Ep6. Phil Gable: Keep A.I. Absurd

Phil Gable: 10 years from now if humanity still exists, I think we’ll look back at the early AI influenced advertising and be like, oh God, the hell are we thinking? But then it’ll get better and hopefully be used to make better things. But the AI is gonna be a mirror of humanity.

Theme: But have you ever thought, what if this is all just a dream?

Helen Todd: 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.

Phil has been working in the advertising industry for 25 years. He started as a copywriter when the internet was young then moved onto creative director roles at some big agencies in New York and Atlanta as well as some smaller ones in the Midwest before setting out on his own. He’s currently freelancing as creative director and strategist for several agencies in New York, and he’s based out of Brooklyn.

You can see his work at philgable.com. He also owns his own production company called Porcupine Armadillo, which specializes in weird low-budget comedy, which you can see at porcupinearmadillo.com. And we’ll put that in the show notes so you don’t have to figure out how to spell it on your own, if you wanna watch some genuinely delightfully strange videos.

Is there anything else you wanna say about what people will find, Phil?

Phil Gable: I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna give too much away. I wanna, I want to, you know, inspire just enough curiosity and mystery. And then, and then let people be surprised or horrified, or whatever their personal reaction is.

There’s no wrong way to feel about what you find there.

Helen Todd: And Phil and I met back in 2012 and we’ve worked on different client projects ever since. One thing you may have already picked up on Phil is very funny and we always have a good laugh. And it’s always wonderful hearing his wildly creative and hilarious mind at work and pairing that with ChatGPT is a real treat, which we will get into in a bit.

Phil Gable: And we’ve actually switched around a lot cuz, cuz I was, I think I was your client first and then you hired me to do some stuff later and then we were both side by side at stuff. And then they figured out that it’s better if you were like, it went better if you were like a little bit over.

Helen Todd: And I forget who actually connected me to the brand that we first, yeah.

Phil Gable: I think it was the good, the good folks at Swell Shark, I think.

Helen Todd: Oh, that’s right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Shout out to Swell Shark for, for that introduction. Cause that was back in 2012 already. So how would you describe your humor?

You do stand up comedy, you describe your videos as strangely weird on Porcupine Armadillo. So how would you describe your humor?
Phil Gable: I would, I would say, dark, really dark and, and generally like, absurdist, I feel like that’s the closest thing I have to a religion is just appreciation for absurdity.

Helen Todd: Well, and we did have a talk before this episode to, to keep everything PG-13. So we’ll do our best to adhere to that today.

Phil Gable: So it’s not gonna sound that dark today, but next time there’s a show or a show or something, if you wanna like post that and, yeah. People can come experience the darkness, but then when they feel better when they leave. Yeah.

Helen Todd: And, you know, you’ve been in the advertising agency, you know, for the bulk of your career, starting off as a copywriter, then going into creative director.

Do you have, how do you think about your creative process? Do you is there a certain approach or method to the madness that you have that you can share with us today?

Phil Gable: The most scientific way I can put it is, is kind of think about stuff for a while. I do find moving around is sometimes helpful, like if you’re stuck.

They’ve done studies that suggest like, if you’re walking around, that gets things going. And if you’re thinking about it while you’re in a car, that’s even more effective than walking. I once had the misfortune, I mean honor of appearing in an episode of a reality show where they were trying to like show what it’s really like in ad agencies.

And the producer beforehand came to me and was like, I wanna know, like, tell me when the moment’s gonna happen, when somebody’s gonna like, run across the office and be like, I’ve got it. And I was like, never.

Cause what’s probably gonna happen is they’re gonna think about it. They’ll think of something in the shower and write it down, be like, eh, and then they’ll show it to me in my office and I’ll be like, eh, this one’s pretty good. That one’s less good. Take this one and do more stuff with it.

As a creative director, I believe in trying to, like, you don’t wanna oversteer. If I had to document it, I think the best, actually the best explanation was Bill Pullman in the Zero Effect. When he talks about, there’s a scene where he says, he talks about having to document the method and people should just look that up.

It’s about 12 minutes in, I think.

Helen Todd: Yeah. We’ll, we’ll put that in the show notes. Go to creativitysquared.com and you’ll get all of this. You could tell you’re talking to like an advertising and marketing person in this episode, more so than some of our other episodes.
Phil Gable: Yeah, yeah. I don’t, yeah, I don’t have a, I don’t have a, if I.

Yeah, I’m suspicious of anybody who says that they have a really specific method.

Helen Todd: It’s either beta or theta flow that you’re talking about where the brain is more creative and not in the noise of the day-to-day consciousness stuff.

Phil Gable: Oh.

Helen Todd: And that’s why when people are like going to bed or in the car, like you’re in a different brainwave and that’s where the creative ideas come. There’s science behind that part.

Phil Gable: I do hate noise and I don’t really like to sleep either, so that makes sense.

Helen Todd: That’s funny. Okay, so the advertising industry, you’ve been in it for 25 years or so. How has it changed or how have you seen it change over that time, especially in this interesting moment that we find ourselves with AI as this new big disruptor that we’re on the precipice of, or in the, at the beginning of, I should say.

Phil Gable: Like, how it’s changed generally it would be like, that would be like four or five hours. You know, it goes through cycles where like, for a while, like fun and then. Everyone’s like, no, don’t do anything fun.

There was like, yeah, there was actually a period around 2007, 2008 when there were articles appearing that were describing the phenomenon as like sadvertising where suddenly it’s like, yeah, suddenly like all the commercial, all the TV commercials got like really serious and people wanted to like address like really heavy, and like do, pulling on the heartstrings.

Which like, I, you know, I mean if somebody’s paying me I can do it, but I prefer to stay away from that kind of thing and do things that are funny cuz people, those are things people want to see again and again.

I think currently what I’m noticing is, I mean, everybody’s freaking out for all kinds of reasons. Like, it’s getting, budgets are tighter, things are tense, and then, yeah, people freak out a lot about AI and having things written by AI, and what does this mean?
I’m not, I’m not as worried about it. I find it to be like a handy tool. It’s gonna take a while before, like, it can do like strategic and creative brand level thinking.

And at the risk of sounding like too artsy fartsy, like, it’s gonna be a while before it can like act. You can tell it like, Write something that’s actually funny and have it deliver.

Because it’s going out and it’s sending like its magic robot tentacles out to like grab references of things, right? Which is what makes it fun as a tool.

Cuz you can be like, rewrite this thing and the voice of that thing or that person who has like a really defined style and there’s a lot of reference for. If you’re doing something new, you’re doing a new campaign that has a very specific sensibility and you want it to write something that’s really good.

It’s, it’s not gonna be able to like pick that up. At least not yet.

Like I told it to rewrite the Declaration of Independence in the voice of Dr. Seuss. And I did that and it was like super fun.
Helen Todd: Do you wanna pull that up and read it?

Phil Gable: Yeah. It said, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal with certain unalienable rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Like, and it should have been a rhyme in there somewhere. But, we’re fed up, but we’re fed up with the king’s rule. His ways are cruel. We want freedom when we want it now. We’re done with taxes and being bossed around. We’re forming our own nation and we’re taking our own ground. We pledge our lives, our fortunes and sacred honor to this great land of ours, the United States of America.
We will not be silenced, we will not be swayed. We will stand tall and make our voices heard today. Exclamation point. That’s, and I’ve had to do. And it’s, it’s great at mimicking like a voice of something, at least on a superficial level.

Helen Todd: Mm-hmm.

Phil Gable: I told it to write a sermon about honesty and the style of Eminem.

I did that. I told it to write a 92-second monologue about meatloaf in the voice of Barack Obama, and it did that. It’s, you know, so it’s, it’s a really fun toy for that kind of stuff. And it’s like super handy if you’re like, if it’s like, take this product description and make it shorter, that kind of thing.

I’d be, if I was, if I was, if I, if, if I was making a living writing, like blog content for SEO purposes and things like that, I’d be a lot more worried. So I think it’s gonna replace like that kind of stuff. Things that you would usually throw to things that would usually be like interns or juniors or something.

When you get to like the more campaign ideas and brand ideas and stuff, like, I think it’s gonna be a while before it can do that if anything. Cuz it’s like you’re, you’re making a new thing and you’re, it has to like find references for that. And also just, you know, I periodically test it, of like, write this write a write a commercial for this thing and this kind of comedic style.
And it fails miserably. And it’s like, man, if you were relying on it to do that, you would like do it four or five times and be like, oh God, this is more trouble than just having a person who’s good at writing actually write it.

Helen Todd: And, and when you test it like that, do you, do you also see that as kind of like a brainstorming tool of like, let me see what it does and like I can play off of it?

Or just seeing how bad it is, it’s like, okay, let me just rewrite it and not do what that, what it generated at all?

Phil Gable: No, I haven’t found it useful as like a, not as a brainstorming tool. But I find that you, it’s a handy quick editor when it’s just like, you know, you’re working on a, on a deck and needs something to be slightly, slightly shorter, that kind of thing.

But, yes, it’s not, it’s not really good at generating like original. It, it generates like generic. If you, if it was a junior writer, you would fire it pretty quickly.

It’s like, if you had a, if you had a junior writer whose only goal was I want to be consistently employed, making things longer or shorter, or making slight tonal shifts. But even then it’s kind of like when you tell, you know, Alexi or Siri to do something and they do like this, like dumb literal interpretation of it.

A lot of times it’s like that if you’re like, make this letter sound more conversational and then it comes back with, you know, Hey there, what’s up? I’m, and, you know, yeah, it’s not, it’ll, it’ll get better, I’m sure. But like, yeah, right now it’s kind of, it’s, it’s good at a certain range of editorial functions, I would say.

Helen Todd: Mm-hmm. Well, it’s interesting that, I mean, it’s, it’s generative for sure.

Phil Gable: Yeah.

Helen Todd: And the way that it’s described is that it does create something new based on all the information that’s trained on. But you’ve said a few times, like it’s really not original ideas because of the generative nature of it.
So how, how do you know when an idea is good? Is it just like a gut instinct? How do you rate a good idea? Oh, it’s, or an original idea.

Phil Gable: It’s sheer God-like clairvoyance with a healthy dose of narcissism. I mean, it’s gotta be, it’s gotta be something that like really surprises you. Whereas like, if you, if you tell it like, even something where it’s like, come up with some scenarios for this kind of thing, it gives you things that it’s like, it’ll come back with a list and you’re like, damn it, these are the most predictable I could have, I could have done these, and I’m not even a computer.

It disappoints when you, when you, when you want it to give you like a, a like a really new angle on something, on like a concept. But if you’re just looking to fill in, yeah, like, I find it, it, it’s useful to like, fill in things. It’s like you’re in the middle of several things and it’s like, oh, I need a couple more examples of, blah, blah, blah. It’ll do that.

Helen Todd: Well, and what, what are some of the fun prompts that you’ve put in there? Because it sounds like you do have a lot of fun just playing with it and testing it out and seeing what it will do.

Phil Gable: Yeah, yeah. It’s like having, you know what it’s like having a, it’s like how if you have a, yeah, if you have a stove and wanna add like an extra burner and you have like this like side burner or hot plate or something, I feel like at least currently, like AI writing things are kind of your side hot plate of like, all right, just keep this warm.

Don’t, don’t try to do too much with it. Just, just keep it. Yeah. But I think like the image ones are fun cause it’s like combining like movie posters. Like I had it combine, Yeah, do like Taxi Driver meets Pretty Woman, Gone with the Wind and Star Wars and it combines those in like interesting, fun ways largely cuz they’re like still very screwed up.

You, they are, you know, people talk about it being like, oh, it’s great for like generating like a quick piece of concept art. And I think that’s where it’s like the skill is actually being able to write the prompt. Well, cause it’s like, I’ve had it do, I’ve had it be useful for that a few times, but then, I don’t know, last week was I needed a, oh, I needed a possum juggling peanuts, just a pencil sketch of it.

And it’s like, I don’t have time to do that. And this isn’t the real art. This is just like for reference. And you put that in and it comes back and there’s a possum with a squirrel tail. And then I. One with two heads, and you’re like, okay, no squirrel tails and only one head. And it kept coming back with like multiple limbs for some reason.

And the, the dumb, the dumbness is what makes it fun to me right now. Like those AI generated commercials that people have made on Runway for Pepperoni Hug Spot pizza.

Helen Todd: Well tell, tell us about that. And, and I’ll be sure to embed it in the some show notes too.

Phil Gable: Yeah. We should put a link and, and whoever the person is that actually made it.

But it’s like they made, yeah, somebody took it on themselves to make some genre commercials for like pizza and burgers and beer and it’s all kind of, but it’s all. It’s all, and they’re using like the Gen2 of Runway, which is like the next level, but its source footage is like old commercials from the nineties.

And then it just starts like sticking stuff together in ways that show like a fundamental lack of understanding of human anatomy for one thing. And then they have, yeah, and it’s, and, and it’s right now, it’s great for making things that are just like so, so dumb that they’re fun and so bad that they’re good.

I’m sure that’ll, I’m sure that’ll change.

Helen Todd: There, there was actually a film club I went to a few times when I lived in New York. I forget the name of it, but it was like the horribly fabulous films and they would pick really bad films to watch. And then on the other screens, tweets for like the best like pithy lines about the bad film.

And then if like certain things, like what, what was the film? Like Santa Slays, like every time there’s like a bad, or an object that’s used as a weapon, but that’s not actually a weapon, drink and they turn it into a drinking game, which was really fun.

Phil Gable: [unintelligible]

Helen Todd: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Phil Gable: And like there’s a great, I don’t know if they’re doing anything. There’s, there’s these guys in Brooklyn that run a thing called the Found Footage festival. And they just, they’re great. And you can, you can order, yeah, you can order videos from them. Just compilations. It started when, when one of them like, was working at a video store and found stuff that the store was throwing out and was like, this is all terrible, but, but funny terrible.

They compiled them and it’s like,yeah. I feel like, I feel like once those guys have access to one of the, one of the like better video AI programs and they can upload some of that weird shit, I think that’s gonna be a lot of fun.

Helen Todd: Yeah. I feel like there’s like a whole new, I don’t know, art genre to describe this of like, AI surreal absurdity or something. I don’t know.

Phil Gable: Well, I’ve heard people, I’ve heard people refer to it as AI hallucinations which I think is a good way to describe it.
Helen Todd: Yeah, well, I mean the, the term hallucination is really used to when it fills in the gaps of, like you mentioned earlier that if it doesn’t, if it’s not a super well known person, and this is a great way actually, if you’ve never played with ChatGPT to ask it about yourself.

Cuz when I did that myself, it came back that I had created a conference, a social media conference. I was like, that sounds cool, but I didn’t do it. It totally hallucinated and filled in those gaps. So it, it does that a lot and that’s why you can’t take it for, for face value and always check, double check when it comes out to make sure that it’s actually accurate.

Phil Gable: And when it’s going out and like grabbing, just whatever it can find. It’s like, there’s a few other, there are a few other, other Phil Gables in the country. It’s like there’s like two of them are like science professors. And so I was like, what does it do if I weren’t to write a bio?

And it described my crossover career of chemistry and advertising. And it’s like, well, no, you’re not, you’re not good for this yet either but probably will be. And then there’s the, oh, it’s, it’s fun to play around with the AI voice things.

Cuz it’s also in a similar way, it’s like if you want it to be like actually good and have nuance and soul, you need like a person doing it if it’s but they’re great for when it’s like you’re making something where it’s like, I need a voice that sounds kind of stilted and awkward.

And it’s like, and, and I guess if, if you were, if you’re doing something that was like purely informational and you wanted like a straight read of things and it was short, you could probably do that. But then it’s like, yeah, if you try to, it doesn’t, yeah. As an act, as an actor, it doesn’t get nuanced either.

And you can even like give it really specific instructions and it’s like, wow. Yeah. If you were a writer, I would fire you. And if you were a human, if you were a human actor, I would also fire you, but since you’re, you know, free or $20 a month or something.
But yeah, I think the AI voices are great for things where it’s supposed to sound stilted and awkward and kind of like comedically artificial, but you see these ads on LinkedIn and stuff for like, voiceovers, that’ll fool your boss. And it’s like, I mean, I don’t know. If these are really fooling your boss, then you should work somewhere else cuz your, your boss is really dumb.

Helen Todd: I love that you like lean into like embracing the awkwardness and the absurd absurdity of where the AI and the tools are right now

Phil Gable: Yeah, and I mean, and you know, if the, if the voice ones do like eventually get good, then that’s like the panic everyone has, I think in the industry of like, you know, if it does get good at that stuff. But I think that’s, in terms of writing, I think the stuff that it’s gonna get good at first is the stuff that I don’t really like doing anyway.

Helen Todd: I had a conversation with someone at South By on this cuz I think, you know, differentiating like brand strategy from performance marketing where you do a ton of A/B testing and generating lots of just like, I mean, to a certain extent it’s, it’s just grunt work variations of

Phil Gable: Right, right.

Helen Todd: And creative, whether that’s visuals or copy and it’s like, you know, it helps pay, pay the bills, but it’s not the sexiest, it’s not the most fun. And the gal I was talking to, she’s like, yeah, it’s almost like a relief that I don’t have to do all that anymore.

Phil Gable: It’s gonna replace at the same time that kinda thing.

Helen Todd: Yeah. Yeah.

Phil Gable: Or if, or if you’re on like, you know, a fifth round of revision for a headline and you know, there’s like one word that like, try as you might like. They’re not understanding why it needs to be that word and like, is there another word for this? And yeah, it’s, yeah. Give me several synonyms for this.

Like as a backseat or as a sidecar editorial assistant. It’s, it’s very handy, but it’s kind of like, yeah, it’s kinda like, it’s like the in terms of like the, like the full-time roles that that’ll replace. I don’t think those are things that people like really love doing anyway.

And then they’ll be the skills to like manage that and like fact check things and all that, I think will like, you know, there’s a cycle.

Helen Todd: file management. Where, where’s the AI that can handle all of the file management. I would love that.
Phil Gable: Yeah. There’s still somebody that has to be like, at the controls and there’s, there’s some people that wanna like, yeah, put tighter reins on that. But then it’s like, what are we gonna do?

Are we gonna, are we gonna make like rules in advertising and entertainment, like, like when you drive through New Jersey and you can’t pump your own gas at a gas station. Cuz they were like, well, we’re gonna protect these jobs. And it’s like, I don’t know, just, I mean, not to knock whatever anyone does for a living, but it’s like, I don’t know if, like, I don’t think those people love doing that.

And if they were, there’s, there’s other things they could get. So it’s like, it doesn’t make sense to like preserve the more like, grunt work things just to preserve them if, like new things will come up. It just takes a while for those things to come up.
And that’s, that’s a painful process. And that’s why we need, as you know, like that’s why we need to have like safety, social safety nets and transition things to help people transition when they’re, when those, those roles get replaced by stuff, but,yeah, like I was reading something about robot bartenders. There’s a few bars in Tokyo.

Helen Todd: Yeah, well, there was, well, a story of a woman in China taking a baseball bat to a robot in one of the hospitals because there was a shortage of nurses. And, you know, that’s a very vulnerable state, you know, being in a hospital and not being able to connect with a human.

But yeah, so that, you know, the reality of some of this stuff is, can be a little daunting.

Phil Gable: Yeah. I can’t imagine.

Helen Todd: Or sobering, I should say.

Phil Gable: Yeah. A robot, A robot bartender’s not gonna actually be fun. Like that’s part, that’s part of what, what makes, yeah, what makes a good bar. A good bar is like, who’s actually, who’s actually there.

In a hospital, the only thing I would like is if they could, if there was a, if they could simulate, like in Empire Strikes Back after Luke gets frozen to death and has to go into the bacta tank, and there’s that weird robot standing there fixing his hand and stuff. Like, if they could do that, that would be, that’s a really, that’s gonna be a really niche start.

Helen Todd: Well, yesterday was, well, at the time of the recording is May 5th. So yesterday was May the Fourth.

Phil Gable: Yes.

Helen Todd: So we’ll probably between some of the image generation that you did with Star Wars, but there, there’s gonna be a Star Wars theme I predict in today’s conversation.

Phil Gable: Yeah. Yeah. Nobody, yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s not always, yeah, it’s, it sounds like it’ll be cost efficient and helpful, but it’s like, yeah, this is, no, this is no Luke Skywalker in the bacta tank.

Helen Todd: Yeah. Well, in talking about the job replacements and new opportunities, at my parents’ house in East Tennessee, we still have a VHS player and we still have all of our old VHS tapes, which are kind of funny. But we have a making of the original Star Wars on VHS.

Phil Gable: Oh, wow.

Helen Todd: And it’s so fun to watch because how they did special effects, you know, they would be in, I’m, I’m not gonna use all the right terminology, but in one of the starships. And like they literally had people outside of what they were sitting in, like shaking them.

Phil Gable: Yeah, yeah.

Helen Todd: From the outside to get that, it was like, you know, flying through space. And now we have all these like, special effects, that like really replaces a lot of the original, really innovative ways that special effects were done too, you know.
Phil Gable: It was a real art and I, and I, I still always prefer like, if you can do it in camera, it’s just gonna be that much cooler and that much more interesting and it’s more, and it’s more fun.

But then it’s like, but also, yeah, I think an interesting analogy, like when, when CGI first started showing up, everyone was blown away, but then a few years it didn’t take long for CGI to get better and then everyone to be like, oh, oh, the CGI in that first set of Star Wars prequels was really awful.

And then there was a lot of CGI in commercials around that same time that seemed like, everyone was like, blown away until a year later and was like, oh, wow, that actually wasn’t that good.

Helen Todd: Yeah. I see the conversation almost more on Twitter, around Midjourney. Like, there’s like the images that come out of Midjourney and I have not played with it at all myself.

They have this like hyperrealism look to them where you can.

Phil Gable: Yeah.

Helen Todd: And, you know, they miss some of the depth of field and some of those elements. But it’s a lot of that look or aesthetic seems hyperreal and you can kind of tell, but it is getting better and better too.

Phil Gable: Yeah, no, a lot of the stuff people make on Midjourney is really fun.

But it’s like, yeah, to really use it, you have to get into their like Discord and it’s like a more complicated like interface than the things like,uh, Dream Studio and the like 50 other ones. But, but those, it’s like a lot easier to use, but the results aren’t as good. But it’s funny too, it’s like, even, yeah, it, like if you’re, you still have like a person coming up with like what the prompt is.

Like even Andy Warhol like didn’t, you know, it’s not like he did every single thing by hand. Like he had a whole staff that he would, you know, he’d have an idea and have this person, have these people make these pieces and then, you know, so it’s not, I, I feel, I feel like in the, yeah, in the right hands it’s, yeah, it’s a fun, it’s a fun party trick on at least.

But, and, and it’s a handy, it’s a handy tool to have, if you have like smart people like directing it. But you know, like anything, it’s like, you know, if dumb people use it to do dumb things, then that’s gonna be terrible. And, it’s, a pessimist is never disappointed.

Helen Todd: So you mentioned, we’ve mentioned some of the tools. Are there certain ones that you really like playing with or have any,are the pros and cons of some of the ones that, that you’ve experimented with?

Phil Gable: Oh, let’s see. I have a whole, I mean, I keep a whole set of like bookmarks under there. Oh, I ,Adobe Firefly and then, yeah, Microsoft made one.

I think they just put it on Bing for like, images, like are pretty good. And it, it’s, it’s so weird to like, go jump from one to the other and see which one seems to be, which one takes direction better.

And again, you can’t help but think of it like as a person of, like, you, you put it in and, yeah, I told it to make a,I told one of ’em to like generate an image of friends on a couch watching television.

And it did that. All of them had like three legs for some reason. And that’s when you’re like, why? Why? Why does it do, why does it do that? I, I, someone must know. I don’t know why it does that, but it’s like, yeah, yeah. It’ll be, it’ll, it’ll be like really handy for one thing and then you wanna use it to just make a quick image for something else and it’s like, oh God, I could have just like photoshopped this myself in less time than it took to like, try doing this.

But the, I think my favorite thing is the yeah, just when you do want like a, like a piece of a, like a background voice or like a voice that sounds, voices that are, voices that are awkward and in awkward exchanges. MurfAI is good for that kind of thing.
Helen Todd: So are there any projects or videos that you could tell us where you’ve kind of embraced all these awkwardness and put ’em together, just to kind of see how you’ve taken these and, and kind of run with them, I guess?

Phil Gable: Yeah for Smarty Plants, a cannabis brand, was making a lot of videos like, you know, they would, every time they had a new strain come out, and they wanted like a, like a 15 second, a 15 second video that just announces this strain is here now. And like, getting like, you know, it was, it’s like having a computer, a stilted, weird computer voice that you can then have instantly and then just like EQ it and stuff was like really fun.

It’s like, and you’re on like such a tight timeline.and those come out like delightfully. Yeah. That was just the right, the right kind of weird for the right kind of weird assignment.

Helen Todd: Which I, I watched that this morning cuz it’s on your website.

Phil Gable: Oh yeah.

Helen Todd: And I, I can see how the the target audience of Smarty Plants would really appreciate the video too.
Phil Gable: Well, the shorter, the shorter ones are computer voices. The long, the long one was a real person. And then the 30 second one were just, were free things I dug up from the Library of Congress. I feel like, strange, bizarre, strange archives, I think.

So if somebody can make an AI thing that can search more efficiently in like the Library of Congress archives, that’ll be, that’s on my wishlist for all of you engineer people.

Helen Todd: Yeah, and I’m sure I, I saw some stat, that’s now outdated, but it was on Twitter where the last 30 days there was some 2000 new AI tools that came out, so, whether they’re plug-ins or whatever at the, I mean, the speed at which these tools are, are coming out is, is wild.

Phil Gable: Yeah. Yeah. And I get, I get like newsletters that’ll have a bunch and like try to like, try ’em out. And like the quality is like widely varying.

There was like a simple one where it was like, it’ll, it’ll remove a background for, you know, 10 cents an image. And it’s like, I mean, I can also remove a background, but, all right. Well, and, and it sucked and it was, yeah, it was, it was, again, it’s like if this was a junior designer, I’d be like, what the fuck are you doing?

Why do you suck at this? But I’m sure there, I’m sure there’s some good background removal robots out there also.

Helen Todd: We use Canva for a lot of our clients at Sociality Squared. And Canva has a really good background remover in like one click. And I think, cuz it was so well and easy, I think Photoshop made it easier too to remove backgrounds really quickly or Adobe came out with a similar tool. So yeah, in, in that regard, it makes non designers being able to design a lot more accessible
Phil Gable: And even the current version of the current Gen1 version of like Runway makes it easy. There’s a lot of stuff in there that’s like, you can do all of these things in like Premiere or it can do it like a little bit faster there, like once you get into it.

So yeah, production-wise it’s like, there’s a lot of stuff that’ll just like speed up workflow, I think. But most, mostly I can’t wait to be get, like, access to Runway Gen2 to be able to start feeding in, like stranger source things and have it like really, really fuck things up.

Helen Todd: And, and this is for, why don’t you explain to people who don’t know what this is. This is a text to video that’s correct?

Phil Gable: Oh yeah, well, I mean, Gen2’s gonna be like pure text-to-video. Gen1 is still like, at least as far as I can tell so far. Gen1 is like, a Runway is like, you can put in like source things and then have like, it’s like Instagram filters, like they’re all things you can do in Photoshop, it would take you like slightly longer. But you can like, throw some filters on and put some things together and get like a good resolution output.

So that’s, that’s handy and practical. But like there was a yeah, the stuff people can do with Gen2 that’s just genuinely like new and bizarre I think is like the really, the really exciting part.

And using being able to, oh, it’s, and it’s interesting too, it’s like you can put, like in ChatGPT, you can totally tell it to like answer in this, you know, well known person’s like voice or persona and it’ll nail it.

And with some image programs you can say, like, I asked, I think Dream Time to or Dream Studio to make \remake posters for eighties sitcoms, as done by, you know,you know, Van Gogh and like other, like, great artists. And it nailed it. And it was like, wow, that’s a, yeah, that looks about right.

Like ChatGPT will, you can, you can tell it’s a, like, answer in the voice of this person or in this persona and it’ll nail it. Exactly. And then on image programs, like if you want it to emulate like a, like an art movement or something, or an artist from, that’s been dead for a hundred years, it’ll do it.

Yeah. The copyright thing gets tricky again cuz it’s like, yeah, just remake a still image of this as if it had been from a Wes Anderson movie and Adobe Firefly was like, oh no, we can’t do that.

A lot of times, the the prompts that I put in it comes back and says that it can’t do and then I have to like, revise it and be like, oh, it was cuz of that. And then it’s like, still no. I’m like, oh God. And it might take me four or five tries to like figure out what the offensive thing was to the program. Cuz I’m like, I thought this was perfectly fine. We, we’ll not post any of those prompts or images in the notes.

Helen Todd: I don’t know if that, if we want you on the content moderation team or not, Phil?

Well, I will say, I one thing I do wanna build out for the website is kind of like a report card or cheat sheet to know which tools are good at what from an ethical standpoint. Adobe is one of the most, Firefly is one of the most ethical in terms of how they train their data sets. Midjourney, not so much.

So that, that’s coming in the future and open invite for anyone to contribute.

Phil Gable: Oh yeah. Oh, that, that was one I found the other day too. Cause I wanted it to make like a, a cartoon,a cartoon of like a deer shooting back at a hunter, like a cartoon of it of a deer.

Helen Todd: You, you would see that on like a, like Looney Tunes way back in the day.

Phil Gable: Yeah, I’m pretty sure. I’m pretty sure Gary Larson actually had several of those, back when he was making the Far Side. And I was like, oh, make one of, and it’s like, oh, this violates all of our, and I don’t know. And the, and the way that, the way that they write, you know, there’s a person behind how they phrase your, your rejection letter from the AI program, your rejection letter of whatever you just asked for.

And it really comes across as self. That’s something they might wanna work on. It really comes across as like, they’re trying to make you feel bad for even asking. And I’m like.

Helen Todd: Hh, I, I’ve had one of those experiences I felt like a parent was like, you know, shaming me to a certain extent.

Phil Gable: Yeah

Helen Todd: It was like, this is a very obscure and niche question that da da and violates terms of service, da da da, da. I was like, oh, geez, I’m put in my place.

Phil Gable: Yeah. yeah, when, yeah, when Adobe shot down my, my armed deer, it was like, we’re not allowed to advocate violence and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Similarly like, ChatGPT, I was like, hey, it’d be funny to like, see what it does with like, yeah: write a letter to Lindsey Graham advocating that we teach witchcraft in public schools. And it came back and it was like, oh no, I can’t do that to try to influence like public policy. And, and it’s like, oh, oh, you thought I was serious?

Like, I was just gonna take, you thought that. So that’s another one where it’s like, there’s a, there’s a, there’s a, there’s a sarcasm gap.

Helen Todd: Mm yeah.

Phil Gable: That has not been figured out yet.

Helen Todd: Sarcasm’s hard, hard to understand, you know, via text anyway, for humans to understand all the time and pick up the nuance of that. So for machines to figure it out when humans miss it all the time, you know, I think that once the machines understand sarcasm, maybe that’s when we should get a little bit more worried.

Phil Gable: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it’s such a weird, it’s such a weird moment of people trying to like, you know, people all around the whole spectrum trying to like censor things by other people.

And then it’s like, we have to like, decide, how the robots are gonna censor things and what, and it’s like, well, my ray of sunshine is that is just, that is just gonna be a massive, a massive fuckfest that no one can really figure out.

Helen Todd: Get the popcorn. Well, and I guess because, you know, with some of these tools, I think there’s a difference playing with them personally and then maybe using them, especially with all the lawsuits happening around the copyrights for client work
Phil Gable: Yeah

Helen Todd: Or commercial purposes.

Phil Gable Yeah.

Helen Todd: Do you, do you differentiate the two or are you transparent with clients if you do use AI at all in any of your projects? Or how, how do you think about that or if at all? The Oh, af

Phil Gable: For sure. Yeah cause if I’m using it as like, like an editing tool. It’s like no one, yeah, for the, like, for the ki stuff that I do, like, no one cares that I like used a thing to make this slightly shorter.

But there’s not, yeah, it’s, it’s not good at any functions yet. Right now it’s, it’s not good at any of the functions that people are like actually paying me for.

It’d be, yeah, if you were, like, if you were purely like an editor, that would be like a different, that would be a different thing, I think. But yeah, I think for it’s like I give, I give all the AI things, like I give all of the programs five stars for personal amusement.

Helen Todd: But if they were interns, you would fire them all.

Phil Gable: Oh, for, yeah, for interns. There would only be a few I would keep around. And, yeah, yeah. It’s like, yeah. And I have had clients where like, like during a meeting they tried, I don’t know, it’s like we’re, like, going over something and during the meeting somebody was like, well, ChatGPT just wrote this.

I’m like, well, yeah. And it shouldn’t have, but it did.

Helen Todd: So, but you are hearing that at meetings already, like, is that, is it annoying to like.

Phil Gable: Phenomenally. Phenomenally annoying, but it’s like, by the time, by the time, by the time someone, like, by the time someone asks, like ChatGPT to do it, like, that line has already been butchered beyond all repair anyway.

So it’s like, I find it annoying, but not like, yeah, not, not infuriating.

Helen Todd: Not threatening for your job yet.

Phil Gable: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The stuff that they wanted, the, the stuff that they, the stuff that they wanted to write is stuff that like, I don’t wanna write. Where my ethical objection wouldn’t be that you’re having a computer do it, my ethical objection is, you shouldn’t make anyone read that.

That’s too, that’s too. Making, making the public, subjecting the public to something that boring is not okay. And I don’t care if you’re paying a person to do it, if you’re having a computer do it for free. That’s just boring shit that like no one should have to read.

And I blame you, marketer for wanting something that bad.

Helen Todd: Yeah.

Phil Gable: Clients do get the work they deserve, I find, you know, no matter who’s doing it, they get the work they deserve.

Helen Todd: Yeah. And yeah. And you get what you pay for too.

Phil Gable: Yeah.

Helen Todd: If you’re paying $20 a month for ChatGPT to be your copy editor.

Phil Gable: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very true. Yeah. The really good ones that want something for, yeah.

Helen Todd: Well, one, I mean, one thing that I’ve definitely thought about is, you know, there’s already so much content that exists and I mean, we’ve heard before in the social media industry, like feed the content beast to play to the algorithms and stuff.

Phil Gable: Oh God

Helen Todd: And now these tools, yeah, are gonna, you know, really just make the output of all this creative that much more easy. So we’re gonna have flood of even more creative. So it either puts it on the onus

Phil Gable: Oh God yeah.

Helen Todd: to have even better content to stand out or potentially on the tools themselves, on the algorithms to surface it.
So, I don’t know. Yeah, the flood of content on top of what already exists. I’m kind of like trying to figure out how that’s going to play out in some of the different scenarios.

Phil Gable: Oh for sure. Oh dear God.. Oh yeah. I see, I see nothing but doomsday scenarios there.

Helen Todd: You say it so, with a, with a laugh though. This is why people are getting off social media.

Phil Gable: I know.

Helen Todd: That’s the real.

Phil Gable: Cuz, yeah. So it’s like, so like the, now I was, I was talking to someone recently who has a, a media company about doing some creative stuff, and he had mentioned like, you know, I want somebody that can do, that’s familiar with like, using AI tools.

And I was like, oh yeah, yeah, cuz you can use it to like edit a piece of long copy, edit a deck, make a, a comp image for something. There’s, there’s useful, efficient ways to do that.

And, and you could even for like, for like social posts, use it to make some like weird, deliberately weird, odd stuff that, that people would enjoy seeing.

But then he sent me a link to some other AI tools and was like, I think these are great. And it was all just like, it was essentially just like templates where you could, like, I’m advertising this kind of thing and here, here’s a template, here’s an image. What kind of line do you want on there?

And the stuff that comes out is just like so painfully generic. And it was like, oh yeah, I don’t wanna be involved in this or with anyone who wants this to happen. Cuz it’s the, the amount of, it’s like the amount of every, like the content race, there’s already so much bad content by humans. And then now it’s gonna be like a supercharged arms race to like flood the internet with even more like low-quality content.

Helen Todd: And potentially incorrect content. Cuz if you have copywriters who don’t have expertise in.

Phil Gable: Yeah.

Helen Todd: like the SEO, you know, blog posts or web content that are putting it out and they don’t catch, when the tools do hallucinate,

Phil Gable: Yeah.

Helen Todd: that’s gonna open up a whole new can of worms of just misinformation, you know, flooding the internet, which I’m sure is already happening for, for people who are using it and don’t have the subject matter expertise to, to know the difference if it’s hallucinating or not.

Phil Gable: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s like we already saw, like even in the early days of the internet, like when people figured out that they could have these, you know, like click farms to like game the system for, you know, media effectiveness. And like now those are automated with bots. And so it’s like, man, it’s like, it, it turns into like the old lady that swallowed the fly.

It’s like, so we’re gonna make all the, there’s gonna be all this easy to generate, cheap to generate like low quality content that no humans actually wanna read. But then other companies will make some bots that will pretend to be humans to read that. And it’s like, you know

Helen Todd: We’re just making content for the machines to consume and then.

Phil Gable: Yeah, yeah.

Helen Todd: give us misinformation if we actually come across it.

Phil Gable: Yeah. That’s, that’s the ray of sunshine is the army of the army of fake humans will absorb all of the content made by all of the other fake humans. And then it’s like, well, all right, that can just, that universe can live over there.
The test, the things to prove that you’re not a robot, like are so weird and easy that it’s like, man, why haven’t the robots figured out, how do I identify stoplights yet? That’s really weird to me.

Helen Todd: Well, Twitter’s a whole new hot mess these days. Like how they never solved the bot problem .

Phil Gable: Yeah

Helen Todd: cuz it’s so bad. But it’s, that’s, you know, one of many, many problems with Twitter these days, but yeah. The bots and the spammers and the hackers like with these new tools yeah. It’s, that’s, that’s not gonna be fun.

Phil Gable: Yeah. Yeah. But I think, but there’ll be a lot of jobs in managing the robot armies, I think. That’ll be fun.
Helen Todd: Yeah. And you know, something else that I’ve been thinking about is also, you know, you mentioned AIing yourself is the new Googling yourself, but I’ve heard in so many conversations where people are just going to ChatGPT to get answers over Google just because you don’t have to sift through a ton of results, it’s not really selling you stuff, or the Google ads are. And then what does that mean for.

Phil Gable: Oh.

Helen Todd: for the SEO industry

Phil Gable: Yeah

Helen Todd: And to be discoverable for businesses to be found and searched. You know, that, that has really interesting implications.

Phil Gable: And it is, it is really good, I dunno if I mentioned that. It’s, it’s super handy writing when it’s like, when you get into like, it’s, oh, also it’s like the new Google search history is like looking back at like what you’ve asked ChatGPT.

Cause I was doing that before this and I was like, I asked it that. Wow, that’s even by my standards, that was, I don’t know what was happening there, even by my very low standards of what’s acceptable.

I, but yeah, you can go back and see what you’ve asked, ChatGPT before, and it keeps all those handy. But it’s, it’s great, great writing tool when you’re like, yeah, for some reason, a while ago I needed a lot of synonyms for something, but I needed only ones that started with the letter P.

And it’s like,you know, it didn’t change my life, but it saved me probably five minutes of going, I would normally go to like, you know, dictionary.com, thesaurus.com, something synonym finder. But ChatGPT is yeah, it’s a great handy little synonym generator and that kind of thing.

Helen Todd: I will say I still like, I use wordhippo for my synonyms, and I actually think sometimes it does a better job than ChatGPT.

So that’s, you know, some of the other tools that, you know, TBD on their lifespan, but there are some niche ones out there that are still good and outperform ChatGPT and from my viewpoint at least.

Phil Gable: What I also think is funny is like you, when you correct it and you tell it to like generate it again, and you even write sort of like a, and you kind of, and then you can kind of scold ChatGPT and be like, no.

Helen Todd: And it apologizes like this. I’m sorry you didn’t get it. I didn’t deliver what you wanted.

Phil Gable: Yeah, yeah. It’s gonna be terrible for people that like learn to manage ChatGPT before they manage actual humans. And then they’re suddenly gonna be like, ah, humans aren’t quite, humans don’t grovel immediately when I tell them they’re wrong.
Helen Todd: Oh God, this, this is, yeah, human etiquette and conversation.

Phil Gable: Yeah.

Helen Todd I worry. I haven’t thought about that scenario before, Phil.

Phil Gable: That’s what I’m here for. Giving people new thing, new things to worry about and stay up late at night.
Helen Todd: Oh, I guess,on that note, do you, are there, are there things that keep you up at night, things that excite you? Maybe some predictions or wishlist with the tool? You can answer all or any one of those.

Phil Gable: Oh, AI related things that keep me awake at night?

Helen Todd: Yeah.

Phil Gable: Aside from, aside from, aside from humanity’s general trajectory. Uh, yeah.

Helen Todd: Yeah. It’s, it’s too early in the morning for, for that conversation. That’s another that, that, that’s one in New York with beers in hand.

Phil Gable: I do, I, like, I, I, I enjoy the, like, yeah, it’s like having a new internet again. Like the, like just the sheer wormhole of like, you know, can you rewrite this as if it were so-and-so, and you can use it.

You can, you can, and using it to be like, you know, role play this conversation with me as if you were so and so, and it’s like, wow, that’s odd. That feels oddly correct. You know, not always perfect.

Like I, when I asked it to do a dialogue between Alice Cooper and Jay Leno about wood and iambic pentameter
It got the iambic pentameter right exactly. But the references it, the, the way that it embodied Alice Cooper was like, very superficial, just kind of like mentioning music.and I don’t think it really got Jay Leno’s voice at all.

Helen Todd: Did, did you tell it that?

Phil Gable: Yeah.

Helen Todd: Did it improve after you scolded it?

Phil Gable: Its lack of understanding of Alice Cooper, I thought was so disturbing that I just, I just abandoned that one. I was like, you don’t even

Helen Todd: Okay

Phil Gable: get a second check.

Helen Todd: You’re fired. This, this one AI intern is fired.

Phil Gable: Yeah, like it had, one line was, it had, Alice,oh no. It starts with Alice Cooper.
A wood, so strong and sturdy, how you please the eye with your rough bark. And hue so brown. Your grain so varied, makes artful ease and forms of furniture and structures sound. And then later Alice picks up saying, wood also holds a dark side. It burns with fury, wreaks destruction wild. But still its beauty cannot be denied. And music too. It’s used to make sound

And it’s like, yeah, Alice Cooper would’ve said, had like something a lot more specific and a lot deeper. And then it’s like, oh, Jay says yes, guitars and drums are made of wood. It’s of [unintelligible]. That’s truly understood. And it’s like, Hmm. Yeah, really. I think that was my most disappointing experience so far.

And that kept me up for longer than it should have.

Helen Todd: What was it because of the output or was it, maybe I didn’t ask the prompt right? You know, that’s, that’s a new existential question.

Phil Gable: Oh no, it made me worry that like, it was failing to find enough Alice Cooper reference material on the internet to really be able to simulate Alice Cooper.

Helen Todd: Oh. So it wasn’t trained properly on Alice Cooper.

Phil Gable: Yeah.

Helen Todd: And that’s where the machine failed: its education on Alice Cooper.

Phil Gable: Yeah. So that was,that was, that was sad for me, and it made me weep for great music that may, you know, go extinct one day. But, yeah, no, I, it’s, it’s like I kind of worry about what it means for people writing some kinds of copy blogs and, and product stuff. But then I do think that there’ll be other things for those people.

So then I worry about other stuff for a while. And then, and I worry, I guess my biggest fear is like, yeah, like the like clients that would be like, well, I asked ChatGPT to write it and it said this.

So it’s like, if you’re, if there are clients who aren’t good at recognizing good from bad and they don’t realize how bad some of that output is, that makes me worry. Like, but that, but that parallels like, but I’m always worrying about the decline of appreciation for quality, across every human endeavor.

So, in that sense, I’m not, I’m not losing any more or less sleep than I was before AI happened, but I feel like I’m losing sleep in, in more interesting, more varied ways.

Well, and also, but some of, in, some of it’s in good ways because just staying up and going down the weird rabbit holes of like, and I can make it do this and I can make it do this, and yeah, it’s almost like, it’s like you, you have a 24/7, you have a 24/7 puppet.

And I, oh, I asked it to write a sestina about gardening, which is this, like super obscure, poetic form that all revolves around like six as it’s like six line, six stanzas with six lines each. And then it’s a really complicated meter and everything.
And it did that just like so fast. And I was like, oh, that’s amazing. And it gave me comfort that like, it was able to know what any specific poetic form was. That’s funny.

And I worry about, oh, I wonder and worry about what the hell it means for like, the future of as a parent thinking about the future and then thinking about what would I have done if this was around in high school? It’s like, wow, that would’ve sped up a lot of stuff. And so then you think about like, well, it, they’re gonna be, yeah.

So the, the task of like, you know, digest this and then summarize it is gonna be, you know, the computer can do that for you and they’re trying to make things where they can detect it and watermark it and all that stuff. But yeah, students will be able to like, so like a lot of fundamental parts of like your English education, like will be not, will be things that are easily skippable.

And I feel like that’s gonna result in deficiencies in like kids’ language ability eventually, which is bad. But then it’s like if they’re able to, like, they’re no longer, yeah, they’re not gonna spend time writing like reports that just regurgitate things.
So it’s like, but then they have this fucking tool in front of them to like go make, it’ll be more about like making new things. So then I feel like a little bit better. And then I’ll get a news alert on my phone that something else terrible just happened. And I’m like, okay, now I can, now I can go back to my state of generalized angst.

Helen Todd: Yeah.

Phil Gable: I don’t, I don’t wanna feel too good about the world for too long, but I mean, it’s gonna, it’s gonna have like huge because it’s like you think about,I don’t know a lot of college, at least when I went to college back in. Ancient times. It was like the, like social experience and like the learning how to learn was such a big part of it, but now that’s gonna be like a whole different thing.

So, and they’ll be able to like ask ChatGPT to tell them about things and like, tell me how this works and tell me how that works in ways that like it’s, and it’s quicker than, yeah, Google will give you a bunch of search results and half of those will be clickbait. Whereas ChatGPT will just start telling you, but then you don’t know if it hasn’t been fact checked.

So God, God knows. Yeah. See, I see. I just started to feel good about it and then quickly found a reason to feel bad about it.

Helen Todd: In real time. The thought process

Phil Gable: Yeah.

Helen Todd: Going through Phil’s mind.

Phil Gable: Yeah, yeah.

Helen Todd: I mean one, one thing, I mean, when I was in college social, the social media industry did not exist. You know, I got a major in marketing

Phil Gable: Yeah.

Helen Todd: And then I went straight from undergrad to grad school, and that was right when social media was opening up to businesses and becoming an industry. But you know

Phil Gable: Yeah.

Helen Todd: you didn’t go to school at that time to, you know, be a social media marketer by any means.

Phil Gable: Right, right.

Helen Todd: So I think about that, you know, that there’s job titles that don’t exist today, that will exist because of these tools. Like I went to school for marketing.

Phil Gable: Yeah, yeah.

Helen Todd: Before social media was a thing. So we don’t even know all of the the new jobs and the new titles and you know, what, what this, what these tools will open up to.

Phil Gable: Yeah. That’s kind of a, that’s kind of a thing too, cuz it’s like I, I have had the thought that like, I want my kid to start learning.

Like the sooner he starts learning about AI stuff, the better. But then, you know, my wife and I have different, different opinions about screen time and screens. Screens. He watches a lot of stuff, but he picks really good stuff.

Helen Todd: Well, naturally he’s your son, Phil.

Phil Gable: There’s a whole great world of Lego Star Wars content and like lots of really good things.

And I’m like, I’m, I’ll be dis, I’m gonna worry and be disappointed when he is picking like, shitty shows to watch. In the same way I’m disappointed in and judgemental of people that watch any show that I think is shitty.

Helen Todd: But, but the, maybe they’re enjoying it because it is bad in the same way that you enjoy the, the bad AI outputs, maybe the pleasure, the pleasure in bad content.

Phil Gable: Mm-hmm.

Helen Todd: I’m sure there might be a German word for that.

Phil Gable: Those shows need to get worse though. Like, and that’s, and that’s what I’m looking forward to, is being able to like, yeah. Take, take, yeah. When, when, when I can get to like Runway Gen2 and have it make, yeah, combine several of the different like period shows where it’s just English people stumbling into rooms and being shocked and then stumbling into other rooms.

Helen Todd: Yeah, there’s like hate watching, which I think is different than watching something bad for the pleasure of it.

Phil Gable: Oh, that’s true, that’s true.

Helen Todd: Because it’s very funny.

Phil Gable: That’s true.

Helen Todd: One thing I’ve always loved about advertising is that it is a reflection of society or where society wants to go.
So I think it’s a really interesting moment for advertisers of how they’re showcasing brands and how they’re saying that in this moment of time and where the reflection is and where the maybe where we wanna go to. Do you have any ideas or reactions or thoughts on that?

Phil Gable: Well, the degree to which it’s a reflector you know, just depending on the day and depending on what I’m watching at the moment, I find alternately comforting and horrifying.

And it just vacillates between those two constantly. So I dunno. I, I think, I think in the, I think once it picks once, yeah, once all that AI tech picks up and gets a little better, I think it’s gonna be used to make, yeah, I think too many people are, but it’ll be sort of like when CGI came out and there was a rush, like, because the entertainment did, industry did first, there’s gonna be a rush to make, there’s gonna be a rush to use it. And the same way we look back now at like commercials that had heavy special effects in like the 90’s and early 2000’s and we’re like, oh God, that was, that was impressive then.

I think 10 years, 10 years from now, if Humanity still exists. I think we’ll look back at advertising from the, the early AI influenced advertising and be like, oh God, remember when we did that?

Hell were we thinking? But then it’ll get better and hopefully be used to make, I I don’t really think it will. Hopefully it’ll be used to make better things, but it’s like, ultimately it’s like the AI’s gonna be a mirror of humanity for the good parts and the bad ones. And you, you know, which one I think is probably going to win.

But, I think that’s like, that’s like the end. But then we can all sing Billy Joel’s “We’ll All Go Down together” as everything, as the world burns. And so that’s something that’s a moment of togetherness before, a moment of togetherness, before the great beyond
Helen Todd: It is a funny thing about human nature that sometimes it takes a catastrophe or the threat of a catastrophe or hitting rock bottom for like the wake up call to happen and to pivot and shift.

Phil Gable: Yeah. Yeah.

Helen Todd: And I, I think one of my hopes, and you know, I’m, I would say a realist, but an optimist at heart, is that we shift course or change course before, you know, the hitting the total rock bottom. And that’s just a matter of, you know, will to make it happen

Phil Gable: Well, it’s always like, it’s always like a tail of like the correction kind of.

There’s like that whiplash and the correction kind of follows. It’ll be too late, it’ll be too late, and then it’ll be too much, and then we’ll start doing something else that we need to correct. But I think as time goes on, like the, that I, if I had paid more attention to trigonometry, I would know which kind of wave to call it.

But eventually that, that wave will get like more and more extreme. And so eventually where’s the breaking point of the tail being just taking too long to like catch back up. And that’s when the world ends. So something, something exciting to watch for

Helen Todd: God

Phil Gable: Good indicators.

Helen Todd: Well, any closing thoughts that you wanna leave our, our viewers with and listeners?

Phil Gable: Besides, besides the world ending?

Helen Todd: Or rhubarb. My safe word for today’s episode? Rhubarb. If we get too dark, that was my safe word.

Phil Gable: I mean, before, before the next, before the next Dark Age begins, I think, I don’t know. Yeah, I think the amount of, the amount of just, delightfully weird shit you can make experimenting, I think is gonna be super fun. And it’s like I’m, I’m waiting for like, the image generators to be able to do things that like, are in slightly more high res.

Like, the Pepperoni Hug Spot thing I will watch over and over again. And then there was another one, there was another one for beer, another one for like pizza nuggets that are all. And that’s the weird thing is it’s like those are, those are so funny because they’re so bad, but they’re bad in ways that like, no, like a person would never have thought of.

Like, no ma yeah. Nobody would’ve thought to make like the weird, like distortions that happen in those things.

And yeah, I think once I don’t know, like I’ll, I’ll be less interested in AI once it’s like, you know, really, really good. But I feel like right now it’s like we’re in like the yeah, the really fun playground phase where it’s like you can you can use it to make and not everyone like fully appreciates it, but those are Yeah.

Like people that don’t look at Pepperoni Hug Spot and find it enertaining are not people I wanna be around anyway. So in a way it’s kind of, it’s a, it’s a help, it’s a helpful social, it’s a helpful way to like, you know, identify who you really wanna be friends with, is like, did you think Pepperoni Hug Spot was hilarious or not?

Helen Todd: So if you’re considering working with Phil, watch that first.

Yes. Make sure you like

Helen Todd before reaching out to him

Phil Gable: make sure you like Pepperoni Hug Spot. And so I think,yeah, I think despite, despite the eventual, you know, possible nightmares and pitfalls. I think there’ll be, yeah, I think there’ll be a lot of fun to be had, playing around making weirdly, weirdly intelligently dumb things.

Helen Todd: So before, before Doomsday or Armageddon, we can all enjoy Pizza Hug Spot.

Phil Gable: Yeah, yeah We’ll have, like the, like the most enjoyable side effect of artificial intelligence is artificial, artificial, inadvertent dumbness. And the fact that, like if you had told it to, like, yeah, God knows what would happen if, like, you gave it a prompt to like try to make a pizza commercial with like disturbing disturbingly morphed human beings that like are connected to that are fused with the food that they’re eating.

Oh, but actually they, without saying, without going into detail, a lot of those image generators also now censor things that they used to not cause I was having a lot of I was having a lot of fun with prompts that you might call sacrilegious. And then suddenly one day it was like, oh no, we can’t do that.

And I’m like, oh, oh really? You used to be, you used to be cool, Stable Diffusion.

Helen Todd: You’re making Phil’s sandbox smaller.

Phil Gable: Yeah, yeah. So yeah, there’s the, there’s the large scale doomsday fears about what it means for society. And in addition to like the large scale societal problematic things that people worry about, I’m more worried about the short term where, yeah, some of the really, some of the really fun, weird shit that you can make, like, they’re like, oh, you can’t do that anymore. And it’s like, no, but this was, this was good, this was good fun, bizarre.

And they’re lumping, they’re lumping, they’re lumping the good bizarre in with the bad bizarre. And I feel like there needs to be a bizarreness czar appointed in the US by the Administration, and it should be me.

Helen Todd: Yeah. I feel like this is your next campaign poster for

Phil Gable: Yeah

Helen Todd: to your prompt.

Phil Gable: Yeah. Yeah. It’s like, I don’t have, I don’t have that much free time, but I’d like to donate as much of it as I could to, you know, really oversee the boundaries of what kind of, what kinds of bizarre things AI can make and just issue a rule.
It’s gonna take a lot of work. It’s gonna take a big team to like really streamline it for me every day so I can make decisions on that’s bizarre in a bad way. And that’s bizarre in a good way. But I really think, I really think I would be good at it. So
Helen Todd: I love, I love it. You’ve got Austin and I think Portland, Oregon, their city slogans are kind of like, keep Austin weird. Keep Portland weird.

Phil Gable: Yeah.

Helen Todd: don’t quote me on that. I’m pretty sure Portland has that too, but I know Austin does and

Phil Gable: Yeah.

And Phil’s slogan is true. Keep AI weird.

Phil Gable: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Helen Todd: Or keep AI bizarre.

Phil Gable: Yeah. Don’t be one of these killjoys that stops the hallucinations and makes it like, makes the imagery too accurate. Cuz that’s why Yeah, that’s why it’s fun. When it’s too good, it’s gonna be like, oh God, you’re like, you’re like a person.
I liked you better when you were, when you were a mys, when you were a mysterious, mysterious force for chaos. And if you’re not gonna do that, then you know, what do I need you for?

Helen Todd: Are, are humans too predictable then?

Phil Gable: Yeah, yeah, yeah. This was the great promise of, of AI is to help people appreciate, appreciate strange, chaotic things. So that’s my hope. That’s my hope and dream. In addition to being appointed the Bizarreness

Helen Todd: Well, on that note, Phil, it is always so much fun talking to you and getting a glimpse into your head and what goes on in there. So thank you for sharing with us today.

Phil Gable: Thank you for being willing to do that.

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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