While AI is rapidly transforming media production, its effective integration requires new human roles and workflows, this DLD Future Hub session makes clear. In conversation with Eva Lihotzky (Serviceplan), Eli Varn (BurdaVerlag) and Jan Ippen (Ippen Digital Media) share insights from AI implementations at their companies.
Jan Ippen outlines a three-stage development from “human in the loop” to “human on the loop” and ultimately “human autonomy teaming”. The first stage is already reality at Ippen’s company, where journalists use AI for tasks like translation and support in newsletter production.
The second stage, “human on the loop”, means that “largely autonomous systems are just supervised by humans”, Ippen explains. “So the human just steps in if errors or risks occur.”
The final stage, human autonomy teaming, “is what we ultimately, in the near future, must achieve”, Ippen demands. This means “human and machine are equals. The machine and the human have roles and they form a team. So we can really distribute all the work, all the jobs towards the machine partner or the human partner.”
Eli Varn details BurdaVerlag’s groundbreaking partnership with Black Forest Labs, which led to the creation of Germany’s first fully AI-assisted comic book. “In this very first instance already, we have saved 50% of time in the entire comic creation process”, Varn says. “And now that we’ve established the process we’re expecting that it will save us about 70% of the entire time it takes” to produce the magazine.
How does this work in detail? Watch the video for a full explanation of agentic AI workflows in media creation and more.
