Media Industries and AI: Emerging Trends and Critical Conversations

Dick Wolf, one of television’s most successful producers, is the creator and executive producer of the Law & Order franchise, including the medium’s two longest-running dramas: NBC’s Law & Order: SVU (27 seasons) and Law & Order (25 seasons). A two-time Emmy winner for Law & Order and HBO’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, he has earned 13 Emmy nominations, won a Grammy for the Doors documentary When You’re Strange, and produced the Oscar-winning short Twin Towers.

Wolf Entertainment’s current slate includes NBC and Peacock’s Law & Order: Organized Crime (new for Fall 2025); NBC’s Chicago Fire (season 14), Chicago PD (season 13), and Chicago Med (season 11); and CBS’s FBI (season 8) and the upcoming CIA (new for 2026). Past successes include Prime Video’s On Call, FBI: Most Wanted, FBI: International, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, and New York Undercover. Non-scripted hits span Oxygen’s Cold Justice, Netflix’s Homicide: NY and LA, and A&E’s Nightwatch. The company also produces podcasts (Hunted, Dark Woods, Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer) and recently launched Wolf Games to engage true crime fans.

A New York Times bestselling author (The Intercept, The Execution, and The Ultimatum), Wolf has received the Television Academy Hall of Fame honor, the International Emmy’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the PGA’s Norman Lear Showmanship Award, DGA Honors, the Monte Carlo Television Festival Gold Nymph, Banff’s Award of Excellence, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Wolf’s philanthropy is equally distinguished. With Marcy Carsey, he founded the Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara, led by the Dick Wolf Endowed Director.  He also serves as a founding member of the Carsey-Wolf Center Advisory Board. His other endowments include the Wolf Theater at the Television Academy; MOXI, the Wolf Museum of Exploration + Innovation; the Wolf Humanities Center at Penn; USC’s Dick Wolf School of Drama; an eight-figure lead gift to Mount Desert Island Hospital; and a promised gift of more than 200 Renaissance and Baroque works to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Jennifer Howell has had a distinguished career in the entertainment industry, spanning multiple leadership roles in film, television, and technology. Currently, she serves as the Chief Creative Officer (CCO) at Deep Voodoo, where she oversees the creative direction for the innovative synthetic media and entertainment company co-founded by Matt Stone and Trey Parker. The company specializes in deepfake technology, blending machine learning with world class talent to provide storytelling tools for creatives.

Prior to Deep Voodoo, Howell was the Head of Feature Film Development at DreamWorks Animation, where she developed feature films such as: How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, The Boss Baby, and Trolls, and managed the development slate and budgets of over thirty films. Her earlier career includes key roles at Paramount Television, where she was Head of Comedy Development and helped launch several successful TV shows, including School of Rock, First Wives Club, and Grease: Live. At 20th Century Fox Television, she launched and led the animation department which oversaw the development, current programming, and production of all animated series including Bob’s Burgers, Family Guy, and The Simpsons.

Howell’s career began with Stone and Parker as the Supervising Producer on South Park for the first twelve years of the show. She was a key part of South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, Matt and Trey’s Academy Award nominated feature film, as well as Co-Producer on the hit movie Team America: World Police. Her career reflects a deep expertise in creative leadership, content development, and talent cultivation across various entertainment mediums.

Ian Krietzberg is a reporter for Puck covering the business of A.I. with the expert sourcing and candid insights of a practitioner—exploring the industries that large language models are transforming, the arms race to unleash superintelligence, the battle to separate fact from science fiction, and how it’s all playing out on Wall Street and in Washington. There are a lot of threads that tie A.I. together, spanning technical advancements, regulation, ethics, investments, and a long, fascinating list of different scientific disciplines—alongside confounding philosophical questions. He’s interested in addressing and exploring all of them. He is endlessly fascinated by the world of A.I., all the implications of our ever-more-encompassing digital world, and the neurological, psychological, and scientific nuances to the idea of synthetic “intelligence.” He has previously written for TheStreet and CNBC, among others, and most recently served as the Editor-in-Chief of the fast-growing A.I.-focused newsletter, The Deep View.

Lisa Parks is a Distinguished Professor of Film and Media Studies and Director of the Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab at UC Santa Barbara. A media historian and theorist, her research examines the cultural, political, and social dimensions of digital technologies and infrastructures, with emphases on global networks, satellite systems, and datafication processes. Her work has influenced critical approaches to media technologies and their societal impacts.

Parks is the author or co-editor of eight books, including Media Backends: Digital Infrastructure and Sociotechnical Relations (University of Illinois Press, 2023), Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (University of Illinois Press, 2015), Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries and Cultures (Rutgers University Press, 2012), and Planet TV: A Global Television Reader (NYU Press, 2002), as well as more than 100 scholarly articles and chapters. A 2018 MacArthur Fellow, she previously served as Professor of Media Studies and Science and Technology Studies at MIT (2016–2020).

Currently, Parks is co-leading new research collaborations on AI and the media industries supported by the Carsey-Wolf Center and the UC Humanities Research Institute. She served on the committee to re-envision UCSB’s Center for Information Technology and Society to foreground AI, and was recently invited to present at UNESCO’s 2025 “AI and the Future of Education” conference.

Rick Rosen is a co-founder of Endeavor, now WME Agency. Rosen oversaw the agency’s television division, in addition to heading the broadcast, sports broadcast, and golf divisions. He played a critical role in orchestrating Endeavor’s 2009 merger with William Morris Agency, the largest talent agency merger in history.

Mr. Rosen works with comedian Conan O’Brien and represents the creators of many top television series such as Dick Wolf (Law & Order, and the Chicago and FBI franchises), Howard Gordon (24, Homeland), Alex Gansa (Homeland), Linwood Boomer (Malcolm in the Middle), Jed Mercurio (Line of Duty), and Hagai Levi (Scenes from a Marriage, Our Boys, In Treatment).

Mr. Rosen serves on the board of directors of the Carsey-Wolf Center and the Los Angeles Leadership Academy; he is the former co-chair of the board of the Alliance for Children’s Rights. He is the chairman of the Hall of Fame Committee of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the Israel Policy Forum. He is the former president of the board of directors of the Hollywood Radio & Television Society and was inducted into the Broadcasting & Cable Hall of Fame in 2012.

Mr. Rosen received a bachelor’s degree in political science at UC Santa Barbara and a JD from the Golden Gate University School of Law. In 2019, he delivered the commencement speech for the Division of Humanities & Fine Arts in the College of Letters & Sciences. Mr. Rosen was elected trustee of the UC Santa Barbara Foundation in 2025.

Elliot Wolf is co-founder and CCO of Wolf Games, a generative entertainment company building the home of endless, cinematic games personalized to the player with major IP partners across the entertainment spectrum. Elliot also serves as EVP of Wolf Entertainment where he leads digital strategy for global television brands such as Law & Order and One Chicago. He also co-created and wrote Prime Video’s television series On Call (#1 on Prime in forty countries worldwide), created and wrote Audible’s chart topping audio fiction drama Eavesdropper, and has executive produced hit podcasts such as Hunted, Law & Order: Criminal Justice System, Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer, and Dark Woods.

Ross Melnick is Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara and Interim Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center. He was named an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Scholar and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow for his book, Hollywood’s Embassies: How Movie Theaters Projected American Power Around the World (Columbia University Press, 2022), which was awarded the 2024 Culbert Family Book Prize from the International Association for Media and History and the 2023 Richard Wall Memorial Award from the Theatre Library Association. He is the author of American Showman: Samuel ‘Roxy’ Rothafel and the Birth of the Entertainment Industry (CUP, 2012)—recipient of the 2013 “Book of the Year” award from the Theatre Historical Society of America—co-editor of Rediscovering U.S. Newsfilm: Cinema, Television, and the Archive (AFI/Routledge, 2018), and co-author of Cinema Treasures (MBI, 2004), inspired by the website (cinematreasures.org) he co-founded 25 years ago. His research has appeared in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Film History, The Moving Image, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and in numerous other journals and edited collections on film exhibition, media industries, silent cinema, broadcasting history, and film music.

Due to his research on film exhibition and media industry history, he has been interviewed for numerous documentaries and podcasts and by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, BBC, NPR, A&E, CBS News Sunday Morning, The History Channel, Associated Press, Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, Boxoffice, The Hollywood Reporter, CNN Business, Bloomberg CityLab, Business Insider, and more. Melnick has also served as a museum curator, in theatrical motion picture marketing and distribution, and in business development and marketing for several tech start-ups. He is currently serving as a member of the Board of Directors of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.