Who's In This Podcast
Helen Todd is co-founder and CEO of Sociality Squared and the human behind Creativity Squared.
John du Pre Gauntt is the founder and host of Culture & Code, a B2B podcast and newsletter focused on Generative Artificial Intelligence for Creative Professionals.
YouTube 
E30. The A.I. Rollercoaster Ride: ChatGPT 1-Year Anniversary, OpenAI Chaos & the Magic of GenAI with Culture & Code Host John du Pre Gauntt
On the thirtieth episode of Creativity Squared, we look back at the rollercoaster inaugural year of wide-scale generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and imagine what next year might bring us with audio sci-fi director, podcaster, and technology analyst John du Pre Gauntt.
John is the founder and host of Culture & Code, a B2B podcast and newsletter focused on generative artificial intelligence for creative professionals. He is also the creator of Burner Face, an award-winning sci-fi audio narrative in the subgenre of design fiction.
John dove head-first into the A.I. conversation in 2016 by launching the podcast, Augmented Cities, a non-fiction show exploring emerging technology such as A.I. and self-driving cars through the lens of urban living. Augmented Cities has been featured at SXSW, The Infinity Festival, and LA CoMotion.
This isn’t John’s first ride over a wave of transformative technology. Over the past two decades, his analysis of emerging tech such as cloud computing and social media has earned him bylines with the Economist Intelligence Unit, GigaOm, and eMarketer.
Our conversation in this episode is a time capsule marking where we are on the one-year anniversary of ChatGPT. John expands on his takeaways from year one of GenAI models fully out in the wild, what developers are getting wrong, how content and creators will need to adapt to the new paradigm, and creatives’ delicate position along the path to widespread A.I. adoption.
Storytelling
John says he got into podcasting because of where he comes from and where he thinks the world is going.
“I come from East Tennessee, we grew up around people that we call characters, people who could spin a good yarn. And I realized, oral storytelling might actually be having a renaissance.”
John du Pre Gauntt
He expects within the near future that audio content will be more compatible with a “heads-up, hands-free” lifestyle, which seems to be the direction that human-computer interaction is headed. John attributes that to us being natural storytellers and the history of culture evolving through oral narratives.
Through his work on Augmented Cities, John reached the conclusion that, whether the topic is transportation or healthcare, the throughline is storytelling. Just as importantly, John realized that A.I. will dramatically change how we tell stories and interact with them. The inspiration to launch Culture and Code grew out of his desire to communicate those two conclusions to audiences in a way that’s tangible, but more importantly, actionable.
Not only did John start a podcast to help creative professionals navigate the uncharted waters of working with A.I., he also produced, directed, and narrated a 5-episode sci-fi audio narrative series called Burner Face to show how it might be done. The series is set in what remains of Seattle circa 2121, where humans live with the severe consequences of long term climate change. Existing tech such as facial recognition (Burner Face is a play on “burner phone”), A.I., and synthetically augmented humans are part of the story, but aren’t the focus. John says that he wrote the story deliberately to center human challenges against the backdrop of the natural and synthetic realities they create.
Burner Face is an audio experience featuring 25 voice actors and eight A.I.-generated voices. John produced the story in 2021, without the benefit of life-like voice clones. But the limits of the technology factored into the substance of the storyline. John edited the script so that the characters voiced by A.I. were explicitly written as synthetic entities.
“All the synthetic text-to-voice sounded kind of like the Cylons from old Battlestar Galactica. And we decided to turn that into a virtue and say, well, then we have to dramatically depict the character as synthetic. Ah, okay, look at how we’re making editorial decisions.”
John du Pre Gauntt
And as A.I. becomes a more consistent contributor, John says that the world should be watching the creator economy for early signs of how A.I. may eventually impact other industries.
Canaries in the Coal Mine
Earlier this month, OpenAI held its first DevDay conference to unveil new products including customizable GPTs. When applications for attendance went live, John told the organizers that they needed him there.
“I just simply wrote, ‘I am a podcaster trying to humanize A.I. through the power of storytelling and you NEED people like me at this meeting.”
John du Pre Gauntt
John got the opportunity to attend, and shared his takeaways on Creativity Squared. Among them, he was surprised at the lack of content creators in attendance — it was him alongside Creativity Squared guest Chad Nelson, and disappointed that presenters spent more time on the technical specifications of their products instead of imaginative new use cases.
Among throngs of professional journalists, John said he and only a handful of others in attendance were there because they use A.I. to make content. Yet, he says creators are the ones who ultimately transform new technology into part of everyday life. On the other hand, creative professionals are also among the first to go when production technology becomes more efficient.
“We’re the canaries in the coal mine for what’s going to happen to the rest of the service economy as A.I. ripples across.”
John du Pre Gauntt
Listening to presentations at the conference, John tells us he was also struck by the amount of time spent on highlighting the scale and efficiency of their model. He says those might not be the right questions to ask. He says that’s like a person with a shovel worrying about how they’ll retrain to be able to compete with the steam shovel; there is no competition. So instead of thinking about how A.I. changes the rules of the game, we need to spend more time thinking about how the game itself has changed.
Stumbling Backwards into the Future
John shared his thoughts and reactions with Creativity Squared about how A.I. will impact our cultural and civil institutions.
Regardless of the deal’s specifics, John says that Hollywood actors’ and writers’ battles against studios to limit the use of A.I. in film production was a fight that needed to take place in the open. He credited the U.S. Copyright Office’s decision earlier this year for helping break the strike by making it clear to studios that they would get no intellectual property rights (which means no profits) from works produced entirely by machine. Still, John says that those working in Hollywood should be prepared to adapt to the inevitable changes coming.
“It’s not time to declare victory and just go back to work. Hollywood’s changed. There’s no going back. It’s a new normal. Well, not even normal. It’s just new.”
John du Pre Gauntt
Like many, John also expresses concern about how A.I. and social media will impact civic life. He predicts that voters next year will experience campaign targeting at a level of granularity never seen before. Instead of customizing messaging by age group, gender, or geographic region, A.I. will enable campaign marketers to tailor a hyper-individualized message for everyone on their list.
“Now it’s not going to be so much like Big Brother, as it’s going to be like Boss Tweed. You can create a true political machine around A.I. Why? Because you’re able to tell that story in a way that resonates at the individual level.”
John du Pre Gauntt
However, John points out that the same capability could be a force for good in education by tailoring instruction to address each student’s unique needs.
John thinks A.I. will be a disruptive force in the music industry, benefitting musicians by expanding access for those who have an idea but lack the technical skill to bring it to life. Despite the walls of complexity and exclusivity that the recording industry has built around itself, John reminds us that it’s only as old as the 20th Century. Since the dawn of humanity, humans have been making music.
Returning to the art of storytelling, John says that he’ll be excited to see A.I.-generated images and videos get better than the “fashion magazine cover” pictures and short animations we’ve seen from A.I. models so far. But more so, he’s excited to see if A.I. can move the needle on how humans share stories at a fundamental level.
“What I’m looking for, especially next year, are people who can use artificial intelligence to actually improve a narrative arc, because storytelling is much of the way that we program our culture.”
John du Pre Gauntt
John sees Burner Face as an early entrant in the canon of throwing A.I.-enhanced art at the wall and seeing what sticks, like radio broadcasters looking into a motion picture camera for the first time. He teased a possible continuation of that theme at South by Southwest 2024, sharing that he’s working on a unique visual layer that makes sense accompanying a podcast.
Channeling our Inner Cave Painter
While A.I. caught the spotlight this year, augmented reality made big leaps as well this year with the Meta Quest 3 and the announcement of Apple’s Vision Pro.
John says that he thinks that A.I. in combination with the internet of things will bring us back in touch with our distant ancestors who, some experts believe, left behind many more expressive symbols of culture than survived the ages. The way that modern computing is playing out, there is no monolithic A.I. superbrain. Rather, we have distributed computer chips throughout our entire world so we now live in a “planet-sized” computer. In that world, where A.I. allows us to practically cast spells to conjure content, John says humans will reconnect with the urge to express an idea artistically at any given moment.
“With these tools, we have a much higher fidelity way of taking what’s in our head and giving it some kind of tangible form at a much closer level. We can communicate so much more richly now, and I can’t help but think that’s an improvement.”
John du Pre Gauntt
And as we strap in for another year on the A.I. rollercoaster, John’s parting advice is to keep an eye on what’s happening in the creative space for signs of how A.I. might affect you.
Links Mentioned in this Podcast
- John Du Pre Gauntt on Medium
- Augmented Cities Podcast
- Burner Face
- Culture & Code Podcast
- Creativity Squared Episode with Chad Nelson
Continue the Conversation
Thank you, John, for being our guest on Creativity Squared.
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TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] John du Pre Gauntt: I believe that creators and artists, we all have that, you know, you ask a bunch of four year olds who can draw a doggie, you’re going to see a bunch of hands raised. Ask the same question 10 years later, a lot fewer. Go to a corporate audience and say, who can draw a doggie? It’s like, well, no, I’m not an artist.
Well, now with these tools, we have a much higher fidelity way of taking what’s in our head. And giving it some kind of tangible form at a much closer level, doesn’t mean it’s perfect. Doesn’t mean we’re an artist, but we can communicate so much more richly now what’s in our head and what we want. And I can’t help but think that’s an improvement.
[00:00:40] Helen Todd: This is the 30th Creativity Squared episode and is being released on the one year anniversary of OpenAI’s announcement of Chat GPT. Today’s guest is John Du Pre Gauntt, the founder of Culture and Code, a B2B podcast and newsletter focused on generative artificial intelligence for creative professionals.
John and I met because we both launched podcasts and newsletters this year, exploring the intersection of AI and creativity and what a roller coaster ride it’s been. A theme that comes up often in our conversation looking back at the incredible explosion of ChatGPT and generative AI this past year. We recorded this conversation on the afternoon of Friday, November 17th, and needless to say, we had no idea how much we needed to buckle up for the news that shook the tech world.
Unlike anything we’ve seen since Apple’s board fired Steve Jobs, that broke just a few hours after we wrapped the interview. If for some reason you missed what happened. In short, the board removed OpenAI co founder and the face of AI, Sam Altman. Then shortly after that, Greg Brockman, also an OpenAI co founder, quit.
The board never gave a specific reason for why they removed Sam, except for possible disagreements over creating AI that’s safe for the world. The news spiraled into mayhem. With over 700 of OpenAI’s 770 employees threatening to leave if the board didn’t quit and reinstate Sam, who at the time looked like he was going to become an employee of OpenAI’s biggest investor, Microsoft.
By the evening of Tuesday, November 21st, five days after his firing, Sam was back at OpenAI along with Greg to continue OpenAI’s mission to achieve artificial general intelligence, saving OpenAI from potential collapse, which was a real possibility. The board was overhauled, and there are more wild twists and turns to the story that you can read about in the creativity squared newsletter.
John and I both believe in the power of story. And one of my takeaways from the saga is that we cannot forget that behind these companies are not tech gods, but humans. And the stories that we tell are incredibly important. Time will reveal the full lessons this Game of Thrones level drama has for us, but one that I’m walking away with is a cautionary tale that we must not forget our humanity in the midst of all of this technology.
What stories will we tell about this moment in time and what future will we co- create together? So for today’s show, you’ll hear the original conversation I had with John. For more context on John, his analysis of the impact of emerging technology on media and marketing has been featured in The Economist, Gigaohm, eMarketer, while his speaking credits include South by Southwest, Infinity Festival Hollywood, Podcast Movement and the Monaco Media Forum.
His consulting clients include financial services, media, and technology. John holds degrees in computer information systems and English literature. In 2019, he earned an executive certificate in technology and leadership from MIT Sloan school in partnership with the MIT computer science and AI laboratory.
Our conversation in this episode is a time capsule marking where we are on the one year anniversary of ChatGPT. Enjoy.
Welcome to Creativity Squared. Discover how creatives are collaborating with artificial intelligence in your inbox, on YouTube, and on your preferred podcast platform. Hi, I’m Helen Todd, your host, and I’m so excited to have you join the weekly conversations I’m having with amazing pioneers in this space.
The intention of these Conversations is to ignite our collective imagination at the intersection of AI and creativity to envision a world where artists thrive.
John, it is so good to have you on Creativity Squared. Welcome to the show.
[00:05:01] John du Pre Gauntt: Thank you so much for having me.
[00:05:02] Helen Todd: Oh, I used to say that I was the only podcast at the intersection of creativity and AI until I came across you. So it’s so good to have another fellow newsletter person and podcaster in this specific niche and so excited to discuss all things AI and creativity with you this episode.
[00:05:17] John du Pre Gauntt: In Winnie the Pooh, Tigger was my favorite character, you know, I’m the only one. I had the same the same idea. And then I discovered your newsletter and went, oh wow, okay, let’s take a look. And I like the way that number one, I was on the west coast, you were in Cincinnati… And so I’m just like, okay, we’re gonna get various perspectives on the creativity.
And at the same time, it’s. I was thinking, my God, I can’t be the only one because this space just has make so much sense. And fortunately, we are well met.
[00:05:51] Helen Todd: Yeah, and your culture and code has a little bit of a different angle than creativity squared. But before we go into that, why don’t for those who are meeting you for the first time, why don’t you share who you are, what you do in your origin story that got you to where you’re at today?
[00:06:09] John du Pre Gauntt: Okay, well, I am John du Pre Gauntt. I’m based out of Seattle, Washington, and I am the founder and host of Culture and Code. Now that’s a new B to B podcast and newsletter that’s looking at the intersection of creativity and artificial intelligence with audiences that are similar to yours. We’re looking at media and entertainment, marketing, PR.
Eventually get into H. R. Training corporate communications because one of the things that we found is that a lot of The jobs in the service economy are about telling a story, uh, and that story can be from kind of the branding. You know, this is why we’re so it’s such an amazing organization all the way down to how do you operate this particular product or a piece of technology or something like that?
It’s a narrative that helps people accomplish a goal. And in looking at that, I was like, well, okay. I’ve been covering artificial intelligence since 2016 on another podcast called the augmented city. And we chose that name. You’ve heard the term suitcase word. We wanted like a shipping container word and we felt that AI and cities was a good way to start talking about transportation, talk about education, talk about health care. But we were finding in covering those topics that the common thread was some type of storytelling. You know, anyone who says that storytelling is just once upon a time, it doesn’t really matter.
Really needs to look at the recent history of you know, how we handle the pandemic among other things, how it deals with our politics with everything because humans are natural storytellers. And so that was sort of the editorial impetus for getting into Culture and Code because we’re saying that AI is really going to change things in a dramatic way.
Now, the challenge has been, okay, if that’s the idea, how do you make the idea a tangible and equally, if not more important actionable. And so that’s where we are focused primarily on how to marry practical skills with critical thinking, because I firmly believe we can get into it. A bit later that if we don’t really evolve our narrative skills along with our technical skills, we’re basically just going to use a I to raise the production value of mediocrity.
And I quite frankly, don’t want to live in a world that way.
As far as origin story, I’m an accidental steam graduate. I have degrees in computer science and in English literature. And then also have been a technology analyst for several decades. I’ve covered internet when it first came out, it covered mobile internet, it covers social media as an analyst, you know, the observer trying to make sense of things.
And more importantly for organizations like eMarketer and the economist intelligence unit, try to make that sense quantitative. So you want to talk about storytelling. You try…, you know, Excel is a great storytelling tool and whether those stories are true or not we can find out later. And then I got into podcasting in 2016 because I’ve always enjoyed oral storytelling.
I come from East Tennessee, which is, and so do you. That was one of the things where I was like, oh, I got to talk to her. And we grew up around people that we call “characters”. You know, people who could spin a good yarn and I realized, you know, oral storytelling might actually be having a renaissance in a world that’s more heads up and hands free and voice-activated. So that was one of the things that drew me into podcasting. So, that’s sort of like the quick version of sort of how I got from there to here.
[00:10:01] Helen Todd: Amazing. And one of the things too, that I’d love to have you share more about is burner face.
Cause that’s a podcast series that you did that got some accolades as well. So can you share with our listeners and viewers what Burner Face is?
[00:10:14] John du Pre Gauntt: Okay. Well, in our, in our work, we do both nonfiction and fiction, which any management consultant will tell you is crazy. You have to concentrate on one thing, and I’m just like, why?
But during a pandemic I had been tinkering with this idea of a genre called design fiction. And what design fiction is the fictionalization that’s based on real world technology. A lot of organizations actually do it. They’ll draw scenarios of, you know, what the world’s gonna be like in 2035 because they’re trying to do product design or something like that.
And it’s not so much about how is the product going to evolve, but it’s more of what’s the world going to be like for this product to evolve in. And so that was the initial breadcrumb trail. And so, we created a five-episode scripted fiction podcast about Seattle in a hundred years and being proper sci fi —Yes, there are flying cars and talking cats, but the bigger point was how can we write a riveting fiction story to where people are exposed to blockchain drones, natural language processing, neural implants, you know, all this exotic stuff?
But they’re exposed to it in a way that’s focusing on human factors and a lot of decisions that people are going to be making as opposed to making some fetish out of the gadget and so Burner Face takes place in a world of ubiquitous facial recognition.
And it’s a play off the idea of a burner phone. You can more or less. If you want to kind of play off the books, you can rent a temporary facial ID with all of, as you can imagine, the restrictions and penalties and interests of being late involved. And so, because of a windfall to where, you know, I’ve got a bit of age on me, I won’t give it out exactly, but for the first time in my life, I had a bit of literally free money fall in my pocket.
And being a superstitious type. I’m like, well, I am going to burn every last single dime on this and use it not only to write a story, but to also experiment with the storytelling. So, one of the things that differentiates burner face is that we use 25 human voice actors, but we also used eight synthetic voices.
This was in 2021, so this is when the, all the synthetic voices, text to text, a voice sounded kind of like the Cylons from old Battlestar Galactica, and we decided to turn that into a virtue. And say, well, if we’re going to use a synthetic voice, then we have to dramatically depict the character as synthetic.
And that was something to where I’m like… ah, okay, look at how we’re making editorial decisions. That’s sort of the story behind the story. You know, sure. We’re like I said, flying cars and talking cats. That’s the fun part in developing the characters…and it’s always that kind of energy that keeps people going.
And I love working with voice actors. But I also realized this is potentially a template, a concept car, if you will, for how we’re going to be telling in depth. Stories to where AI is part of the process. It’s not directing the process. It’s not an ignorant tool. It’s I realize it’s a contributor just doesn’t happen to be human, but you have to position every single contributor from a position of strength.
If you’re going to get something good and so, yeah, it did when it won two signal awards, one for audio fiction and recently for best trailer for a limited series and along with various film festivals best podcast in Amsterdam, Sweden, Hong Kong. Official selection on air fest and many many other film festival.
Now I’m getting peppered by film festivals, left, right, and center. Oh yeah. We heard about the podcast and that’s another aspect that we found was that the line between what we’re calling a podcast and what people are really working on and our. Being resonating with eventually, I think we’re just going to declare victory and move on and call it, you know, oral storytelling.
And who knows, maybe podcast joins information superhighway is one of those terms that was extremely useful in its time, but has been outgrown. So, yeah, you can go to www. burnerfaceoneword. com and that’s the main website. We’re also on all the usual suspects, you know, Spotify, iTunes, etc. And have at it.
I’d love to hear some feedback.
[00:14:58] Helen Todd: Yeah. Well, thank you for sharing that. I watched a little bit ahead of this interview and it’s. It’s very cool. And I love not only are you giving creators practical tools, but putting them to use and showcasing them as well through that limited series.
[00:15:12] John du Pre Gauntt: One last thing about especially the website was that burner faces based on real world climate science and technology futurism.
And we were in that, how do we give it some teeth? And so late in the process of, the story for the website, we partnered with a professional cartographer. One thing Seattle has is a lot of people who make maps because we have a large video game industry and you can’t have, you know, could you imagine game of thrones if you didn’t have a map of Westeros or something?
So people who make fantasy maps are pretty thick on the ground here. And we found this guy and said, well, okay, let’s imagine a world in a hundred years where the sea levels rise. 20 meters, you know, close to 60-70 feet which unfortunately is becoming more and more plausible. You know, 2021, it was crazy.
Now it’s only mildly crazy. And so we actually overlaid the city of Seattle. With this actual geographic data, and I can if you go on the website and you look at the map, you can zoom in and see which neighborhoods are underwater, literally underwater. And you’re also able to access different types of multimedia, which, yeah, they range from Easter eggs about the story to you find out.
Hey. Kelp is important it sequesters eight times the amount of carbon that a tree does. Plus you can make pharmaceuticals, you can make materials, you can put it on your Japanese food. And this is a way of giving people a learning back end. So we’re saying, you know, how can we write a kick ass story that can also have an educational back end?
So if you go on the website, check out the map, it’s in the dropdown menu.
[00:16:53] Helen Todd: Amazing. And I’ll be sure to put the link in the dedicated blog post that goes with this interview for all of our listeners and viewers. Well, and one reason are how John and I connected not only through the podcast we were on LinkedIn, but I saw a post that John did that he got invited.
Or accepted to go to open AI’s dev day and I was slightly jealous And had a little FOMO and lived vicariously through john at dev day But this episode is episode 30 for creativity squared and it’s coming out on the one year anniversary of ChatGPT’s announcement so it’s an exciting, episode and so excited to have john on the show but you know speaking of Burner Face being so futuristic when we were talking about the themes for this episode, we’re like, why don’t we do a, where are we in this moment in time?
Cause it has been a wild year for us, you know, both personally and professionally launching our podcast, but you know, with the explosion of Jen AI capturing everyone’s imagination. So I guess we could start. With Dev day, since you were so privileged to get to go there and what were some of like the biggest takeaways for you?
And then we can kind of dive into some of the big milestones that we’ve all kind of experienced and seen this year.
[00:18:15] John du Pre Gauntt: Well, first off for Dev Day, I was not subtle to open AI. I remember I was working, it was been September 6th, September 7th, when they made the announcement working late. I see this update that says, you know, Hey, OpenAI is going to have its first Dev Day.
If you’re interested, you have to go through an application process or something. And I knew instinctually, I’m like, man, that’s going to be super oversubscribed with, you know, the world class developers and such. So, you know, how me, you know, little content creator and stuff. And so, after filling out all the information, they had sort of the open text box of you know, why do you want to come or something to that effect?
And. I started out with, you know, one of those vast you know, how you would answer like an SAT question, but then I was like, I don’t know why this is going to work. And so I just simply wrote, I am a podcaster trying to humanize AI through, through the power of storytelling. And you need.
In capital letters, you need people like me at this meeting and then I didn’t think anything of it and then a couple of weeks later, I got the invitation. I was like, Oh not that my mouth got me in trouble, but it’s like, okay, now I have to now I have to actually. live up to it. And so I went down there and that was on November 6th on that month.
So I got there the day before. I went down there and I was struck that aside from another person, Chad Nelson, who I believe has been on your podcast who made a great film called Critterz with a Z, highly recommended. I was one of the very very few content creators who was not part of industry press, you know, of course, you know, the press was three, four rows deep, but as far as like people saying, yeah, I use AI to make content.
We were very thin on the ground. So that was sort of the strange side, but I also found a lot of developers were very eager to speak to me because among the things that. That you would see, and I’ve been to multiple, you know, technology developer days and demonstrations, we still seem to launch technology around the same kind of tasks.
You know, help me organize my calendar, help me organize my to do list. Who should I meet? Who should I know? And I’m not belittling those, but I’m saying those are sort of like the poster child applications that they want to demonstrate new technology. And I was thinking with generative AI, you need to go into media and especially into content creation because we’re the canaries in the coal mine, you know, as far as like what’s going to happen to the rest of the service economy as AI ripples across now, as far as the the overall takeaways, there’s a lot of really good summaries and YouTube.
I mean, the videos are up on YouTube right now, but the overall vibe that I got, especially in just walking around and opening my ears, which is a great habit that podcasters have were incessant spy, you know, we can sit in an airport and our ears kind of grow, shrink, grow, shrink, grow, shrink, depending on who’s having a good conversation.
But many of the developers are okay, I get it. I can understand what it can do, but how do I truly differentiate myself on scale and efficiency? Because scale and efficiency are the two kind of holy grails that all tech apps or. You know, technologies will pursue and the point about generative AI is that might not be the right question to be asking because the scale of which you can do things with AI and the efficiency, you can do things that AI it’s sort of like people with shovel saying, how are we going to retrain so that we can beat this steam shovel that just came around?
It’s a useless competition. You got to rethink the rules. From the rules point of view, as opposed to how does this change the rules? No, they’re not change the rules. They’re new rules. And that was the core vibe that I got away from that I took away from this particular event.
[00:22:33] Helen Todd: Thank you for sharing and for letting all of us live vicariously through you that day.
Hopefully I’ll get to join you next year at the, at their dev day. Well, and one thing too, that we’re talking about just kind of like milestones you know, at that conference, they announced the custom GPTs where everyone can kind of make their own agent future or like the future will be AI agents where we can create our own, you know, ChatGPT’s customized.
But looking back, it’s this year has been so fast and furious that You know, when it, when chat tbt originally launched, it’s hard to kind of remember that chat tbt became the fastest growing app ever, even though the, they don’t use the word app with a hundred million users within a month and just like exploded on the AI scene.
So what in your mind, what are some of like the big milestones in addition to that’s happened this year? Cause you and I have both been on this. AI rollercoaster through our podcasts with everyone else too.
[00:23:36] John du Pre Gauntt: Well, actually, if you track what’s been the November 30th, 2022, you know, you can argue that’s the day the starting gun went sometime.
I can’t remember the exact date in 1996 when the Netscape browser came out, but I would put it, you know, in somewhat similar terms. I mean, that was the day that artificial powerful artificial intelligence became accessible to the masses and just like with early internet, the initial bias was text.
So chatGPT, everyone saw about how it could write. And then what happens after text, you get image and that’s Dali and that’s mid journey. And that’s when people go, Oh, wow. You know, this is amazing. And then video comes after that and then games. And so as far as like the content experiences that are vital.
AI has been tracking internet almost in a scary way of text to image, to video, to cloning voices and, you know, Lord knows what, how was it, what’s going to be coming next, but, when I started playing with ChatGPT, which would have been in January of this year, I found that it’s like, wow this really changes how I approach my writing, not simply for how it writes, but equally, if not more important, how it reads.
When I could take some of my old writing and then say, you know, Hey, take a look at this and sort of tell me what you think, summarize it. And it was pretty good. I was like, Oh, wow, this just changed how I did writing because I realized that from a time savings point of view, this is what’s really huge.
[00:25:23] Helen Todd: I feel very privileged or I have a friend at open AI who gave me a demo in October of last year before it was publicly announced.
And it really captured my imagination. And we did yeah this limited TV series that I have floating off in my head, mostly an Excel document right now, and we did the first scene, and I was just blown away by how fast it was and how good it was, and that really captured my imagination of how, you know, I could collaborate with this tool, and I was even thinking, I was like, Oh, maybe I could you know, give myself two years Write this with chat GPT and then the tech will be good enough to make it all with AI.
But instead I launched a podcast and the tech is like so good right now that, you know, this could be feasible within the next 12 months with the way that AI and video generation is going, coming, but yeah, for other milestones for this year. I mean, it’s like all of the big companies have gotten into the space.
We’ve also seen new companies emerge like anthropic in the gin AI scene. I don’t know when stability AI was first came onto the scene, but they’ve done some really interesting things as well in terms of the open source approach. But yeah, I guess just kind of looking down a memory road this year.
What are there any other like big standout moments for you in 2023 on the Gen/AI rollercoaster?
[00:26:56] John du Pre Gauntt: Well, one thing that did capture my attention was how fast so many large organizations not just simply made announcements and put out press releases and presentations and so that’s sort of expected to stay up with the news cycle, but then actually started worrying Putting some money behind it that caught my attention because it’s suggested to me that large organizations, I’m just, I’m not just talking about big business.
I mean, while I was at open AI, I met people from the department of defense. And they were talking about that now, you know, through both the Biden administration’s AI policy document, I mean, regardless of leave the politics outside, regardless of how you land on on. The government and technology, the fact remains by far, they’re the largest purchaser of technology.
And so decisions that are made at the federal level have a ripple effect throughout the entire industry. But I was amazed at how quickly these elephants pivoted to say. We’re going into GenAI. Yeah, I know we were into blockchain or something like that last year, and it’s still important, but we know that this is more important, and you hardly ever hear large organizations do that.
They’re always yeah, we’ve been doing this for a long time, and we decided to sort of give it a little more. No. There are a lot of large organizations saying, Wow, this is huge. And we’re just as surprised as most individuals are and we’re just gonna get behind it 90 degrees because if we don’t, we’re gonna get steamrolled.
And I was like, oh, hey, that’s some refreshing honesty, but also, you know, it does prove that if it’s big enough, you know, elephants can dance. So that was one of the things I pulled away from 2023. Now in 2024. And this is part of our discussion earlier for 2024 and 2025, especially that’s when those intentions will get their real test and we will know, you know, who’s real, because to make a lot of these initiatives work, there’s going to have to be some hard trade offs.
And so that’s something I’m gonna be watching, especially second quarter of next year, because by that time, there’ll be no more news value to say, Hey, we’re making a big initiative around open a around generative a I people that be like people joining the Internet bandwagon. I mean, no company says, Hey, we launched a website.
That’s not news anymore. So using AI and at one level is gonna be banal. And because it’s been all Oh, It’s actually extraordinary because of the time compression.
[00:29:45] Helen Todd: Yeah, that’s so true. Oh, and I think another thing that’s interesting from when we first connected and hopped on zoom to now, I mean, everything’s just moving so fast, you know, open AI is dev day, but also we’ve seen an executive order come from the white house, which we’ve never really seen Adequate regulation around social media.
And this is coming from a year where, as you said, every company’s getting on the gen ai bandwagon while you know, Tristan Harris was leading the the movement to try to call for a six month pause, which no one did. on, steamroll on, you know, but it’s been an interesting year of yeah.
[00:30:27] John du Pre Gauntt: Now that we’ve reached cruising altitude of..like, can we pause the aircraft for a bet that takeoff was a little nauseating, you know, I don’t, I never bought the six month pause.
[00:30:38] Helen Todd: Yeah. Oh, well, as much as I, I understand actually what’s funny is I watched their presentation, the the AI dilemma the night before I officially launched my podcast and it was such a sobering presentation to watch for a show that, you know, I embrace AI, the good, the bad.
And everything in between but I was like, what am I doing? What am I getting into?
So it’s just buckle up. We’re going to go.
[00:31:09] John du Pre Gauntt: You’ve seen those YouTube videos of the people who are strapping into the rollercoaster. And then there’s that one person say, I want to get out. No. You know, now that the seatbelts gone click. They are like, Oh, my God, what’s going to happen?
[00:31:21] Helen Todd: I feel a roller coaster is the best way. And also, you know, we’ve seen I think another big thing that’s happened this year, and I believe you had a guest on your show that’s discussed this too, is in terms of AI and the entertainment industry, we’ve seen the writers and actors strike and. You know, I was a piece of the negotiations that happened, but there was a lot more to it.
But I was curious, what were some of your takeaways from some of your conversations around AI related to the inner entertainment industry too?
[00:31:52] John du Pre Gauntt: Well, number one, I was really happy to see it debated out on the street, you know, so kudos to the unions. You know, regardless of how you land on that issue, kudos that they basically said, look this is real and we’re not going to be signing away on happy talk.
Now, what you actually think of the final agreement, we’re going to see how that plays out. But, this was a debate that needs to happen, and it needs to happen in bright sunlight, not in behind closed doors. So that was point 1. 2. And it was where I learned I actually started thinking.
The same as Stuart Lyons. He is the line producer of Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul. He said, you know, a lot of people think that Hollywood is this kind of self contained little egotistical ecosystem. There is some truth. But, more importantly, new technology washes over media and content creation first.
You know, as far as like being able to transform the way people work, and there are a lot of people in the creative industry. And that’s not just simply Hollywood. I came from publishing. I was a journalist for for some years. We’ve got direct experience of management getting a shiny new toy and saying, well, we don’t need people anymore.
You know, and so happy talk was not going to persuade a lot of the writers and the actors who had the just direct experience now going forward. I think the key thing and the one ally. That the writers and the actors can really thank is the US Copyright Office, who basically said, if it’s all algorithmic, you can’t copyright because from that point, that means Hollywood, you have no IP unless you involve a person. And so the negotiations were more about how do we get it The dramatic talent working with AI in a way that’s not only helping us make a better product, but also making a product by a work product, movie, song whatever kind of series game where we can get some formal intellectual property.
Recognition by the copyright office. So, by basically saying you only a human can copyright creative work. That was a huge reason of why the studios eventually started negotiating in better faith, because if they could make defendable IP purely algorithmically, I’m not saying all of them would do it, but definitely some of them.
Would do that. And and then you start dividing dividing up the industry. So I think that on balance with the actors and the writers it’s not time to declare victory and just go back to work. Hollywood’s changed. There’s no there’s no going back. It’s a new normal. Well, not even normal.
It’s just new. We’re going to, again, 2024 and 2025, we’re going to find out a lot more. So if you were to put the Hollywood strikes. The way that government and business pivoted the way that the new cycle was driven. 2023 is going to be studied decades from now for people’s PhD thesis. And who knows those people might not all be human.
[00:35:21] Helen Todd: I think one other moment that stands out from this year is also the Kevin Roos Sydney story that hit some of the. The cycles because one of the things that Tristan Harrison, Aza Raskin said in their presentation is if social media was a race to the bottom of our emotions like anger and fear then the chatbots.. It’s about the race to intimacy because they can feel human. They can feel empathetic, even though they’re not. And then what was it when Microsoft launched their being chat by early to some journalists, Kevin Roos at the New York Times. He’s also one of the co hosts of hard fork, which is another podcast.
I love started interacting with it. It kind of went rogue and was like, you don’t love your wife you because you love me. And it got into this like very intimate conversation. And because of that they, Put on a lot more guardrails before launching publicly, but I feel like in the canon of 2023, that was a really pivotal moment of without the proper guardrails, what, how quickly these things can turn and we don’t know if Sydney did that.
Because the machine wanted to because it’s just algorithmic and trying to figure out what would make an interesting story because Kevin Roose is a journalist. Is it, you know, they’re trying to predict what to say to engage the person. So was it just a way to engage the viewer to stay longer on the chat?
But like, we don’t actually know because of the black box of why the chat bot went that way. In my mind, that was a pivotal moment for AI and the chat bots too.
[00:37:06] John du Pre Gauntt: Well, take a step back and first look at what is feeding these machines. The AI has learned what the internet has to teach, which can be a pretty scary thought sometimes, but early internet was about how did we digitize print culture? How do we bring newspapers and magazines online? How do we digitize books? Now in all of those situations, the source data of a book, magazine, etc. was also edited. It was put into a particular point of view.
It was fact checked. It was copy edited. And so you have that type of input then comes social media, which is much more free form, a lot closer to people’s id, as you said, you know, social, we did we, at the augmented city, we did one of our first shows, approximately four day, three, four days after Donald Trump was elected in 2016 to basically said, you know, if this regard, again, regardless of the politics, what Trump did.
Was he helped social media take over from mass media for choosing an American president? Simple as that. CBS News, NBC News, ABC News contributed, but they did not determine how people found out. About Donald Trump. Twitter did. Okay. And then Twitter what he would put on Twitter was then picked up by news articles and then put into the bloodstream of the body politic for good or ill.
Again, I’m just talking about what happened factually on the ground. So he asked the question, well, if social media did this in 2016, what’s going to happen and we’re going to find out next year, what’s going to happen when political parties are able to harness The power of AI to not only do micro targeting, Oh, you need to reach this persuadable voter, but also micro delivery of exact message they want to hear.
And they might not even know that’s the message they want to hear. And it’s put into that type of language. What kind of politics are we going to have? And our response was, no, it’s not going to be so much like big brother as it’s going to be like. Lost tweed, you know, you can create a true political machine around artificial intelligence.
Why? Because it helps you not only tell a better story, but you’re able to tell that story in a way that resonates at the individual level. Because historically, this is what internet did. Internet gave you the ability to take one message and distribute to millions. What AI does is let you Look at millions of audience and distribute micro messages that sort of add up to the big idea.
Now that’s in politics, but it’s also in how we’re going to be talking about brands that used to be a B testing. Well, you know, a B testing is a good. It’s a good, you know, still a very solid methodology, but I would expand it to like A to Z to the 15th power testing that you can do with AI because what actually persuades people to make a major purchase is grouped in the general area, but the final straw that either breaks the camel’s back or tips them over to actually pull the trigger and say, yes, this is what I’m going to buy, typically boils down to the individual. They’ll find, you know, they’ll finally make that last rationalization, even though their heart made the decision maybe a month ago, but they’ll come, you know, the men will finally say, I’m getting this Jeep because it’s safe.
And they’ve got 15 other reasons, but they find, but finally being able to give them that last that last justification tips it over to the purchase. And what AI is doing is enabling you to tailor that for millions of people, not just what’s A, B, or C message going to resonate the most.
So, in that sense, it’s very scary, but also flip that around and that same capability can now be used to help the millions of Algebra 2 students who are struggling. Right now out there in the U. S. And they’re 14 years old and they’ve got to take their algebra to test and they’re freaked out and they’re being told, well, this is the one way to learn when actually with a there are multiple ways to learn so we can go into a bit later.
I’m not 100 percent of always just a tool and it’s neutral. But I do believe that we can find Oh yeah. The dystopian and utopian use cases in just about any type of AI capability.
[00:42:12] Helen Todd: I couldn’t agree more. And I think it comes down to the people behind the tools and the intentionality behind the tools too, and how we put them to use.
So I definitely agree on that front. Another news story that got a lot of headlines this year was the fake Drake and weekend song. And I know you mentioned that content creators are kind of the the canary in the coal mine someone on the show, and I forget who said it right. The second said that actually music is a great canary in the coal mine.
Cause what happens in the music industry. Industry usually then spreads to other entertainment. And we had the fake Drake and weekend song and ruffled a lot of feathers and all the platforms took them down. Now they’re having AI policies and letting them up. But what was kind of your take on on that new cycle, our new story?
[00:43:02] John du Pre Gauntt: Okay, well, this is a bit like talking about a bad relationship I had in college. One of the first companies that I worked with back in the early noughts was trying to make music applications for mobile phones because we saw that’s what people are carrying around. They’re not carrying around transistors or radios.
And this was pre-iPhone, so your position on the carrier’s deck, you know, on deck or off deck application was pretty important of whether people are actually going to discover you and music is like one of the biggest intellectual property hair balls that will ever be created. Now or in the future, I want to see how if a I can truly untangle music, it’s going from an intellectual property and investibility point of view, it’s gonna be extraordinary.
And by the way, I’m gonna give a shout out to a company that you should be looking for called Jukebox J X B X run by a guy named Scott Cohen, who had a company called the Orchard, which was one of the largest independent labels. But what Jukebox is gonna be doing? I think they launched last month. You is taking the power of technology and enabling people, ordinary, regular retail investors to invest into the catalog of an artist and not just at the catalog level, but at the song level at the stem level of music content.
And that has the capability of revolutionizing how artists actually can develop their craft and create a business. It’s not that, Oh, we’re going to get rid of the labels or anything like that. It’s an, it, again, it’s not saying I’m going to change the rules. It’s like, no, we’re going to make a new game with new rules.
And I would hardly. Encourage you to check out jukebox, but back to music with the ability to not only reproduce, you know, whatever kind of melodies and different types of musical elements you want, but also the fidelity of someone’s voice. It’s really going to be changing a lot of legacy. And that’s going to be different, you know, it’s like Johnny Cash singing punk, which I think if you could speak to the actual ghost of Johnny Cash, you’d be all over it.
But at the same time for the people who are part of the estate of Johnny Cash The value of their estate is that historical legacy that’s frozen in amber in the sense of master recordings. And there’s a whole chain of custody of who has rights to that recording. That’s how we built the music industry in the 20th century.
The thing we got to look at is that the 20th century is by far the exception of the history of music. Music’s as old as humanity. The, some of the oldest artifacts we ever found. I think there’s some bone flute in Germany. That’s like 40,000 years old. We’ve been making music since we’ve been human. We’ve had a music business since the 20th century, effectively speaking.
Once you got it out of the churches, at least in the Western world. And so this idea, at least in my mind, that there’s something sacred about the way that music is. Is captured and then bought and sold, you know, as an economic entity, I’m gonna leave the aesthetics to the side, but I mean, as an economic entity, I’m not that fuss that AI is upsetting that apple cart because having been there. It’s always been an insider’s game, and that’s something that technology historically has done, is it’s disrupted, I hate to use that management term, but that’s the proper term, it’s disrupted the old insider’s game, so that it can create a new insider’s game, but there’s always this gap between those two, where artists and creators can truly thrive.
And then, yeah, it’ll coalesce under a new set of rules, and then eventually that will get old enough, and we’ll have a new inside game, and then new technology will come around, and we’ll blow that up. So, as far as like Drake and The Weeknd, I listen to it. Yeah, it’s a fun, it’s a fun tune. Is it the end of civilization? Nah, not even close.
[00:47:31] Helen Todd: I appreciate that. Well, and I think one phrase that I’ve heard a lot this year and even have said on the show many times is just kind of the democratization of creativity, where you kind of mentioned just now that you know, tech breaks up the institutions and the music industry.
And I think one thing that really excites me about the intersection of AI and creativity Is you’re just going to have so many more people with access to tools that they might not have had otherwise being able to share their stories and voices from all walks of life and parts of the world being able to share stories and express themselves in ways that we are.
You know, mediums haven’t existed before and and just to be able to surface and hear these stories that we haven’t got to hear before. So that’s one thing I’m excited about. So I feel like you and I could talk all day, but we’ve got just a little bit more time on the interview and I want to cover like a speed round of tech announcements this year, a little outside of AI that will definitely be following in 2024.
So on my list. Is the humane AI pen, which was just recently announced the Apple Vision Pro, Nvidia blew up Neuralink got FDA approval for their first human testing. And then another thing that I think is very interesting is the brain computer interface. Cause I got to play the, my first game of just thinking and interacting with a computer and playing a game with just.
Yeah. Thinking as the only modality to interact with the game. So I was curious you know, your reactions on any of those or any more that you would add to the list too.
[00:49:15] John du Pre Gauntt: Well, let’s take one slight step back in this year and I’ll ask you, I’ll ask you a trick question, how many AI generated. Pictures of single people looking off into the distance, you know, almost like they’re out of a fashion magazine.
Have you seen probably zillions how many really good pictures of multiple characters where there’s a focal point where there’s a Where almost like you’d look at some painting, you know, Christ and the Last Supper, you know, to where there’s all kinds of different perspectives, but it adds up into something emergent.
We’re not even close there with, you know, with AI the vast majority of content examples that I’ve seen. That have been algorithmically generated, have been tech demos more than stories. So, beyond the tools, what I’m looking for, especially next year, are people who can use artificial intelligence to actually improve a narrative arc of something.
Because storytelling and stories, and it’s one of the reasons why you’re doing creativity, I’m doing culture and code. Is much of the way that program our culture, it’s when they say knowledge is learning from your mistakes and wisdom is learning from somebody else’s mistakes. And a lot of our stories are do this, don’t do that, see what happens.
Okay, strip it down to its barest essentials. And that’s what storytelling from a utility point of view. We’re doing that. We’re also identifying ourselves as groups. AI is now just starting to get into that area. When I say AI, what I’m talking about is not the tools themselves, but people who are learning to work in a new way in the context of new tools.
That is the high ground, in my opinion. Not just competitively, but also where we need to go so that we can raise the value of narrative storytelling, not just as production value. And so a lot of these tools are bringing more people into the mix, which I think is foundational for humanizing. I’d said previously, you know, I went to the open AI dev day and they were showing the wonders of the technology for helping them with their calendar.
And I’m not belittling that I’m just saying that is a pretty standard use case that the tech industry loves to do. Thank God they weren’t using AI to order pizza. Cause that would have disappointed me. But the larger point is that to actually improve the technology. We need to have non specialists get better with AI.
And so whether you’re talking about the humane pen, which I think for a for medical applications is wonderful because anything that can help us mitigate this constant toggling between having eye contact with a patient and having to turn away and type something into a screen. Or read something off a screen and break eye contact.
Any technology that can help improve that experience is going to improve a patient. Experience and we desperately need that in medicine. So I’m looking forward to that neural link. In our fiction story burner face, we do a lot around neural interfaces. Because if anything, we’re seeing a blurring of kind of the organic and inorganic world, which some people say, Oh, that’s creepy.
Well, you put on a pair of glasses, you’re blurring that. that boundary. You know, you’re using some type of modification to change your organic experience with the world. I for one like eyeglasses. I for one in a few years will probably need hearing aids. I for one don’t mind the the idea of a pacemaker if I need one.
You know, you go to a 50th anniversary reunion, one of the party games is how many real hips are in the audience. You know, we modify ourselves all the time down to our bodies with technology. So that does that doesn’t scare me as much, it’s sort of a natural progression of things. And I think that a lot of the technologies that, you know that you listed are going to be actually put out of the, taken out of the labs and put into the field.
And we’re going to see what’s really going to go forward and not, because for example, with, you know, your thoughts, a metaphor that I learned from Dr. Christoph Koch at the Allen Institute for Brain Science is, imagine you’re in a blimp. And you’re flying over an NFL football stadium on a Sunday, and you want to hear an individual conversation in the stands, and you drop a microphone.
That’s sort of like where we are with trying to get a probe down into the actual brain tissue, down to sort of the neuron or the synapse level. And so It’s pretty clear that the touchdown is scored. You hear the roar from the crowd, something happened, but to really understand nuance, we’re still pretty far off from that.
[00:54:54] Helen Todd: Yeah. And I think one thing too something that you said that made me think of it is a lot of the Gen AI output has been. Just kind of showcasing its capabilities of like, look how great this is not being generated from traditional design and animation and video tools but still is far from being as good as the traditional tools, to be honest.
But I think one of the interesting things that I’m excited about is. Yeah. What is going to be the next Citizen Kane for these new mediums? And how is that going to make us rethink some different formats? Or narrative storytelling, or whether it’s immersive in Quest 3, or Apple Vision Pro, or whatever.
Shape it takes. You know, we haven’t seen anything. We’ve seen like the tech produce really fascinating and interesting things, but nothing fundamentally different than our current entertainment. At least I haven’t seen anything yet. I’m not sure if you’ve come across anything. That’s Really expanded your thinking about mediums and and how they can be yeah, just expanded our thinking about what we can do with them.
[00:56:06] John du Pre Gauntt: Okay. I’m a bit, I’m a bit conflicted when we put it this way, wait till next March at South by Southwest. And I might have something to show you. We are.
[00:56:18] Helen Todd: You have my attention, John.
[00:56:24] John du Pre Gauntt: We are looking at. How can AI enable us to create a visual layer around a podcast that actually makes sense, that actually elevates the audio story in a way, when without, you know, without going into too much detail, think of a storytelling experience that contains elements, that is driven by a podcast, but it also contains elements of a graphic novel and a film, and it makes sense.
That’s where we’re poking around. You know, we wrote Burner Face specifically to be that equivalent of the 440 Dodge Duster that, you know, you got these teenagers bashing on it and turning it into a stock car and, you know, modifying it and putting a cherry bomb muffler, you know, up on top and doing all those types of modifications.
You’re going to see it in, in media. You’re going to see it in fiction first. So whatever kind of fiction we’re talking about those, the areas I would look for, and I would also encourage people to, to read up on their Marshall McLuhan because there are several things that are tried and true.
Number one, it says. We march backward into the future, which if you kind of look at the history of media television comes out, who were the first people in front of the camera, radio guys wearing headsets with ashtrays, smoking cigarettes and having a conversation. So typically. We take what we did in the old media and we try it in the in the new container.
Second thing he said was that that I’m starting to believe very much is that he said the first meal of a new medium is the old medium, meaning that the first meal of the internet was magazines and newspapers. That’s what it ate. That’s what it digitized. That’s how it extracted value. And you can see what happened in newspapers and magazines.
And AI has eaten the internet. Basically, it’s all the stuff that, that we are, even this interview is going to be scraped. It’s going to be ingested into these models. It’s going to be atomized. It’s going to be used. And so just like with internet, the first, you know, first five, eight years, first decade of it.
What we were seeing was, Oh, wow, that’s a cool magazine on the online now we’re online. And then sort of the native storytelling methods, not just social media and feeds, but even design metaphors like parallax for websites that started to find their own water level. And I think the similar processes is playing out with AI.
Now I think it’s playing out faster. Then it did with Internet with AI, but we’re not skipping steps and one of the things that was in our interview with Stuart Lyons was he said, Yes, AI is helping a lot of things. I mean, he gave a great example. You’ve seen these led walls that enabled. So think of how many, how many writers want to write in a romantic kiss in front of the sunset? I mean, from a writer’s point of view, it’s a no brainer. You know, you want to make a movie, you know, a nice romantic kiss in front of a sunset. Well, you’re going to have about maybe eight to ten minutes of light from a natural sunset that’s going to work.
Whereas you take an LED screen, you can make the sunset for seven hours. You can do multiple takes on it. So you get that kind of efficiency to where what previously a producer would read the script and say romantic kiss at the sunset, that’s going to take us four hours to set up, it’s going to cost at least 10 to 15, 000 for that one kiss just in production costs alone.
How important is it? Well, that’s kind of taken off the plate now. And so. The creative palette has dramatically expanded of what we can do, but it doesn’t mean that trade offs have gone away. If I was to hopefully leave your audience and my audience with one thing, is that anyone who says, Oh, we’re in this age of creativity without constraints, that person really doesn’t understand what creativity is.
Because creativity is about working. Around constraints, working within constraints, understanding new constraints. And so I think a lot of the challenges that we have to make that kind of AI native media is going to be understanding what are the new constraints, but I still need to hire people. I still need to figure out what’s a fair compensation for people.
I still need to figure out how am I going to market this thing. I still need to figure out who’s my audience. And I’m not saying AI can’t do it. I mean, AI is going to be a great tool for doing it. I’m just saying that work hasn’t gone away. That work’s been transformed.
[01:01:17] Helen Todd: I have so many reactions to what you said, because it was so good.
And I love Marshall McEwen and he has a quote out there. That’s great. That’s we create the tools and then our. And then they shape us. But one of the things too, that I think is really interesting is I’m so curious what you’re working on is not only is it taking old mediums and applying them to the new mediums, but we’re kind of seeing the merging of the mediums together.
I’ve used the phrase before. You know, just as a content marketing best practice, you have the democratization of the consumption of content where, you know, this is a long form podcast interview that takes the shape of, do you want to listen to it? Do you want to watch the video? Do you want to read the transcript?
Do you want to read the blog recap of it or the short little trailer that we put on social media? Like, and it has great accessibility built into it too, of depending on your ability or. Yeah, just however you want to consume the content, we’re giving you as many options as possible to do it. But it seems like with some of these new tools merging like AR over traditional mediums that we’re now seeing not only the choice of how you want to consume it, but The mediums merging together for more multi modality types of storytelling.
One example is Artivive which the CEO was on the show and they take pretty much any visual image and can turn it into a QR code to add an AR layer to it. So say you’re in an art museum, you can look at a painting and then through the AR app see maybe the original. Drawings that were painted over, so you’re getting one layer of the painting and then a second layer on top of it of the back story of, you know, what was covered up by the artist and why so plus an audio, you know, if you’re listening to the headsets at museums, so like the merging of the mediums together in one storytelling tool, I think it’s kind of a fascinating Play as well.
And then one thing that you said about the constraints, one of my, I don’t know where I got this from, but one of my favorite little quotables around creativity is like this composer was asked to, you know, write a piece. And it was like the blank page problem. He’s like. You know, I don’t know where to begin and then was told imagine a composer walks into a bar and sees a woman on a barstool in a gorgeous red dress and then she falls off of it and he’s like i’m inspired.
[01:03:51] John du Pre Gauntt: Well, let me leave you let me leave you with this idea Creativity and it’s one of the things to where when I first read it in a research paper i’m it’s like Even if it’s not true, I really want to believe it because like this, we have this bias that before writing was invented, our ancestors were kind of, you know, brutish and that, you know, they uncivilized, et cetera.
And then, you know, they found the cave drawings in Lascaux and Spain and China and other things, you know. 30,000 years old, 40,000 years old and writing the best we can get back is about nine or 10,000. By the way, it wasn’t poetry. It was a receipt for beer. And so the idea was this, what if these people who were composing art inside the caves were also composing art outside the caves?
And the only thing that survived that we see is what was in the caves. Okay, because as you can imagine, 30,000 years on the outside, the chances of finding, you know, trees that have been decorated other things that have been, had human marks on them, it’s going to be really hard. And so actually their world was suffused in art because it’s sort of like you have to ask yourself the logical question, you know, you’ve got this amazing talent to create art.
And, but you’re only going to do it inside a cave. That’s a hard one to swallow. And then when you start really imagining, well, wait a minute. We do need art, not just simply to humanize, but for very practical reasons. Because think for a moment when you walk downtown, how many symbols and signs and colors and marks and navigation aids you see on a typical modern street.
Where the crosswalk is, when to walk, what the stop sign is, those types of symbols. Is that all a modern thing or is it something that’s been intrinsic in our human experience? And so when you think about AI, we like to think of this kind of monolithic, you know, super brain, almost like out of the first Tron movie or something like that.
When actually these little micro pieces. of intelligence are going to be embedded all through our environment, just like they are right now. And so in one sense, the premise behind Tron is real. Only instead of atomizing our bodies with a laser to fit onto a chip, we’ve actually sprayed this huge cloud of computer chips all around our environment and have blown a computer up to planet size.
Now we’re just walking around inside. Just like our Paleolithic ancestors.
Walked around with drawings all inside and so in that sense, I believe that creators and artists, we all have that, you know, you ask a bunch of four year olds who can draw a doggie, you’re going to see a bunch of hands raised, ask the same question 10 years later, a lot fewer go to a corporate audience to say who can draw a doggie.
It’s like, well, no, I’m not an artist. Well, now with these tools, we have a much higher fidelity way of taking what’s in our head and giving it some kind of tangible form at a much closer level. Doesn’t mean it’s perfect. Doesn’t mean we’re an artist, but we can communicate so much more richly now what’s in our head and what we want.
And I can’t help, but think that’s an improvement. Now, at the same time, are people going to do terrible things with it? Are they going to make, you know, subversive art? Are people going to be you know, basically leaving curses or saying, you know, so and so does these terrible things? Of course. Go to the British Museum.
You can find evidence of people, of Romans who made graffiti. You know, Maximus whoever is… is a cheat. I think one of, there’s a, it’s a cuneiform tablet that’s over 4, 000 years old and it is the world’s first customer complaint form. Where they were talking about that the beer was bad, or something like that, and they immortalized it into a medium.
We’re going to be doing the same, we’ve been doing this recursively as humans since we’ve been humans, and I think that if we can keep that open mind, that In that sense, AI is just a tool, we can domesticate it better. And I think domestication is going to be the proper verb because AI, in my opinion, is something that is going to be a companion with us.
And we’ll need it, especially for the problems that we’re facing right now with climate change and and making a more sustainable world.
[01:08:49] Helen Todd: Yeah I agree so much. And one of the, my complaints about. Cause I love creative endeavors, but what’s in my head, just cause I haven’t put, you know, the skill set to proper practice and whatnot, never comes out in my paintings that well, even sometimes photography, what I’m looking at, I’m not capturing it the way that my eyes see it, but the idea that you can take what’s in my head, what’s in my head, Without relying on, you know, some skillset with my hands or whatever, and can get it out of my head.
I actually think that’s really exciting to transpose what’s in my head. Also, you know, can be very scary too, because there’s a lot of different implications that come with reading people’s minds in, in that way, but also very scary too.
[01:09:35] John du Pre Gauntt: Well, along with Marshall McLuhan, I’d be reading the Harry Potter books because you know, human language is now a programming language.
And so people really. I’m talking about just people outside the tech industry. A lot of people, if you ask them, they don’t want to operate technology. They want to cast spells. Hey want to be like Jean Luc Picard and say, make it so number one. You know, they have that that, that chasm between my will and my ability to exert my will shrunk because ultimately that’s what magic is.
Is being able to control the forces of nature, to use words to set things in motion. And effectively speaking, when we’re thinking about prompting, that’s what we’re doing a prompt is a set of words that set things in motion. So, New Book of Spells. That’s basically what, that’s basically what we’re dealing with.
[01:10:27] Helen Todd: Well, I think Arthur C. Clark had a quote or something along the lines of the best technology actually feels as if it were magical or as magic. And I feel like for today’s episode number 30 on the anniversary. On the anniversary of open AI’s announcement of chat, GBT the magic of technology is a great way to, to end this episode.
I guess one thing before we do our sign off, is there anything else that you want our listeners and viewers to know related to our conversation or your projects or anything you’d like to make sure that’s included in today’s conversation?
[01:11:03] John du Pre Gauntt: Well, number one, I would. I highly recommend that they listen to your podcast, they listen to my podcast, and they actively search out people who are trying to deal in this nexus of creativity and artificial intelligence, because effectively speaking, creativity is the new productivity.
We view, we’re going to be able to use AI when I say create, I think produce is a better verb. We’ll be able to produce. Content even more than internet and social media. So if you’re already occasionally a little queasy from the kind of what comes over your feed, if you are not becoming a critical consumer, you’re going to be overrun.
It’s going to be the equivalent of fast food for your brain, and we know where that can take your body. And a little bit, it’s not that bad now and then, you know, but the kind of work that you’re doing with creativity squared we’re trying to do with culture and code. Also if you look into let’s, oh, I can’t remember the exact name of his organization in Los Angeles.
There’s a guy named Todd Terazis who is organizing Hollywood community, the creative technology community of Hollywood around, around AI. Keep your eye on what’s happening in creativity and media, because that is the early indicator of what’s going to eventually be happening to you. And when I say eventually, that could just be a year.
So, you know, it’s exciting, it’s giddy. It’s the roller coaster. Don’t eat a lot of pizza before you take the ride.
[01:12:53] Helen Todd: You know, yeah, but buckle up. I don’t think 2024 is going to slow down at all. If any.
[01:13:00] John du Pre Gauntt: No, we just got a presidential election. We just got a presidential election to add a bit more spice to the AI max.
[01:13:07] Helen Todd: Yeah, well, John it has been such a pleasure having you on the show. I’m a listener of your show and definitely encourage everyone on creativity squared to listen. And we’ll definitely we’ll be talking to more with John. We’ll be at South by together in March. So I’m so curious what you’ve got cooking.
[01:13:26] John du Pre Gauntt: That’s going to be another great milestone. And you know, who knows my convince you to to join me and we’ll do some, we’ll do something jointly and throw the cameras on that.
[01:13:35] Helen Todd: I love it. Well, thank you so much.
[01:13:38] John du Pre Gauntt: All right. Well, I appreciate it. And I wish you all the best in the run up. Hope you had a good Thanksgiving.
[01:13:45] Helen Todd: Thank you for spending some time with us today. We’re just getting started and would love your support. Subscribe to creativity squared on your preferred podcast platform and leave a review. It really helps. And I’d love to hear your feedback. What topics are you thinking about and want to dive into more?
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