging used to train the models come from licensed content generated by a network of hundreds of creators, including film school students, independent filmmakers, international studios and film catalogues.
Moonvalley recently announced that it is opening public access to Marey. In a recent press release, Moonvalley Chief Scientific Officer Mateusz Malinowski said Marey gives directors the same level of controls they expect on set and by working with filmmakers directly: "We built technology that amplifies and empowers their creative vision rather than replacing it."
At Moonvalley's in-house studio, Asteria, filmmakers are incorporating these AI tools, which allow the company to "build technology that's actually built for creators, rather than just kind of being these abstract models," Talukdar said.
Moonvalley built specialized interfaces that let filmmakers direct the AI model using sketches, storyboards, photos and camera controls. According to the company, working directly with professionals shaped the workflow and controls to ensure the technology would fit seamlessly into existing creative processes.
The company likens the effect of this technology to the shift from silent film to talkies, the introduction of Technicolor or the advent of CGI in the ways it is "opening doors to a new creative renaissance where a broader range of voices and stories can be shared."
"When CGI first came out, there were these fears that a lot of jobs just aren't going to be there anymore," Talukdar said. "And it's true: there are things that obviously you didn't need to do anymore post-CGI that you did before. However, studios have only increased in size since CGI came out, because now you have a whole new cascade of roles that have opened up in VFX and different things that you have to do."
He said the proliferation of AI in filmmaking will allow independent filmmakers to make more films
"What's going to happen is that you're talking about a 30 to 50 percent savings, and that alone is enough to cause this massive flourishing of creativity," Talukdar said. "I really think that you're going to see a golden age of cinema emerge from these independent studios now suddenly being able to punch above their weight and create AAA content, whereas otherwise, they would have just been making indie movies."
There is plenty of pushback against the use of AI in the filmmaking process, but, he said, many of the fears are not the reality.
"I'm not going to spend two hours watching a ChatGPT-generated movie," he said. "There's no quick fixes to it, like the industry is angry, and they're going to be hostile to the technology, as is completely natural."
The solution, he said, is to ease in a "show, not tell" strategy to demonstrate that creatives can do the same things in a way that is more feasible than before.
"With a generative videography model, these are just power tools," Talukdar said. "Expecting them to replace filmmakers is asinine. What they need to be is something that filmmakers can now use to realize their visions in a way that they couldn't before. It's not that you can make $50 million movies for $10 million, it's that the studio with a $10 million budget can now make that money go a lot further."
