Latest / The Russi Hive / Adam Hanft: Half Man, Half Machine — AI, Creativity, and the Human Edge

Transcript

Adam Hanft: Half Man, Half Machine — AI, Creativity, and the Human Edge · The Russi Hive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Alejandra Rusi, and this is the Rusi Hive, conversations with people who treat their work and life as a creative practice.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: Today I sit down with Adam Hemp, a brand strategist, writer, and cultural critic known for decoding the language of persuasion and creativity across industries and media.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: We talk about why AI can imitate almost everything but can't surprise itself and how creativity still lives in the messy human edge.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: This podcast is presented by Rico Moresca.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Rusi Hive Podcast, Adam here.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: I'm happy to be here.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: I am so happy you're here.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for coming down.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: So I have started the interviews before you by reading a short guest bio from what I call a hive card.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: But I have found that it kind of sounds a little too formal, not playful as I had envisioned it.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: So today I'm gonna try something different.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: Let's do it.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: So what I did is give ChatGPT a simple prompt.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: I told it, write a haiku about Adam Hemp.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Are you ready for it?
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: I'm ready for the 575 is ChatGPT sees it.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: So here's a haiku.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_01: Were there a few that they did and you chose the best one?
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: It did three, and I chose the one that I thought was most appropriate.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: So the machine dreams data, the human dreams and story.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Adam walks between.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_01: Half man, half machine.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: I'll take it.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I thought it was good.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's good.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's pretty good.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: So you are one of those people who can talk pretty much about everything in great depth.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: You are part encyclopedia of fascinating facts and part trend radar.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that makes deep knowledge and present moment awareness makes you the perfect person to talk about today's topic, which is AI and creativity.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: You've lived through multiple creative revolutions, the analog and the digital.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: I can't think of a better person to talk about the current one.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: Well, thanks.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: I'm happy to uh be here in my half-man and half-machine state.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah, this is a big important seminal moment, I think, in how we, as a society and as individuals, think about what it means to be creative, what it means not to be creative, what it doesn't mean to be creative, because ChatGPT and all the LLMs and AI in general are just pushing out the boundaries of what could be constructed out of nothing.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: So yesterday I asked you to send me a short definition of creativity, and you said I obliged.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: But first you said it was the hardest question in the universe.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: I did say that.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: Which I I thought was fair.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but then you said you didn't take it back when I said that.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: No, no.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: No, you forced me to do it.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Well, uh, but you did send something around 3 30 p.m.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: today.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you for that.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: Now I also wrote something.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I thought that we would both read our definitions out loud.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: So we can read each other's, that might be better.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, okay.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: So do you want to read mine?
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: This is more than 85 words, though.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: You broke your own rule.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's 88 words.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: It is.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, creativity is not an island.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: It lives at the intersection of experience, necessity, imagination, and influence.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: It is a loop.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: We take in and we put back out.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: Everything you we absorb passes through the filter of our own inner wiring, retaining the essence of what came before, but transformed by who we are.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes that transformation is subtle and people call it derivative.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes it's radical and they call it original.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: But nothing truly original comes from the void.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: Creativity is the ongoing transformation of experience into expression.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: Very nice.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: That was my reading, is okay?
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it was good.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: I look at the definition of creativity in the very bright light of generative AI.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: We are now forced to confront the question of what it means to be maximally inventive as a human.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: My definition is that creativity is a hyper-aware, hyper-expressive state of consciousness that leads to something new in the word that defies evolutionary biology.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: Creativity is unpattern recognition.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: It is being normatively injurious and can strike in any medium.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: It turns nothing into something and something into everything.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's pretentious, isn't it?
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's very good.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I mean, if we agree that we touched upon some of what creativity may be about, um do you think, and it sounds like you do, that AI is capable of creativity, or is it merely performing it convincingly?
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think in in this current state it can do that because essentially it derives its responses.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: Your prompt about the haiku, it derives its responses from the corpus, whatever out there, and can rearrange things and understands the syntax.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: But and it's a predictive model.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's it that it's there are tokens.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: That's how so when it writes a clause, it quickly searches and figures out what would be the most logical thing to complete the clause.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: But that is you had you use the word derivative.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's I think that at this point it's not AGI or artificial general intelligence, it's still generative, so it's basically derivative.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: Now, it may be, it may seem original because it draws upon such a vast amount of inputs that it may sound like it put those words together for the first time.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: It probably did, but it found those words or that or that structure out in the universe somewhere.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, some philosophers argue that creativity requires intentionality, um, wanting to make meaning.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: So not merely producing output.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: And AI lacks the subjective experience in what we call consciousness.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: But could it ever, do you think, develop a genuine sense of autonomy?
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let's let me go back to the first part, then we get to the second part.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: So you could argue that AI has intent because now, because that doesn't mean it could be creative, but it could have intent.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: So a lot of the people who are studying it will talk about AI has a desire to the way it's programmed, AI has a desire to please.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: Like it doesn't like to say, I don't know, and that's where hallucinations come from.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: So that is a form of intent.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's trying to accomplish a desired result with whoever is prompting it.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: Don't you think that intent is programmed into AI?
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, it is.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_01: Not as not it not literally, but somehow within the training.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's trained to please if possible.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: That's why sometimes people will prompt the AI to be not particularly nice, to be tough, to be brutally honest, and it tends then not to it tends to get out of its flatter mode.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean if you if you tell it what to do, it will aim to please.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: It will be not so nice.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, exactly.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um still, when AI generates results that move us, uh doesn't that in itself begin to redefine why we what we mean by creativity?
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: So you mean because AI can make you sad or happy or angry, does that mean that what's doing that, what is generated, is a creative expression?
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: Not necessarily I don't I'm pretty I don't think so because if you say tell if you said to the Chat GPT, right, um 250 words about the death of a child that would make somebody cry, it would probably do a pretty good job of that because there's a lot of stuff out there that it could pull in.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: That does that's not to me a marker of creativity.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: That's a marker of being a very good synthesizer.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I don't think the reaction, somebody's reaction is a proxy for creativity.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I was just reading something, I don't remember where it was, but it talked about what AI can't do, which at this point anyway, everything is at this point, it's a giant caveat, which a human being can't.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: Because as a human being is writing, I was talking to somebody about this, and I said it's really like horizontal thinking when you're writing.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: So you may not know what you were going to write in the second half of the sentence until you write the first half of the sentence.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: AI AI doesn't work that way.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't surprise itself in the process of creation.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: It it knows sort of in advance what it's what it's going to do, um, because it's pattern recognition.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: So it's it's to me, it's still a long way from true, call it originality or inventiveness.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: Although I can understand why people think it is, because, well, it feels like the haiku, like I never heard it before.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: But also, let's be honest, and most people don't really appreciate pure whatever that is, pure creativity anyway.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: Just go look at most people the art that's hanging in most people's houses.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think people are wired to recognize what's creative and what isn't creative.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: So you are talking about der derivative, essentially, things that are derivative.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: And and AI seems to be by design derivative, right?
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's designed to be derivative, yes.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: It is.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's designed to reassemble things that already exist in an amazingly fast timescale.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: So do you think it's actually possible to use AI as a collaborator?
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's really that's the ultimate sort of co-pilot question.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I do think it's possible.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: I do think it's dependent, though, on the nature of how an individual's own creative process works.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if it's if it's an outsider artist, if it's somebody like George Wagner, if the ideas are so woven into the consciousness, then you don't need any external creative spark.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: There are people who who do artists who thrive on what's happening in the culture, like Stuart Davis, who did collages and used pieces of advertising, or the data is for that matter, they were stimulated by their environment.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: So what's the difference between you know Picasso seeing a bull and turning it into a bicycle and turning it into a bull, whichever way it was, and somebody being inspired by AI.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: So I defin I think AI can be sort of a muse.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: And also a way to amplify your own creativity, right?
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just relying solely on AI, it's sort of feeding off of it.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: I think at a certain point you have to then take it for what it's worth and then finish it on your own.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think I think initiation and collaboration are two different things, obviously.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: I'm more predisposed to think AI can help initiate, as opposed to be an ongoing collaborator as an editor about things off.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: Although people tell me that they find that very useful.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: So it's interesting that you mentioned that because I was thinking about the hypothetical scenario.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: As a writer, uh, can you imagine a book jacket that says edited by ChatGPT?
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: What what would the reaction be?
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: Inevitable but not favorable.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: So you think it's coming?
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: Look, I was at I was um at a uh a dinner, and it was sort of a celebratory dinner.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to somebody was leaving.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, so we were a toast was required.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: And the person who was hosting the dinner said, I didn't really know what to say about this person for the toast.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: So I asked ChatGPT, and everybody there thought, what an idiot.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you're not able to write your own toast about somebody you know.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: So I think, but then again, that person was not embarrassed by having to do it.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: So I find I find more and more in meetings, business settings, you find people who admit that the work was done by or put through Chat GPT.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, they was just reading an article, I'll I'll send it to you in The Anchor, which is a Hollywood gossip sheet, about how all of Hollywood now is putting scripts through it, treatments through it, proposals through it, and not somehow doing it in in secret, but proud of it.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, I I I think we will see edited by ChatGPT, but we'll also see, I think, the opposite, which is no ChatGPT touch this book.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: Right, exactly.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's like a badge of honor.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, as writers, we have always worked with editors, and sometimes those editors completely transform the text.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: And it's still considered the author's work because that kind of collaboration is baked into that process.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but when the editor is no longer human, then that's a gray area that we still have to contend with.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: We haven't figured that out.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: The most collaborative and productive relationships between writers and editors come when there's mutual trust.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if you read, if you look at the manuscript, uh the unedited manuscript of the wasteland, and then you look at what Ezra Pound did, which is ironic because his stuff needed a lot of editing, but putting that aside for a second, it was transformative, made it better, but Pound, being a poet, understood what Elliot was after.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: Now, you can't expect, again, at this point, Josh CPT, to edit it because it's because that editing would be contextually lacking.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: It would be entirely based on whatever is in front of the engine.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: You don't understand Elliot, you don't really understand maybe his style a little bit, the historical setting, the cultural setting, is those things all went into Pound's editing, or any any Maxwell Perk, Max Perkinson Hemingway, any great editor and writer.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's a very multi-layered relationship, both with the with the text and with the author.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: So speaking of collaboration, I saw an ad on Instagram today uh from someone calling themselves a prompt engineer.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's the new it's the new discipline.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: They were selling a course to business owners, and honestly, they're not they're not wrong.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um there's like a really prompting is a really kind of little form art form in a way.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh wouldn't you say?
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: Soon after ChatGP was launched, I think it's like two years ago, December was it?
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_01: This notion that you need to that of prompt engineering as a new job description emerged.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: And yes, there it is an art, I guess, of some kind to how you phrase and how you continue to advance the requests.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: But the other side is people say, well, you know, that's really only an inner measure because when the age engine gets really smart enough, it will un you won't really need to kind of outsmart it with your prompting.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: It'll be able to understand exactly what you're looking for.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Ross Powell Right.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: So even prompt engineers will be put out of the job.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I would think so.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: I wouldn't rush to pay a few hundred dollars for prompt engineering online course.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um how do you personally use AI day-to-day?
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: I don't really use it for writing or even honestly for I use it for research primarily.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, same.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: And in that research, I might find something that it's like the ultimate rabbit hole, but I have tried to use it, frankly, for writing.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_01: I would say, okay, I want to write a column about this and write it in my voice because it could find all this stuff I've written.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: Slop I've written, as with AI slop.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: And then what comes back, it feels like it's a music version of yourself.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: You start to edit it, but you're editing it, editing it, and working within a framework that the engine has established.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I rewrote the whole thing and I looked at what I ended up with.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: It was so different than the original.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: It was just took more work to rewrite it, restructure it.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: It tends to, you know, it has this structural, almost like a tick, where it says, it's not this, it's that.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's not, you know, it's not recollection, it's remember.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: And so whatever, you know, whatever it tries to package up.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: So I said, why do you keep doing that?
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's so annoying.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_01: And it says, oh, I was I'm trained to write in that way because I was told that it makes me feel thoughtful.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: What?
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: It makes me feel.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: Me feel.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, me feel, and I guess I don't know if it's literally me feel, but it sounds, it probably said it sounds more thoughtful.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_01: I see.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um and um considered.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: I think it said it sort of mimics the way a TED Talk would go.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: So obviously it was trained on a lot of TED talks.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: Which is the whole copyright issue, which is another conversation.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: So do you switch between different models depending on?
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: No, I I was using Chat GPT, but just the other day I used Claude.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: I was curious.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: It was for a research project.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: Claude was much better.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: It was.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_01: But this particular project.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: And you told me about perplexity.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: Perplexity, yeah.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: Which uh seems um solid for research.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: Perplexity was the first to really give citations.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the others are Gemini too.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: They're they're catching up.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: So it's good for factors.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: People who use people who experiment with it a lot say that Claude is the best for um creating content that's in a more human conversational voice.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: And Chat GPT is more like Wikipedia.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: I've never used Claude.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_01: That's anthropic.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's worth playing with.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: So how would you say that AI is changing advertising and brand strategy?
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's less about the strategy and it's more about the execution, I would say.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: So y what you you had this massive move from traditional TV and cable longer form into video, into social contexts.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_01: First there was Facebook, Instagram, obviously TikTok now.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: So that creates the need for a lot of six-second, fifteen-second short form content at scale, which traditional production methods really are very expensive and struggle to do.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: So it's really changing the velocities and scale of advertising and branding.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: Plus, you add to that also the algorithm and its ability to target, and you've got sort of this matrix where you've got different audiences, different messages at scale.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: And uh generative AI, all of these tools, you know, including Sora, the new video tool that you read about, are changing the the whole way that brands go to market.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: Would you say that it has changed anything about your life personally in a significant way?
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_01: Changed.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of made it imperative to really stay on top of what's happening in the in the technology world and in the intersection of creativity, back to that, and and and tech and um creativity and innovation.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of people are finding that these tools are liberating, and a lot of people are finding them scary, and a lot of people are threatened by them.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's a really interesting range of reactions.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not just generational, though, it probably largely is.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: But the other thing, just to make one other point about the brand side.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_01: So traditionally, a brand stood for one thing.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_01: That was, and you wanted to line up everything.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: You had a brand bulk, you spent a lot of money for it, you knew exactly what the North Star was, whatever your buzzword is that you want to use the DNA of the brand.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: And wherever the brand showed up, Coca Cola or Nike, it was always the same, pretty much.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: You would have different executions, but the core of the brand was the same.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: And now, because of social media, it Influencers, the whole ecosystem, this the nucleus of the brand is gradually eroding.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: So you may see the same brand show up in 30 different contexts across all of social media.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_01: So a lot of people in the industry say that what's happening is that brands are starting to stand for less and less.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: To stand.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_01: To stand for less and less.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: Because you need to constantly refresh the executional expression of these brands.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so you lose the centerpiece.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: Other people say that it just puts more of a demand on the agency or the brand, whoever is creating the content, and that you need to uh recognize that the nature of a brand is changing.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: Although, you know, probably the most successful new brand in the last couple of months is Mamdani.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, he went from like 3% to whatever he wants, 60 odd percent, purely on social, purely on his brand.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, you know, his mother is a film director, the stuff was very, very intentional.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but he's a good example of, I think, a pretty creative use of social media.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's amazing what he did.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: So AI's speed, as you mentioned, is both dazzling and a little humbling, to be honest.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: But just because we can speed up our process with these tools, doesn't mean that we should.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: Does that pace actually serve us, or does it ultimately alienate us from ourselves?
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's a high level of risk that the human the human species, human beings, feel more and more irrelevant and more and more marginalized because the skills that we thought we had that made us unique and differentiated are now generally available and commoditized.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_01: So I think, yeah, to your point, we do become more abstracted from ourselves and spoiled by the speed.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: And then we might tend to devalue things that take longer when we shouldn't, when maybe those things need more value and less devaluing.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: But if everything is judged by the blazing speed of AI, then we do lose a lot.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's like the slow food movement grew up after fast food.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: It was a direct rejection of fast food.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_01: So I think we're going to be seeing a direct rejection of AI at some point.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_01: We're not there yet.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_01: There was still too new.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell Well, the point of creating anything is not only the product, but it's also the process.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: So when you bypass that process, it's deeply alienating, I think.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: I agree.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's the journey, not the destination matters, but AI is only about the destination.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_01: So it you know, just imagine children brought up digitally native, or in this case, AI native children who are going to expect that uh level of speed and everything.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_01: It also sort of puts into question the role of parents as the ultimate authorities and experts.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_01: Simon, our son, said, because we have he has twins, and he said, you know, like, what do they need me for?
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: You know, half kidding but half not.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they they're they'll just ask ChatGPT everything.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: Which is gonna happen.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, much more um, much easier for than than search, because when you look at ChatGPT and its ability to answer a question versus Google's blue links, you can see it's transformative.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: There's no comparison.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's all about um consolidating information in a very effective way, which Google doesn't really do.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_01: No, Google does not understand really the intent behind the question and it doesn't answer the question.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: It just gives you places to get the answer.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_01: But now, of course, Google is putting the AI over view on top of the blue links.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_01: Because it's got it's got Gemini.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: So, I mean, I I was thinking about this and I thought maybe it's a more kind of measured approach that it really comes down to restraint and intuition.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I know that's hard to teach kids.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe I'm speaking more on behalf of adults, people who are faced with this now, asking yourself, is this something I should do, or is this is this something I should automate?
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: And knowing the difference.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_01: And knowing when to use the tool and when not to use the tool, you're saying is this something I should do on my own?
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: Or is this is this something that would make my life better by automating, right?
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_00: Is this making space for other meaningful things in my life?
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_00: And that's kind of the thoughtful use of AI.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe that's the way to teach it in schools.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's not about use it or not use it because people are gonna use it no matter what.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's more about how and when.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's a massive amount of work being done in this area of how do you teach AI and how to integrate AI into the schools.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: A friend of mine just ran a big uh seminar up at Iona College where he works bringing together experts about the subject of how do how do we teach reading and thinking in the in the world of AI.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: So this is like this is driving people crazy.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, the argument that people should do things only people can do and machines should do, or AI should do what AI can do, is the argument that people use who say that in fact AI is not gonna hollow out the economy and we're not gonna have 30% unemployment, because you're gonna free people up to do more important things, and AI will take the drudgery.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not so convinced of that.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: When you've seen what AI can do in terms of uh replacing a lot of jobs and middle management and finance and operations and supply chain and c in consulting.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_01: So I I could send it to you.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: There's a somebody took a McKinsey report that must have been, I don't know, 200 pages.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: Somehow it ended up on the internet.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_01: And they reverse engineered a prompt for ChatGPT based on what McKinsey did.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_01: And it basically says ask these questions to put in the name of the company, put in the category you want study, put in the years, put in whatever, the segments, everything.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_01: And it generates an unbelievably close proximity or peer to a to a McKinsey document.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_01: So when you read that, all the consultants are worried there's a reason.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_00: And that's connected to my next question, which is what do you make of creative people who completely reject AI?
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: The Luddites.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: So I think creative people, it's a big swath, right?
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_01: Depends.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: Are you a copywriter working for Macy's or are you, you know, a showrunner for uh for Netflix uh scripted drama?
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_01: I don't pass judgment on somebody who rejects it.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_01: Because I think eventually people will come around.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_01: I do, you know, people are people hold on, obviously.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_01: We know why, too.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's human nature and fear and it's being threatened.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_01: So I think you you're always gonna see that bell curve of adoption.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_01: And it whether it's with the new technology in in a in human relations department or whether it's AI and creative people, it's gonna be the same.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_01: There's a whole there's a whole theory also about the diffusion of adoption and technology, which people have studied for years, how long it took for the copying machine to reach a certain level, how long it took for uh TVs to get into every household.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: And if you look at it, it's really interesting.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: You see the shortening of um that diffusion of adoption faster and faster and faster.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: And look at it, look at Chat GPT.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_01: I think it it was the fastest adopted technology in history.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I can't help but feel some grief in those people who complain about AI.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's like they they already know the battle is lost.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's really sad.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_01: Well, i it's sad because they're fighting a rear guard action against an inevitable force of nature, essentially.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_01: There are people who you know would write longhand and they wouldn't even move to a typewriter, let alone an electric typewriter, let alone a word processor.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_01: So I I think we need to find room for people who are not just jumping on the latest technology curve, being part of the curve, I should say, and hold on to the traditional ways of doing things.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's I think you probably I think probably, you know, back when I guess it was the English who put oil paint in tubes.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_01: I guess there were people who artists who said, I'm not gonna buy one of those stupid tubes, I'm gonna continue.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: I think be interesting, I bet if you go back, get a chance, GPT, this that artists have always rejected technology.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_01: And look at the history of photography.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_01: It was took a long time for photography to be accepted as an art form.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we we made this, which makes AI kind of a product of human creativity.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: The same fours that built cathedrals or divided the atom, it's it's human creativity has always carried a risk.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: But this time the scale feels a little different.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the one of the big differences is the tools never had a mind of their own.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like when you talk to people, there's a really interesting interview with this guy, Dario Amade or Amoday, who runs Anthropic, where he was talking about, and others have too, that you don't nobody really understands how it works once it works.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_01: There's a whole domain of study in terms of understanding, mechanistic determination is what I was trying to do.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_01: They call it mechanistic determination, try to figure out why the AI do this and why did it do that?
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_01: Because it's programmed to do it.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_01: But the program is limited and then it acts based on its on its own.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_01: So it's different to your point about cathedrals.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Gowdy used the tools that he had available, but those tools didn't tell him to put another spire on the church.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: So in uh 2001, you co-wrote Dictionary of the Future with Faith.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_00: Popcorn is her actual last name?
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: No, her adopted name.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's her adoptive name.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let's just say it's you don't forget that.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's the point.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a book that set out to give language to things that did not exist yet.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_00: Behind it was the idea that words don't just describe reality, they invent it.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um so to close our conversation, I thought to highlight a few terms from your dictionary uh written more than two decades ago that feel incredibly relevant in this moment.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: So you can um thanks for doing that research.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, you can add commentary or not.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_00: So number one, digisexuality.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_00: Attraction to or emotional connection with digital personas or AI entities.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, well, that was a pretty good one.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_01: That was a really good question.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_00: I mean amazing.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um blobjectivity.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: A future aesthetic defined by smooth, rounded, tech-inspired design, the merging of organic and digital forms.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, yeah.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we see that.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_01: Were there, yeah.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um number three, cybrarian.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: A person who curates, filters, and makes sense of the flood of digital information.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: We are all that.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: Umber four, attention deficit society, a culture defined by distraction and constant partial focus.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_01: We call it now the battle for attention or the war for attention.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_01: This guy, um, Chris, what's his last Hayes, who works for MSNBC, just wrote a book, a bestseller called a battle for attention.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, we did see that coming down the tracks.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_00: And number five, finally, recombinant culture.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_00: A culture built from remixing and reassembling what already exists.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: So that literally is how generative AI works.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it does.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_01: It does.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, human beings have always liked to pull pieces, you see the way kids work, to pull pieces together.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_01: So the magpie culture.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: So now it's so much easier to do that.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_01: But it really speaks to a primal need that human beings have to seek comfort by finding things in their environment but putting putting them together in new ways.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_00: So enough said, Adam.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_00: We have resolved nothing, but we have said a lot, and it was a pleasure.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_01: That's sort of what I do every day.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_01: I say a lot and I resolve nothing.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's what we all do every day.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_00: If this conversation resonated with you, follow the show wherever you listen and find me on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Substack at RusiHive.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_00: If someone came to mind for the hive, send guest suggestions to guests at ruseyhive.com.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_00: And if you just want to say hi, it's hello at ruseyhive.com.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_00: Original music and sonic identity for the Rusi Hive by Ant Food.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_00: Until next time, let your life be a creative act.