AI Has Pushed Us Into ‘Relationship Economy,’ Warns Arte Exec

Amongst growing conversation on conglomeration, the shifting landscape of global media and restrained freedom of speech, the leading documentary festival CPH:DOX chose “Media Sovereignty: Rethink, Envision, Redefine” as the theme for its second-ever CPH:SUMMIT. This year’s event gathers politicians, innovators, researchers and documentary professionals to discuss the future of the audiovisual industry, focusing specifically on the state of information, technology and shifting notions of truth. In the opening keynote, president of public broadcaster Arte France Bruno Patino provided a bleak yet piercingly precise evaluation of the industry today.

During the Summit’s welcome speeches, Doc Society’s Beadie Finzi presented the audience with a report generated by AI bot Claude predicting what the industry would look like in 2030. The result was ghastly: public broadcasters would become “a shadow” of what they once were to evolve into “merely commissioning entities”; documentary would be split between costly prestige and cheap creator-led, with no in-between; and the information environment would become flooded, with “tiny audiences who care” clustering “tightly around a tiny number of deeply trusted brands.”

Most worryingly, the “real loss by 2030” would be that of “shared commons.” Finzi’s AI-generated report warned that, in just four years, the idea that a society could have a common information experience would be “largely gone” and rebuilding it “will take longer than losing it did.”

Patino was then invited on stage to directly respond to Claude’s predictions. As a seasoned journalist, writer, media analyst and a close observer of recent developments in AI, the exec offered a sharp insight into how rapidly developing technology is contributing to the crumbling of our understanding of media. Below, you will find the keynote speech’s main points:

Pull behavior replaced by push era

Patino says that, for a long time, citizens went “directly to the media,” which he called a “pull behavior.” People online would actively seek information, accessing online newspapers and trusted sources in search of whatever was going on in the world. With the advance of social media and algorithm-based platforms, the exec said we have now entered a “push era.” “People wait for content to reach them, not the other way around. This is a major change.” 

Power and saturation

In that push landscape, what has evolved is a scenario in which there are two main industry dynamics: saturation and power. “The very notion of scale is changing,” said Patino. “Global players are gaining weight and [becoming] more powerful than ever. Just look at the recent acquisition of Warner Brothers by Paramount in the United States. Everybody is competing to become the global interface and control the relationship with saturation.” Thanks to AI, the expert said that our content production is now “nearly limitless.” “Content can be produced faster, cheaper and in greater quantities than ever before.” 

“These two dynamics could have similar consequences,” he went on. “First, the industrial standardization of content due to the power increase. Second, the technological standardization of content due to less diversity. And that leads us to the paradox of our industry: We’re producing more content than ever before, but diversity is shrinking at the end of the day.”

Fragmentation as our primary relationship to reality

Patino alerted audiences to how three crucial ideas in our understanding of modern culture are now threatened: “First, the idea that culture is the source of both individual and collective emancipation. Second, the idea that fact-based information shared with the widest audience contributes to the democratic [process]. And third, the idea that public broadcasting is a form of collective solidarity.” 

He said that the third transformation is “not only about our industry” but the “very world we’re living in, in which the legitimacy of the European social and cultural model fought for after World War II is being questioned.” To Patino, the worst case scenario is “a world in which AI determines the citizen’s place in society, deciding the information, the culture and the entertainment [they] have access to. In such a world, fragmentation becomes our primary relationship to reality.”

The relationship economy

That risk of fragmentation did not come from nowhere, added the exec. It’s the direct consequence of the “broader history of the digital revolution.” Patino outlined three ages since the revolution, with the Age of Access coming first with the advent of the internet, then the Age of Propagation, which started in 2007 and introduced notions such as “algorithm, viral, visibility, social media,” and “the rise of the attention economy.” 

With the introduction of AI, we have now entered the Age of Implication. “An era where everything becomes blurred between human and machine, authentic and synthetic, reality and fiction.” “The age of social media changed the place of truth,” continued the expert. “Media no longer speak directly to citizens; they speak to an agent who then speaks to citizens. The risk is that these agents become the primary mediator of our relationship to society, to information, to culture, to entertainment.”

This, Patino said, is what he calls the Relationship Economy. “There’s a growing risk of invisibility for diverse voices or narratives about the real world, either because those narratives will never be proposed to audiences or because they will be drowned in the age of content.”

Coalition: the future of Europe

The Relationship Economy creates “a major consequence for our professions,” said Patino. “There is a growing risk of invisibility for diverse voices and for narratives about the real world, either because those narratives will never be proposed to audiences or because they will be drowned in the flood of content. For us in Europe, this created a whole challenge.”

“The first challenge is discoverability: How can our content be found in the age of AI when AI is controlled by U.S.-based giants? The second challenge is production itself. Our very logic of production is increasingly tied to U.S.-based platforms. Europe cannot produce acts of comparable power in these fields.”

The question, Patino said, is simple: Is there another logic besides sheer power? “Faced with the power of these platforms, Europe must rely on the strengths of coalitions.” “This is, overall, a political choice. Europe remains the most effective geopolitical, social and cultural framework for rethinking identities, narratives and spaces.”

Speaking on that, Patino said he believes Arte can become “the missing name in the European broadcasting system.” The exec brought up how Arte federates a network of 14 public broadcasters, has programs available in seven languages, and maintains strong ties with the creative ecosystem across Europe. Giving his speech the day after the Oscars, Patino brought up Arte’s hand in two big winners: “Mr Nobody Against Putin” and “Sentimental Value.”

“Our ambition is not to build a mega structure, not even to create a European Netflix,” he added. “Our goal is much simpler: to give real substance to the European network. An alternative built on curiosity, discovery and openness.”