Ep52. Lori Mazor: Go Beyond the Binary

Lori: There’s going to be such a volume of content out there, and you kind of think of this similar to what’s happened with social media, that he said the bar gets raised. Those things that are going to become culturally relevant to the largest swath of people, right, are going to have to be really excellent, right?

Lori: And so I actually think it’s going to make human creativity more important.

Helen: Lori Mazor is a visionary leader at the intersection of artificial intelligence and creativity. She joins us for a thought provoking conversation about her new book, Temperature, and the themes it explores on creativity in the age of AI.

Helen: As the CEO and founder of Synthetivity, Lori teaches executive leaders about the transformative power of generative AI. With her unique background in architecture and a passion for pushing the boundaries of technology, Lori has already educated over 3,000 leaders in just six months. At the bleeding edge of gen AI, her work extends to prestigious institutions like Cornell Tech, Fordham University, New York Tech, NYU, and Tufts.

Helen: A distinguished architect, strategist, and celebrated multimedia artist, Lori has won industry awards and her creative work has been featured in major publications. Lori and I were both at the MIT AI Summit. where a mutual colleague connected us and I’m so glad he did as I’ve enjoyed every conversation with Lori since we met.

Helen: In today’s episode, you’ll hear Lori’s thought provoking perspectives on AI and creativity, where she challenges traditional notions of what it means to be creative. And her belief that AI will make us more creative. She shares how writing rules is not only a creative act, but important in making space for the magic of creativity to take place on the spectrum between control and chaos.

Helen: We also discuss her book, how she uses AI and her creative process and the importance of embracing AI responsibly through her manifesto. Can we code machines to be as creative as humans? Listen in to discover Lori’s answer. Enjoy.

Helen: 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.

Helen: 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.

Helen: Lori, welcome to Creativity Squared. It is so good to have you on the show.

Lori: Thank you for having me, Helen. I love the title of the podcast, Creativity Squared.

Helen: I’m so excited for the conversation. Lori and I, we’ve actually been at the same conference together, the MIT AI summit, but didn’t meet in person.

Helen: Another gentleman there, shout out to Calvin, put us in touch and we had a wonderful pre-call and I had so much fun already talking to Lori and reading her book, which we’re going to dive into today called Temperature: Creativity in the Age of AI, and all of our listeners and viewers are in for a special treat today.

Helen: But for those who are meeting you for the first time, can you tell us who you are in a bit about your origin story?

Lori: Yeah, absolutely. So lately I’ve been thinking a lot about, I think my peak moment in life, which was the age of 10. So my origin story is that, at that age I was into the theater. I had grown up dancing and I, in the fourth grade, wrote a musical that I produced with my classmates.

Lori: God bless them. But I also had a Commodore 64 and was just starting to learn it to do some like basic programming. And so, yeah, I think like at that moment I was really using all parts of my brain. And I think it took like another 40 years for me to realize that actually was my calling. So there was a career in that 40 year period of time where I went to school to become an architect.

Lori: I am trained as an architect. I practiced architecture for many years. And then I moved into university administration on the client side. I worked for New York University leading the design and construction there, and then I moved into The City University of New York and led operations through the pandemic.

Lori: So that was really a career defining moment for me. And after that experience, I was so exhausted that I just took a break and decided to play. And when I started playing, as I write in the book, I found AI. And once I discovered image generators, it was just an opening into a deep rabbit hole that I am still in.

Lori: And I am like, way, way down there, just like loving exploring and learning new things and then offering what I can to teach.

Helen: It kind of tees up the book since it’s about your journey with AI. So can you tell us what inspired you to write Temperature?

Lori: Yeah, absolutely. So like many creative works, it’s not a linear process, and I knew that I wanted to write a book, that was definitely something on the bucket list.

Lori: But it really goes back about 10 years. I was in business school and I had the great opportunity to study game theory with one of the leading scholars in that area. His name is Adam Brandenberger and he wrote a book called Coopetition and Adam offered to be a mentor and I did an independent study with him.

Lori: And at the time I was really trying to understand whether there were some kind of rules, whether they be mathematical rules or computational rules or structural rules that govern creativity. I didn’t know about AI at the time. I’m sure many people were actually working in that field, but I was really looking at it through the lens of games.

Lori: And so I came up with what we called at the time, a taxonomy of rules. And what I understood was that people are all different. We all operate in a different relationship to structure, right? Some of us really thrive on structure. We like following recipes. We feel very comfortable if someone gives us a framework or we might even feel comfortable in a negotiation where things are pitted against one another.

Lori: Some people actually really like when you say, no, I’m one of those people. They will figure out the yes in getting a no, and then other people just really like a blank page. Just don’t tell me what to do. I [could] figure it out on my own. So, you know, I was kind of looking at people’s behavior in [relation] to rules.

Lori: So I was studying game theory and I was thinking about the way that people interact with rule systems. And I was reading a book by Gretchen Rubin called the Four Tendencies where she kind of comes up with a model for how people respond to rules. And I’m reading this and I’m thinking, well, this is very similar, I think, to the way that people respond to creativity.

Lori: And so I look to kind of marry that with a structure of rules. The rules I defined were recipes, improvisations, negotiations, prohibitions, and chance. And when we think about this now in terms of AI, what I really was talking about was structure and latent space, right? What we know, what we can code, what we can train, and what gets filled into the blanks, and in AI, I now understand that we call that metric “temperature.”

Lori: So as I started to learn more and more about what was driving the machines that I was able to type in language and conjure up images, I started to understand that it wasn’t just a fixed response that actually, on the back end, computer scientists can program this metric temperature. We can dial it up if we want to sample more randomness, and we can dial it down if we want to get things that are more precise.

Lori: They’re never going to be as precise as deterministic or binary systems where you’re, you know, picking a zero or a one and it’s one or the other. generative systems are creative by nature. And then I just started reading, you know, I followed my curiosity. And, you know, as I started reading David Foster’s book about the origins of generative AI, I realized that, you know, these machines hallucinating is not an accident.

Lori: That’s actually how they’re designed to work. They’re designed to mimic human creativity. They’re designed to be us as we were when we were five years old and we didn’t have a boundary between fact and fiction and, you know, when we’re young, we call that imagination. And when we’re older, we call it hallucination.

Lori: So, you know, I just am really fascinated not only by the potential to automate things, but by the potential to open up our creative minds.

Helen: I love in the book what you just said about latent space you have in there, or maybe it was our pre-call that for you, the creativity lies within that latent space in the spectrum between the chaos and the rules.

Helen: And I thought that was just a really beautiful way to tie in the magic of creativity in the latent space with artificial intelligence. And one thing is since you do talk so much about rules that I mentioned to you, one of my favorite like little thoughts about creativity and I have yet to find where I got it from is, this composer was like asked to write a piece and he was like, you know, had that blank page problem, which so many creatives do of like, I’m not inspired.

Helen: And then someone came to the composer and was like, “Well, imagine walking into a bar and there’s a beautiful woman and a red dress and she’s drunk and falls off the stool.” And then the composer’s like, “Now I’m inspired,” you know, giving like the framework around the creative process. So I like that you really explore that in your book.

Helen: And you have some like, I guess some hot takes related to creativity too, in terms of challenging some traditional notions that we have about creativity. So let’s dive into that and Lori, what are we getting wrong about creativity today?

Lori: Yeah. So I think this one was like kind of looking and doing a little bit of “me” search, right?

Lori: Like I, when I was a kid, I really loved creative, like performing arts. And I was a dancer and I was in the theater, but I also really loved math and I really was good at logic. And so I always felt kind of split and it was really difficult for me as you get older and you have to figure out how to specialize. Picking a career was hard.

Lori: And so architecture for me was the career that allowed me to marry those two things together, right? You need buildings to both be beautiful and to stand up. And so, you know, and then there’s also a bit of social science there. So I got the human component. But, you know, I don’t necessarily love designing buildings.

Lori: That’s probably not my, like, life’s passion. I like just creating spaces, interesting spaces, psychological spaces for human beings. So I think what I realized from my own experience was that we divide the world into people who are creative, and sometimes we even call them creatives, right?

Lori: Like we give them that label as a job profession. And what we really mean is those are people with some artistic ability or artistic talents, right? Usually they’re in the graphic design departments or even the marketing departments. And then we label other people as analysts, right? And those are the people that you want to take care of your taxes and to, you know, crunch numbers.

Lori: And, you know, what I realized is that actually creativity happens in every profession, right? It’s not just artists versus analysts. And so I started digging into the science and I’m like, where does this – I kept seeing that diagram of like left brain, right brain, right? Like, your right brain is the place where you’re imaginative and the left brain is the place where you’re analytical.

Lori: And what I found out is that there is some truth to that. So there were some studies that were done in the like late fifties, early sixties on epilepsy patients whose brains had literally been split. They thought that this was going to be a technique to help stop seizures. It’s pretty barbaric, but at the time it was the best they knew how to do.

Lori: And a researcher at the time was able to study those people’s brains and to identify that there are specific functions that happen in different parts of our brain. That is true. But the pseudoscience that’s evolved around that is that one side of our brain is associated with creativity and the other side is associated with not being creative and actually what we found is, in 2010 a study was done that looked at all of the brain imaging and looking at how people were taking on creative acts and they found that there is no one place in the brain where creativity is located. Creativity is a process and it moves between divergent and convergent thinking and conflict resolution and decision making and executive functioning and all of those things and so we now know that we have a whole brain theory, but that hasn’t really made its way into the mainstream.

Lori: People still talk about being left brain and right brain, being creative and creativity being novelty, right? And divergent thinking. And now, even as we’re testing AI to see if AI is able to be creative, we’re using a test that was developed in the 1950s that was called the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking that really is a test for divergent thinking and novelty.

Lori: It has nothing to do with actually the creative process.

Helen: So what, how would you define the creative process then if we’ve got it so wrong?

Lori: Yeah. So I found that sometimes it’s just good to come up with a new word. And so the word that I found and literally found it is called “synthetivity.” It is a portmanteau between synthesis, which is different than creating.

Lori: Synthesis is taking what is available in the world around us and mixing it up, right? Making something that appears to be different than what we’ve seen before in a synthetic way. And then still that “-itty,” the creativity; the making of things, right? So it’s the synthetic making of things.

Lori: And I call it synthetivity. The term comes out of genomics. But I’ve adopted it as the title of both my company and my replacement for the word creativity to really talk about that whole brain process that we go through.

Helen: And where did the name of the book come from? Because you explain it a lot and it’s related to AI, but I would love for you to explain it to our listeners and viewers where temperature comes from as well.

Lori: Yeah, absolutely. So I really love analogies and so temperature literally is this parameter in AI models that allow you to dial it up for randomness and dial it down for precision. And you can toggle it in image generators. It’s often called chaos. And it goes usually from zero to one or zero to 100.

Lori: But when I was listening to this word and trying to make associations with human creativity, what I realized is that actually humans also have a creative climate. And I started my TED talk with the statement, “Have you ever felt so cold that you can’t think?” And, you know, a lot of people said, yes. I happened to be one day in the lobby of a hotel and I had actually just changed book topics and I was starting to write about this new topic.

Lori: And I sat down at the computer blank page. literally frozen, like not a word could come out because I was so cold that all I could think about was being cold. And so what I will often do when I get those blocks is I will literally just start writing about what is in my mind. So temperature was on my mind.

Lori: And I started writing about how cold I felt. And then I, it just warped into, we each have a creative climate. Some people would thrive in that cold environment, right? Creatively, they would start with a recipe and maybe if they were missing an ingredient, they would make a substitution.

Lori: They would evolve a process rather than inventing it entirely from scratch. And other people really do love that freedom. And a lot of these lessons I learned when I was managing architects, I was on the client side and I was working with creative teams and even within those people who get that creative label, I was finding people approach the problem differently.

Lori: Some teams approach the rules that we gave them. What the timing was for the project, what the budget was for the project, what the regulatory requirements were. Some people took those very seriously, but I found that sometimes those solutions were less inventive and less novel and less interesting. And then other people took that blank page wide open.

Lori: They invented a whole new problem that we never even stated. They were often really interesting buildings, but it then caused us to have to rethink the schedule and the budget and the regulatory climate. So, you know, I was really looking for, is there a better way of writing the rules to maximize the creative potential of all teams, right?

Lori: And all individuals, regardless of where you start so that we can get it all, right? I’m a little bit greedy in that way. I want it on budget. I want it on schedule and I want it to be spectacular, right? So how do we all do that in our lives?

Helen: Oh, and I love how you say in the book that writing rules is a creative process and that the people who write their own rules have the most creative output and you kind of explore the tension between the control and the chaos.

Helen: But I was wondering if you could kind of expand on, you’ve kind of said it, but like how rule writing is also very crucial to the creative process in your mind.

Lori: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think like, first and foremost, kind of like thinking of the person who’s in a managerial position, right.

Lori: And like, if you’re looking for an outcome, how do you maximize the ability for every person in your organization to participate in the problem solving. And I developed a quiz in the book that you can take and it’s all about decision making and how you start processes. And so what I have found is that if you give a brief in different formats, you can actually tap into different people’s creative potentials.

Lori: So for example, if I say I want to increase revenue for my company, right? Some people are going to start that process by looking at past history and performance, right? They’ll look at recipes, formulas. They might look for best practices.

Lori: They might look outside the organization for other organizations that have done a similar thing. Other people might sit down and just do a brain dump, right, go through a brainstorming process, like, think of new and innovative ideas, right, before they start looking at what’s happened in the past. Other people might set up a conflict situation for themselves, a SWOT analysis is exactly that, right?

Lori: Looking at strengths, weaknesses, [00:20:57] opportunities and threats. What are both sides of the issues, right? What are the opportunities and what are the things that might actually stop us from succeeding? And so I think that knowing that people interpret and operate differently helps us communicate in different ways, and just write, literally write the rules so that they can be personalized.

Lori: And I think one of the things that I love about AI is it allows us to do that personalization so much easier. So I could literally put into a large language model, like I have this problem and I want to structure this problem for these types of thinkers. Help me frame the problem in a way that each person can optimize their own input.

Lori: Right. So I love that. I also kind of love using rule writing as a way of hacking my own biases. So I wrote this week a LinkedIn post that I think people connected with, which is, you know, I really like working by myself. And I, you know, I often find that when I read something and it kind of like hits that emotional knee jerk reaction spot for me, it’s usually someone who I’m actually quite closely aligned with.

Lori: Not somebody who has like a polar opposite thinking, but somebody who’s like very, very close to my own thinking, but I’m able to see the differences, right? I see the differences first and that will like often make me angry or it will like make me combative. Now that’s a really great skill to have if you’re trying to work within a highly regulated environment.

Lori: That’s a really great skill to have if you want to write a thought provoking essay. That is a terrible skill to have if you want to be collaborating with a team. So I have to write my own rules that say, “Okay, Lori, you’re not going to like, be working in a prohibition system. You’re not going to be reactive here. You’re going to be working in an improvisational system. Everybody is going to have an idea. We’re going to agree on a framework and then we can each have our own innovative take on that, right?” And so I think for me, that’s helped me figure out when I’m in a climate that’s uncomfortable, like how can I still be myself, right?
Lori: And not have to change my own personality, but just change the structure of the game that I’m really playing.

Helen: Yeah. I took the quiz to learn my persona, my creative persona in that way. And it was pretty accurate or like it was accurate. So I appreciated that.

Helen: And like one thing too, just that your book. Even though it’s about AI and kind of for the AI curious from the creators to team management and everyone in between, but it’s really about how we can access our own creativity and giving us frameworks for that too. So I very much appreciated that. I’m the entertainer persona. What’s your persona?

Lori: So I actually have a bit of a split persona. So I, and I have taken the quiz a few times and I get a different answer. And so, you know, some of that just depends on like what day of the week it is. I go between being an entertainer. So I enjoy improvisational structures, right? Like a little bit of structure, a framework, right?

Lori: Something to riff off of. But I also have a strong psychological reactance. So the prohibition is also one that really connects with who I am, right, so I kind of oscillate between those two. I’m like creatively bipolar.

Helen: It’s not on her website. So you have to buy the book, which I encourage you to do to get the magic link or the QR code to take the quiz to find out what persona you have.

Helen: And one of the other things I really appreciated about the book too, that you have in here, like a manifesto that you wrote. And kind of some ethical aspects because you’ve jumped in, you embrace AI, you’re one of the early AI adopters but you know, it is controversial.

Helen: We explore the full spectrum of that here on Creativity Squared but I really appreciated your manifesto. So I was wondering if you could share a couple of your key points on that as well. Cause, I think one of the things that I most appreciated is just the, I’m looking at the book for those who aren’t seeing, just kind of the sensitivity to underrepresented voices as well, and being very conscientious of how this impacts just everyone and not just white cis males.

Lori: Yeah. So I think like a few things one is that as I was playing with AI, I was writing about it in real time, so every Monday I would post on LinkedIn what I called Mid Journey Mondays and at the time I think I had like a thousand followers so I, I didn’t expect anybody other than my mother [to be] reading this but it was just a way of me kind of documenting my thought process and, you know, it wasn’t very far in when I started to realize the bias, particularly in image generators, right?

Lori: And that bias is really a human bias, right? The machine has absorbed a compendium of human knowledge, and a lot of what’s been on the Internet is not fair. And we as humans [are] not all good people. So I think that, that gets exacerbated, right? When you kind of blow it up to the scale that we have with AI.

Lori: And you know, same with large language models and that was stopping a lot of people from using AI. I was hearing this, you know, everybody that I spoke with, like, wanted to be an ethical person, wanted to be respectful, didn’t want to be abusing people who had been underpaid or, you know, who didn’t work in a good environment where they had protections.

Lori: So, you know, as these things were coming out, I’m thinking, how do I reconcile this with myself? And so what I decided to do was to write this manifesto, which was, I acknowledge that these are imperfect tools, right? I know that there is embodied harm that’s been done that has gotten us to this point.

Lori: And at the same time, I’m going to use them in a way that I can take a action, a positive action in not reinforcing or kind of just trying to change the story. So, you know, I make a conscious effort not to use words that I don’t know. Words have semantic meaning. So, you know, a lot of people were kind of like, pulling words like Afropunk and using them and those would create amazing styles.

Lori: And I’m like, you know what, if I’m going to use the word Afropunk, I damn well better know where that word came from, what its cultural meaning is, and I have to use it in a way to say something. I was also finding that if, you know, it’s like, everything looked like pornography, whether the people were clothed or not.

Lori: It was like the woman in still, like, is looking at you as if she’s about to eat you. And I just was like, those are not the people that I want to be representing. So, you know, I would spend a lot of time prompting and curating to make sure that the images that I was putting out represented the people I wanted to see.

Lori: And that meant putting weight on people and having to literally use the word fat in order to get somebody who had what would be considered an average weight. That meant, like, prompting for color of skin, eye color, texture of hair and rejecting a lot of stuff that came to me. So, you know, it’s an active process.

Lori: And I think that, you know what, D.E.I. in general is an active process, right? It’s not just like one and done. It is a daily act of constantly trying to over-correct. And so that’s kind of how I live my life. I am a gay woman. I have not always lived as a gay woman. I made that transition in my early forties. And you know, I’m now like very confident, but every single time I walk into a room with people I don’t know they assume I’m straight.

Lori: And it’s little subtle things. So, you know, I take that experience that’s happened to me and I realize that, you know, that happens to someone who’s neurodiverse, that happens to somebody who’s of any other skin color than me white. It happens to someone who wasn’t born in the United States, right?

Lori: Like, there are so many ways of being other and we’re all unique in that way. So I kind of, I want to make sure that I’m contributing to loving every single human being on the planet for the person that they are and representing that in the work that I put out in the world.

Helen: That’s so beautiful. Is the manifesto somewhere online that we can link to, or is that…?

Lori: I think I posted it to LinkedIn and I might have to dig it up, but yeah, it is there.

Helen: Yeah, I’ll follow up and find it and make sure to include it in the link description cause reading them, I really appreciated every single one. And I spoke on a panel yesterday. And one of the questions that didn’t get voted to answer was “Will AI make us more empathetic storytellers by default.”

Helen: And what triggered this is like, I don’t think we should, one, make any assumptions about anyone in general to your point about inclusivity of other people, but two, we should never assume that the default of these tools are anything we should lean on, and we should always question what the default is in general.

Helen: So you’re nodding your head. It looks like you agree with me on those points.

Lori: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, this morning I was thinking of a woman introduced herself that I’d never met before. And she said, I’m the wife of a pilot. And the first thing that comes to mind is that she’s straight and her pilot is a male, right?

Lori: She never said that, right? And that’s the same thing that happens in AI, right? You say you’re the wife of a pilot, AI is going to make an assumption about you. It’s [00:31:47] going to make an assumption about, you know, what is the most dominant, what’s the most popular, right? And that is that temperature metric, right?

Lori: It’s a system of probabilities, right? And so a lot of times we’ll get something that’s banal because it’s an average, right? It’s the most popular thing people have said on the internet. It’s like the first thing that’s going to come out. So will AI help us be more empathetic storytellers?

Lori: I think so, and this is the reason why. I think being able to visualize bias as soon as you can see it, it’s like the first step to being able to do something about it. And I think to many people, it’s not visible. In fact, just this week I got in a bit of a tiff with some French men who believe that there are no women in France who are computer scientists who have raised their work to the same level as Yann LeCun and his peers, who are all men.

Lori: And. I was like, you know, that doesn’t seem right, but I don’t know, right? I don’t know any French women myself, so I had to go digging, right? And I unearthed many of them. And so, you know, you have to, like, see it first. They don’t see it, right? So if there are ways of us making those things more obvious to people, then we can start to have a real conversation about the why, right?
Lori: Why does that happen? Why does that bias happen and connect with one another? And build empathy.

Helen: I kind of found it funny when Google over-corrected this. And as all of these AI tools are doing, releasing way too fast but released it. And if you put in historical figures like the Pope or US President, they were coming back black and brown, and that ruffled everyone’s feathers.

Helen: Well, I shouldn’t say, let me say that again. And of course, that ruffled all the, a lot of feathers who normally aren’t ruffled for DEI efforts because it impacted their notions of all of this. But it kind of highlighted the bias in overcorrecting in an interesting way too. But I thought it was kind of funny that it was the other way around. Cause we’ve seen it so much the other direction for most of AI and life.

Lori: Absolutely. And what I’ve been kind of telling people when I go around and do talks is like, we are all part of a beta test, right? This is not – like nobody’s releasing products. These things aren’t finished.

Lori: And you know, when you are in a beta test, you’re going to have fails and companies are going to fail publicly. And the most important thing is not the failure, but how do you then correct, right? And absolutely, I think part of the work that we need to do in DEI is overcorrecting until you overcorrect and you never actually get back to a point of equilibrium.

Lori: And so, you know, I actually applaud Google for what they did. And I think, you know, You know, applaud them for taking the risks of being out there. They’ve had like quite a number of failures there, I think, eroding public trust a bit. But I think some of that is because we all need to recognize that, you know, this is a beta test, right?

Lori: This is an experiment. We are all part of a public experiment.

Helen: Yeah. And I would imagine our listeners and viewers might have strong opinions or feelings or reactions to being a part of a beta test that by, you know, that we all need to learn whether we want to use AI or not. So I think we’ve both said so our heads aren’t stuck in the sand and we’re not hit by a Mack truck because this is the next internet, the next social media.

Helen: Some people call it, you know, the next electricity or Gutenberg press, whatever it is, but in some ways we’re all part of the beta test, even though we didn’t really opt into it, we’re choosing to opt into it, but we should all definitely be learning about it.

Helen: That’s for sure. Or my opinion, anyway. You wrote this book last year, it was a nine month birthing process and. I wanted to actually ask how did you use AI in the writing process? And you mentioned on one of your interviews that you were going to create a custom GPT based on your books content.

Helen: So I was curious, like if that came to fruition and then also what’s kind of changed with AI since your book came out too, and how you’re playing with it. So there was like three questions in one, but I’ll let you take it and run with it.

Lori: Yeah, absolutely. You know, [AI] was constantly evolving through the whole process of writing my book.

Lori: So, you know, I love writing. And so I always start by downloading my brain and I think what makes writing interesting are personal stories, right? And those personal stories, like you’re not going to find on the internet, not about me. Maybe somebody else’s are there, but I just really wanted this to be a book that both combined an opportunity to connect with me as a human being and also to like talk about some theoretical concepts in a way that’s approachable.

Lori: So, you know, the, most of the writing is mine, but I did use AI unabashedly as an editor to do targeted research that I normally would have done using Google. So, you know, I would ask a question and I would make sure I was using a, you know, AI that had a live internet connection.

Lori: But it was helpful for me to, I hate summarizing. I hate writing like short histories of things. So I got it to write the parts that I didn’t love writing. But I also had some lessons learned and I think this might’ve been on the podcast that you listened to. So, I really was looking for an example, one of the things, one of the analogies I made was between runners and there are different types of runners, there are, and literally we have different genes that predispose us to either optimizing for slow twitch fibers in our muscles or fast twitch fibers in our muscles.

Lori: Sprinters operate on fast twitch, endurance racers operate on slow twitch, and it’s very difficult to go in between. There are actually very few people that have done this. So I was looking to see if there were any outliers and I was like doing a little research and then I would kind of go back and forth between OpenAI because they had the live internet search and Claude, which I just liked its writing style better.

Lori: And I wrote this beautiful story about this runner who had gone from being a sprinter to like running marathons. And it all turned out not to be true, like not an iota of it was true. And it even made its way through the first pass with my editor. And she didn’t pick up on it because it sounded so believable, but I did go through and fact check every single thing in the book.

Lori: And as I was like, got to that place I was like, Oh my God, like this, first of all, this person doesn’t even exist. Like they had a very common name. And so like, yes, that person was a sprinter, but they weren’t the sprinter that they’d said they were. They actually never did the marathon it said they did.

Lori: Right. And the coach was not even a coach. So yeah, it was like, I got a whole like, big chunk of fiction that got left on the cutting room floor. So, you know, I learned kind of the things that does well, the things that doesn’t do well, where are the pitfalls? But like definitely used it in the editorial process.

Lori: And by the time I was getting to my second round of edits, one of the things that’s really hard as a writer is to remember what you’ve written already and to do what they call callbacks, right? You want to be able to bring your readers along and like remind them, you know, especially if you like, put the book down and then pick it up another time, right?

Lori: You’re not always going to remember everything you’ve read. So you want to remind your readers periodically and like summarize pieces of the book. It really helped me to do that. So I did build a GPT that I would upload the chapters I’d written to. And then I would, you know, when I was done with the next chapter, I would upload it and I would ask it to help me make callbacks and like, you know, does this flow properly?

Lori: Have I repeated myself? Is there anything missing? That was really helpful. In terms of building a GPT for my audience, I have held off because up until like two weeks ago, we didn’t have GPTs available to the general public. But that has now changed. So I am working on that. I’m hoping I’m going to release it this summer.

Lori: It will just be a companion guide that will allow you to go a little bit deeper. And what I’m hoping is that you will also be able to do kind of, matching exercises. So if like, say you and your partner have both taken the quiz, you can actually look for your creative potential together and where your creative gaps might be.

Lori: And I think same thing with teams. My hope is that you can get a profile of the members of your team and kind of, you know, target specific exercises for you to do as a team as well. So it’ll, I want it to be able to do something that you can’t do by just reading the book and kind of give you another level of depth.

Helen: I love that. And I wasn’t planning on doing this for the interview, but we’ll experiment and see if I can pull it off. So as I was putting on makeup I’m always like prepping up until the last minute for every interview, not everyone, but most, I’m a procrastinator on the, my creative process.

Helen: But I was using chat GPT’s voice to like do a couple of high level things. I asked it about the book. Infinite and finite games about the high level principles of game theory. So that’s something that interests you. And then I was like, tell me through Lori Mazer’s lens, like her approach to creativity and game theory principles and then it did that.

Helen: And I was like, okay, now I’m about to interview her. What are some questions that you recommend? So I’ll ask Chat GPT now. Chat GPT. I asked you to write questions for my interview with Lori Mazor. What is the number one recommendation out of the questions that I should ask her?

ChatGPT: The number one question I recommend you ask Lori Mazor is:

ChatGPT: In your book, you challenge the traditional notion of creativity as a divine or purely original act, instead proposing the concept of synthetivity. Can you elaborate on this idea and discuss how it redefines what it means to be creative? This question dives into one of the core, thought provoking themes of her book and invites her to explain her innovative concept of synthetivity, which is likely to generate an engaging and insightful discussion.

Helen: So it’s a good question, but I have to, like, I want you to answer it, but like, how do you feel that it already knows this about your book?

Lori: Oh my God. That’s fascinating. So number one, did you give it a background on my book or did it get that just off the internet?

Helen: Nope. That was my question. I was asking, that was from the internet.

Helen: That was not me feeding it anything.

Lori: I mean, there were definitely some buzzwords that I used in the synopsis of the book that’s on the back of the book. So that would be on Amazon, right? So I think that he definitely like pulled that up. And I actually love this. This is like fascinating to me, right?

Helen: Me too!

Lori: That’s a really good question. Like that definitely is the top question.

Helen: And like in the book itself, you were talking about one thing that I’ve never thought about creativity; Like it does. And you put in the book, like, you know, we put it on the pedestal of like, “Oh, to be creative is this,” you know, but I didn’t tie it to the the story of creation and from a very Christian approach of creativity being a divine act as far as that.

Helen: So like, I thought that was an interesting framework that you pointed out and that this question that ChatGPT kind of raises as well as one of the more thought provoking themes in the book.

Lori: Yeah, I mean, you know, there’s definitely some, like, embedded philosophy that I probably didn’t, like, come out and say in the book, but I think that’s very much right.

Lori: I think that the idea that, like, we were created by a single God, right, like, out of nothing, I think that is a belief system many people still hold, right, and I won’t, like, dispel that. I don’t know. I don’t know that we’ll ever know. But I think the science has certainly taught us that evolution is more the natural creative process, right?

Lori: There are very, there’s nothing that comes from nothing. And, you know, evolution is about organisms responding to their environment and optimizing for their environment and surviving their environment. And so I think, you know, this certainly has been kind of like a philosophical revolution across human history.

Lori: And I think we’re still, you know, much of the language that we use comes from, periods in time that are like way distant, right? And it’s very infrequently that we actually update our words. Like I can’t stand the word “master.” We use it all the time, like to talk about having competence in something.

Lori: And there really isn’t another good word to like, talk about that. So I’ll often say I’m like the mistress of something, but, you know, just as being kind of provocative, but, you know, there’s a lot of colonial language, right, that we use. So, you know, certainly using AI has made me more sensitive to the language that we use, the philosophy behind what we believe, you know, why we get stuck on certain concepts and, you know, maybe how we can start to evolve past them.

Helen: Another very thought provoking thing that I definitely want to make sure that we talk about on today’s conversation, nd this came from our pre-call, is why you want to go back and are considering getting a PhD from the MIT AI lab? And, you know, we’ve talked about can machines be creative on the show?

Helen: I think that’s actually a title before it was the last episode in 2023. And it was with Martin and Moritz who are two amazing creators in, they have a design and creative shop in Austria and they’re like machines can be a little creative, you know, the putting ideas together, but the real human creativity, the humans are still going to do.

Helen: And if I understand you right, you think that we can actually code machines to be as creative as humans can. Is that correct? And tell me why.

Lori: I do. And I, and that doesn’t frighten me. So I kind of start with the assumption that you know, in the fullness of time, and I don’t know if that is like five years, 10 years, 100 years, 1000 years that we will be able to have machines that can operate in the full capacity of humans and likely surpass us.

Lori: Because frankly, they can just like do things faster. You know, I talked today [to] somebody, I don’t remember what the topic was, but I compared AI to like using a power tool, right? Like when you’re using a chainsaw, like you’re more careful with it. Not less careful, right? You’re not lazy with it.

Lori: So you need to be more attentive and precise. But I think that the MIT conference for me was like a big mind opener and being able to be physically present and hear Stephen Wolfram talk about his approach to computation was just fascinating to me. He’s someone I’ve always admired. And what he talked about really was about creativity.

Lori: He talked about computation as being something that makes it very easy to come up with novelty. And he used the analogy of like, a machine can come up with random numbers very easily. But what he said was that, human beings don’t find random numbers all that interesting. And what I’ve started to realize, and really this is kind of like new thinking within like the past maybe four weeks or so, is that, you know, it’s not, novelty is not what is our human superpower, right?

Lori: It’s connecting with what is meaningful to people. That is our superpower, right? Understanding what is gonna connect with an experience you’ve had that, you know, is gonna, like, make your heart sing. What’s gonna light up your face when you hear a joke, right? What is going to make you sad when you hear a traumatic story?

Lori: And you know, we’re storytellers at heart, all of us. So I’m very interested to see whether computationally we can mimic that entire process, right? Can we, which I think is really too, if you want to call them agentic, like, I think those are like two agents, right? One that’s defining the creative process and, you know, along that full temperature spectrum, like what is the realm of possibilities of outcomes to solve a problem?

Lori: And then what are of those outcomes? What are the things that will be meaningful to people? And I think I believe that it’s a razor’s edge that it’s not the most outlandish things that we find interesting. It’s actually those things that are right at the boundary between nostalgia and new, right?

Lori: And I think for me, songwriting has been this place of really trying to understand that, right? Like the songs that I connect with are usually songs that have memory, like some kind of memory, whether it’s in, you know, the sound, the vocalist, whether it’s in the rhythm, whether it’s, you know, like literally a song I heard when I was young.

Lori: And then there’s something that’s like new enough that like makes me curious, that like makes me want to listen to it this time around. Maybe it’s the lyrics, maybe it’s a new artist, maybe it’s like a new kind of instrumentation. So, you know, I think it’s like this temporal edge and it’s not that thing that we’ve thought it is, which is like, just be as different as possible, right? We tend to call that weird. Not necessarily meaningful.

Helen: I would imagine a lot of people might have strong reactions to what you said, because it’s probably the most forthright of anyone on the show who thinks that the machines can match our human creativity.

Helen: So I am very curious of everyone’s reactions, so please do send them. And Harry Yeff, who was the very, very first guest on the show last year, April of 2023. You know, one of the things that he posed is you know, what really is going to be new? And he used the word “novel,” but I think in a different sense than you, but like, in this world of generative where it is, you know, generative.

Helen: So how do you think about the discernment of, you know, of, whether it’s machines or humans, like who determines whether it’s meaningful? Like, is that a societal thing? Is that an audience thing? Is that something that machines can actually discern or not? I’m like curious to your thoughts around that question and like, what will actually be new or is nothing, since it’s all synthesized, is anything really new?

Lori: Yeah. It was like super interesting to me. So, I think like, on one hand imagine that we were in a world where everyone could have a personalized experience, whether it’s like a movie that’s like written about your family or, you know, something like very personal to you or, you know, a song that was, you know, like written for you.

Lori: When I was a little kid, my mom had this birthday record and it literally, you put, it was so thin, you had to put a penny on it. And then it like sang like, “Lori, it’s your birthday.” And I loved it. She played it every year for my birthday and it got kind of cheesy. It got lost, and last year, my family unearthed this record, and it sent me into hysterical tears.

Lori: Alright, and so that moment, like, who would have known that would be so meaningful to me, right? What’s meaningful to me may not be meaningful to you. And so that, I think, is the power of personalization. But I think, collectively, we’ve looked to taste makers, right, to define what is good, right? And there are all kinds of criteria that might come along with that.

Lori: I’ve just recently heard Rick Rubin talk about the fact that, you know, his role in music, he doesn’t play music, right, but he can hear and he can recognize what he thinks is going to be meaningful to a large segment of the population, right? Those people I would call tastemakers. And there are those people in every single discipline.

Lori: It could be critics, right? Movie critics. So recently I heard Ashton Kutcher talk about his experience with Sora. So he was given early access and he’s been playing around with it. And he looked at it and he’s like, “I can imagine using this for filming movies because the cost of doing these things on set is really expensive. And this is really inexpensive and accessible.”

Lori: He’s like, “But when everyone can do that, there’s going to be such a volume of content out there.” And you kind of think of it as similar to what’s happened with social media that he said the bar gets raised. Those things that are going to become culturally relevant to the largest swath of people, right, are gonna have to be really excellent, right?

Lori: And so I actually think it’s gonna make human creativity more important, right? It’s like we get a wider and wider, like, volume of material. It’s, you know, what is going to be able to connect with many, not just with one, right? And that’s what I mean about, I think creativity is really about meaning, right?

Lori: What is meaningful to many versus what is meaningful to you?

Helen: Yeah. And I think something that’s interesting about that point is again, if there’s a higher volume of content, which I also think that there will be just because just you can with generative AI just produce so much more content, whether images or texts, and you already see a bunch of articles about, you know, the junk on the internet, you know, not helping with the quality, but that that aside, my point is like who then surfaces these stories? Right now, we still have, you know, the tastemakers as you outlined, but also algorithms that are black box for all of the feeds in addition to the AI black boxes in a lot of ways.

Helen: So, the algorithms are the ones that are going to help sift through the content of what’s meaningful to us. And there’s not, unless you have direct relationship with creators, which, you know, I encourage, especially for the two people who you’re listening to, join our newsletters and whatnot.

Helen: But that deluge of content, even surfacing and floating up the best, you know, we’re still within the systems that we have right now. And I, you know, algorithms, tastemakers are directly, serendipitously, maybe finding people. Would you add anything else to that list of, I guess, finding these good stories?

Lori: Yeah, I mean, I think there are also those people who persuade us to think or do differently, right? So there’s kind of like the Chicago school of thought, which is like, you know, people didn’t used to think that they needed bottled water, right? Now we all buy bottled water, right? Do we really need bottled water?

Lori: Like, probably not for the majority of people who live in regions where the water is like perfectly safe. And yet, you know, we buy it. So there are a lot of things that like, we’ve been convinced that we need, that we probably don’t need. And I think the same goes with creative works.

Lori: So, yeah, who are you listening to, right? And I think a lot just depends on, you know, who are the influencers in our life? And, you know, I certainly there’s like, do you trust yourself? Do you trust your own instincts? Do you trust your own likes and tastes? You know, do you have close friends and family who influence and shape what you like?

Lori: Are there people in the world who you like, admire and look up to? And so, you know, like, a lot of people will read a book because somebody else has recommended it, right? We find things through other people. So, you know, so much of this, and again, like, the human part of this is all the relationships that we form with one another and how we share stories, right?

Lori: And again, like, I think those stories will be meaningful at different levels. At the personal level, at the community level, right? And at the global level.

Helen: I know we could keep going and going but we’ve been flagged that we’re getting close to the end of the interview. But I do have a couple more questions for you before letting you go.

Helen: And we, I did want to ask since this project was like a big creative project and you had shelved another one that you’re now revisiting. So I was wondering if you could share with our listeners and viewers what your current creative project is.

Lori: Absolutely. Absolutely. So, I mentioned like when I was 10, I wrote a musical and I produced that.

Lori: I loved the theater. I still do. I made a decision not to not to pursue the theater because I wanted a paycheck on a regular basis and I didn’t always want to be auditioning in my life. But this has remained a passion. So during the pandemic, I started writing again. And so I have written a full length musical, and it’s a three act story in two acts.

Lori: It’s a story that I would say is structured kind of like a course line. It’s a story about a group of people who show up, but instead of showing up to an audition, they show up to a triathlon in New York City that gives me the opportunity to explore the five boroughs and to watch these characters as they evolve individually and collectively.

Lori: And it’s a little bit of a Sisyphus story which is, you know, Sisyphus was always pushing the rock up the hill and then it would always fall back down again, and you know, the idea that work is often just those things that we do over and over and over again to eventually get better.

Lori: So the title of the musical is called Better. I wrote 13 songs that accompany the musical, and I kind of wrote them as, like, song sketches. So, they were, like, very crude, and I kind of, like, you know, banged out some chords and got some instrumentation, but I’m now using AI to reinvent those songs and to start to remaster them into actually like music videos.

Lori: I’ve started, I have two of them that are out and I’m going to try and do like one every couple of weeks until I get through the whole thing. And then I have to tackle the script and the dialogue. So, we’ll see.

Helen: That’s so much fun. Well, and one thing that you said is that you’re not worried about people stealing your ideas, especially cause this one’s like so specific.

Helen: And you said like, you know, will it be, I think it sounds very interesting, but more meaningful than to just my mom. But I thought that was kind of like interesting that you’ve never been worried about someone stealing your ideas.

Lori: Yeah, no, that’s like, I think a lot of people are, you know, and like ideas to me have just always come very easily.

Lori: But it’s really the making of the idea that I think is, you know, the test of of the endurance. And so yeah, I’m like, how many people are going to come up with the idea of doing a musical about triathlon in New York City using Sisyphus as like the lesson to be learned here. I don’t think there are very many people coming up with that idea.

Lori: And, you know, it probably isn’t very interesting to other people to write. I hope it will be interesting to people to watch.

Helen: Oh, I will be there. I will get you back on the show. And one thing that you said in one of the interviews about a lesson from running, cause you, you are a runner is train slow, go fast.

Helen: And I thought that was, I hadn’t heard that before. So I was like curious if you could share that with our listeners especially since we explore creativity as part of the creative process, like what that meant to you while writing the book.
Lori: Yeah, absolutely. So those 10 years between the thesis that I did in graduate school and writing the book, I trained and did a number of triathlons.

Lori: I have like, so lapsed in my physical abilities right now. But many of those lessons that I learned from triathlon really came to bear. And I think the biggest lesson is literally you train slow to go fast. So when I started increasing the distance of my races, going from, you know, five Ks to 10 Ks to half marathons to marathons, my pace got slower.

Lori: And I even got to the point where you know, in order to just get the distance in, I had to slow myself down almost to a walking pace. And when you do that to your body, there’s a process called cumulative fatigue and your body slowly starts to adapt. You work in a little bit of speed work every once in a while, but the program that I did is only 20 percent speed work and 80 percent slow endurance work.

Lori: And most of the time when you’re going slow, it doesn’t even look or feel like you’re doing work. But I think that’s a great analogy for so many things in life. And you know, a lot of the learnings that we do are not necessarily those things that come quickly, but those things, those lessons that we learn and evolve over time.

Helen: I thought that was really beautiful. And I want to make sure that you get a chance to plug your executive training [01:04:15] because you’re no longer a practicing architect, but you teach other people how to use AI. So I wanted to make sure you got it a minute or two to share what you do on that front too.

Lori: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, I think my greatest pleasure now is that little bit, and it was really like six months of being earlier than other people to the AI game made me a good teacher. I’m in part a good teacher because I’m not that much further ahead, so I can relate to the feelings that my students have of not knowing.

Lori: I in general am pretty good at understanding technical things and translating them into language that’s simple, understandable, and approachable. And I really just love watching the light bulbs go off when people find an aspect of AI that allows them to do something they couldn’t do before. So I teach boot camps.

Lori: I teach a level one and a level two to executives. That’s like anybody in a managerial position or above. And many of the people who come to my class like I have never made a PowerPoint presentation before, right? Or like, or not that sophisticated with using computers. That’s not even necessary.

Lori: We do everything in class, including logging onto applications. And then I take people from there to being able to build your own no code applications. Custom GPTs are a very easy way of people being able to do that. There are other ways as well. And this summer I’m running a summer camp.

Lori: So all of the modules I’m going to teach this summer are all, you can take them individually. There’ll be some that are playful and fun, like making a storybook using AI. And there will be some that are for those analytic folks who want to talk with your data and get insights and graphs and charts.

Lori: So there’ll be something for everyone on the temperature spectrum.

Helen: Wonderful. Well, I’ll be sure to include the link in the dedicated blog posts, which that link is in the episode description. In the short term, you’re playing with gen AI audio or music. I’m assuming, but I shouldn’t assume that’s what you’re most excited about with AI in the short term.

Helen: But can you tell us like, yeah, just like the future of AI and creativity, what you’re excited about more in the short term and maybe in the longer term too.

Lori: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I would say that like a few months ago, video was the big thing. And I think we all expected that video was going to kind of take the same trajectory that image generation did.

Lori: But I think that because of the fear around the upcoming election, video has kind of been put on hold. And so we know that Open AI has an amazing model. We know something just came out of China. So in the interim, while I’m waiting for a video to mature, music is starting to get there. And I’m really having fun with it, but like all things, I kind of use it in the ways that most people don’t use it.

Lori: So I kind of develop much lengthier pieces than I know I’m going to use, and then I’m kind of like mixing them almost like a DJ. So I will like generate beats and then I will generate like different instrumentals and I’ll generate different vocals and then I’ll start to overlay them together.

Lori: So that’s been really fun. I’m almost getting to the point where I need to start learning how to use a they call it a DAW, which is like a digital audio workstation. So that I can like split my sounds and start like, you know, doing leveling and other more sophisticated audio things.

Lori: But to get started with AI is like, pretty fun. And way in it, you know, definitely broke a block for me because, you know, music production is expensive and difficult and, you know, I wasn’t sure how to take that next step on my own. So this has given me an easy next step.

Helen: Very cool. And the last question that I like to ask all of my guests is if you want our listeners and viewers to remember one thing, what is that one thing that you want them to remember?

Lori: Absolutely. Everybody is creative. Everyone is creative no matter whether you love spreadsheets, or you are a lawyer, or you are an artist. We all have it inside of us, it’s just about unearthing that and finding that place where you do things naturally and tapping into that sweet spot. So, that’s my hope, is that you’ll all find that place inside of yourselves.

Helen: What a perfect note to end the show on. I couldn’t agree more. And if everyone listening enjoys the show, you will definitely enjoy reading Lori’s book on creativity in the age of AI and we’ll link to it in the description. And I know I thoroughly enjoyed it and have enjoyed all of our conversations that we’ve had leading up to this interview.

Helen: So. Thank you, Lori, for sharing you in so many different ways and for being on the show and for all of your time today.
Lori: Oh, thank you, Helen, for what you do and for hosting this really important space.

Helen: 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?

Helen: I invite you to visit CreativitySquared.com to let me know. While you’re there, be sure to sign up for our free weekly newsletter so you can easily stay on top of all the latest news at the intersection of AI and creativity.

Helen: Because it’s so important to support artists, 10 percent of all revenue Creativity Squared generates will go to ArtsWave, a nationally recognized nonprofit that supports over a hundred arts organizations.

Helen: Become a Premium Newsletter subscriber or leave a tip on the website to support this project and ArtsWave. And premium newsletter subscribers will receive NFTs of episode cover art and more extras to say thank you for helping bring my dream to life. And a big, big thank you to everyone who’s offered their time, energy, and encouragement and support so far. I really appreciate it from the bottom of my heart.

Helen: This show is produced and made possible by the team at Play Audio Agency. Until next week, keep creating.