Shownotes
In this conversation, Richard Norton (Norts) and Derek Ahmedzai discuss the use of AI and AR in marketing and creativity. They share their experiences with early experiments in creative AI, such as generating AI recipes and creating the world's first AI gin. They emphasise the importance of taking risks and being daring in advertising and marketing. The conversation also explores the potential of AGI and specialised AI models, as well as the commercial advantage of using AI tools. They discuss how AI is transforming the advertising industry and its impact on music creation.
The conversation explores the importance of human input in AI and the value of a good idea. It discusses the role of humans in photography and the potential for AI in music and Eurovision. The impact of AI on content creation and copyright implications are also examined. The rise of AI-generated videos on YouTube and the need for creativity in AI-generated content are highlighted. The conversation concludes with a discussion on exploring AI tools and platforms, connecting them for creative expression, and the politeness factor in interacting with AI.
Takeaways
- AI and AR can be used effectively in marketing and creativity to create innovative and engaging experiences.
- Taking risks and being daring in advertising and marketing can lead to differentiation and success.
- AI tools provide a commercial advantage by enabling faster and more cost-effective content creation.
- The potential of AGI and specialised AI models offers exciting possibilities for the future.
- AI is transforming the advertising industry and changing how music is created. Human input remains crucial in AI, especially in tasks that require creativity and quality output.
- A good idea is the foundation of any successful AI project, and AI should be used as a tool to enhance and execute the idea.
- AI can coexist with human creativity in fields like photography and music, creating new opportunities and competitions.
- AI tools and platforms offer exciting possibilities for content creation, but it is important to maintain creativity and avoid producing bland or spam-like content.
- Politeness and gratitude in interacting with AI can enhance the user experience and foster positive relationships with technology.
Links relevant to this episode:
- The Peeps - Concepts. Campaigns. Copywriting. Innovation technology. Generative AI. Immersive art. Web3. Six years of award-winning stand-out creativity. Talk to us today.
- AI Song Contest 2023
- Hugging Face – The AI community building the future.
- Suno AI - make custom songs
- Runway - Advancing creativity with artificial intelligence.
Thanks for listening, and stay curious!
//david
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Transcripts
00:00 - David Brown (Host)
Hello everybody, welcome to the Creatives with AI Podcast. I'm your host, David, and on today's show, we have Richard Norton and Derek Ahmedzai from the digital agency The Peeps. The Peeps is an agency that helps you wow your audience using innovative marketing with creative AI, AR, web3 and NFTs. The reason I wanted to have Norton and Derek on the show is because I saw Norton do a presentation a few weeks ago at an AI event, and some of the stuff that The Peeps are doing with AI and some of the NAR is really, really interesting and I thought people would be interested to hear about it. So here we go, Nords, Derek, welcome to the show.
00:40 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
Thanks for having us on. Yeah, thanks very much, David. Thanks very much, pleasure.
00:45 - David Brown (Host)
How are you guys? Are you for those of people listening later? This is what? Three days before Christmas or something, I think everybody's focused on just trying to finish up the year and get their Christmas shopping done.
00:57 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
Still haven't finished that yet.
00:59 - David Brown (Host)
Have you started? No Fair enough, that's beautiful.
01:04 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
So then we've got like 12 inches of snow outside. There's reindeer walking past the house.
01:09 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
It's very beautiful.
01:11 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
So we can paint pictures, can't we? We can, that's the point Paint pictures.
01:16 - David Brown (Host)
Well, this is exactly what I talked about on the podcast that came out this week is do we want AI to be a mirror of society and the data that's actually out there, or do we want it to present a sort of fictitious version of things, to try and nudge us into different behaviors, and so we can paint a picture of whatever we want?
01:36 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
That's fantastic. It's very deep opening there, David, very deep opening very existential start I feel quite reflective.
01:43 - David Brown (Host)
Yeah, I feel quite reflective lately. It might be good, just to start off, if you guys would just quickly introduce yourselves and then somebody give an introduction a little bit to The Peeps and the kind of stuff that you've been doing. I think, because I think a lot of people listening would find it really interesting how you guys are using AI and AR and Web3 and some of the other technology in actual business every day, and then we can start to expand from there.
02:08 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
OK. Well, we've got the tyranny, haven't we, David? The tyranny of two of us. Who goes first? Well, we have to set up a plan. I reckon you should go first, Derek.
02:17 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
velopment since like the year:03:15 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
That's very succinct yes, yep.
03:19
Hi, I'm Norts David, co-founder of The Peeps. My background is creative writing, advertising. Basically, I started as a musician, a failed musician, well, as a session musician, then became a failed musician because I got to a certain age and I was neither well; got played on the radio once a couple of times but neither famous nor dead, and so at a certain age, you have to quit music, which I did. I found myself in advertising in ad writing. So I kind of spent many years doing that and, like you do, if you stay around long enough that you sort of learn your craft a bit just purely by being around, you get kind of promoted, don't you Just go up the ranks, unless you're abysmal, because if you're abysmal, you get fired.
04:00
the kind of AI thing started:04:54
Advertising start again, start again. As marketers, you think about how they differentiate themselves with their audience. That's kind of really important. Do some things that are different to everybody else. Zig Wellover's Zag, as somebody says not be that 90%, which is crap, be that 10%.
05:12
And we always thought, well, you do that by thinking about advertising that's creative, that stimulates emotions, because all advertising, ultimately, is about changing people's behaviours, and you do that by putting them in an emotional state of whatever emotion is. That's all well and good. So you can craft that old school ways by script writing and music and all those kind of things that go into make ads and marketing campaigns, et cetera, et cetera. But we also kind of hit upon this idea well, you can use AI to do that, can't you? In lots of ways it could be for efficiency and effectiveness. So we kind of kickstarted that five and a half, six years ago now. And, yeah, we've got to this point now and that's been an interesting journey because six years ago what we could do for marketers back then is very different to what we can do now.
05:58 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
And people didn't get it, did they? Yeah, people thought it was kind of a crazy move.
06:03 - David Brown (Host)
Yeah, well, probably was a crazy move back then, don't you?
06:06 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
think it was a crazy move.
06:07 - David Brown (Host)
It was like bleeding edge stuff back then.
06:10 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
Yeah, it was, and it was quite funny because you'd like I didn't mind it. Really the first six months we set up didn't have any. We did lots of stuff to kind of tell the world what this kind of new technology was. But back then, when it's like messing around with Google collabs or say, Markov chains look at me, Derek, all technical and stuff like that and the end results of what you created were always a bit, and if it was, whether it was text or it was visual, you certainly weren't animating and if you wanted to do a deep fake it would take you like about three weeks. But back then and all the results you'd show people what you do quite shonky and janky.
06:48 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
Underwhelming yeah.
06:50 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
And it was weird, wasn't it? Ai weirdness, that's what used to be called, wasn't it?
06:54 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
Oh, my God.
06:55 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
AI's made a seven-legged cat. And people would get but weirdly we started getting work and it's the kind of interesting thing about people. I don't like to use the word brave it's a funny word to use in advertising. Brave marketing like brave's putting out a fire, isn't it? Whatever, writing a daring copy line is just like just going a bit above and beyond. But we found people who wanted to stand out like a sense differentiated, kind of moved into space, primarily because nobody was doing anything with creating AI back then.
07:27
So it was that classic trick of like I'm going to be the first to do that. And we sort of found ourselves doing stuff where people would ask us to do it because no one had done it with AI. So it was like oh the first this, oh the first that, oh the. And we found this weird world where we kept pivoting. We were AI, but at one point people got really into us making cocktails for their events, so we became cocktail creators.
07:53
We became cake makers for a while because it was very easy to create recipes with food like take a neural network of, take a whole bunch of data about, I don't know, curries or cupcakes or cocktails. It's a nice lot of seas, isn't it? I just did that. Not a little alliteration, and you could, you could do stuff with that, and you get really weird, interesting outputs.
08:13 - David Brown (Host)
So did you have AI make original recipes?
08:18 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
Yeah, well yeah, we did.
08:19 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
And then we got real, real bakers to actually create the cakes, or nice you know, and what was your success rate in that?
08:29 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
In terms of the fact that, oh, we would always be very keen on going for mega outputs, right, because I think that even today, people don't get and you hear it, we heard it when I was with you, we're living in Tunbridge Wells. That time we'll always have Tunbridge Wells. You get that thing. You get that thing where people just assume that the output is just an AI thing and that's it. The AI is made this like. Very much, I'll take it, and it's never been that at any point in our existence.
08:58
There's always a. It's a human AI, human-machine learning collaboration so, when we were making things. Like you know, if you put in a data set of potential cupcake combinations, it's going to come out with an awful lot of shit. Yeah, but the point of the matter and the same with cocktail, cocktail names. I don't know Cocktail names can be staggeringly high proportion of good cocktails.
09:22 - David Brown (Host)
But that's what we do, yeah, yeah.
09:24 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
Yeah, name is brilliant and that's like that's how we how we kind of got randomly. For example, we did that and somewhere along the line of communications, Deloitte heard about us. We were doing cocktails for Deloitte events, wow, but the key to it is the fact that we would always get an expert, an expert baker an expert cocktail maker or bartender, etc.
09:50
To kind of work with us to say that works well, no, that's not going to work. And what was kind of interesting even back then, the learning for them where you thought there is something about AI that can add value was the fact that they always, they would always find combinations that they would never think of themselves.
10:07 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
Right.
10:08 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
Because they seem just too like. Oh, that plus that I never thought about that. But, the acidity of that, the quality of that works together well, and I suppose the culmination, the sort of peak, the zenith of our combining for food, drink, etc. Recipes, flavours etc. So culminate probably when we devised the world's first AI gin.
10:33 - David Brown (Host)
Okay.
10:34 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
And that was interesting because that was something we kind of identified ourselves in. Like, can you believe all these people come to us for firsts and no one's ever come to us and said because we'd made a lot of cocktails no one's ever come to us and said, oh, the world's first AI gin, and it just didn't exist.
10:50
And so we kind of hawked it around. A few people I won't say who we walked, hawked it to who kind of declined it. It's like the Beatles Decker thing. You know they had the chance, didn't they Decker?
10:59
and signed the Beatles. Well, someone had the chance to do the AI gin before the people who did it, and they declined it. But yeah, so we ended up working with a small distiller in Bristol to make the world's first AI gin, and we don't have to go into the bit. It's an interesting story. But what was important was it gave them the punching power to oh, I've cut off, I've not cut off.
11:23 - David Brown (Host)
then no no no you're still here, it's an energy nightmare.
11:28 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
What was interesting about the AI gin culmination the creation of it it wasn't so much that you were using machine learning to create the thing. The core of the idea was giving someone who was a small distiller, independent distiller, who had interest in technology, to punch well above their weight in the kind of like their marketing. So ultimately the culmination of it was they got coverage across the world for very little money because the thing went viral, because guess what? No, would have made an AI gin, and back then that's a story, isn't it?
11:58 - David Brown (Host)
Oh, content, content, content and see what was sorry to jump in, but what was really interesting about when I saw you present as well is that a lot of people, I think, when they talk about AI, even these days, it's all theoretical and nobody actually uses it, whereas you just jumped in and dived in, you know, five, six, seven years ago and went, no, we're just going to try this thing and we're going to see what we can actually make using it, and I love that. I think that's amazing and you know, yeah, it wasn't perfect, but people aren't perfect. Do you know what I mean?
12:32
Bakers, when they're trying to come up with a new recipe, they don't get it right every time. Chefs don't get it right every time they have to make it. You know you watch MasterChef and some of those you know the chefs talk about. We've worked on this dish for two years before we put it out, so in my mind, it's no different, but it's really really interesting to hear you know, sort of to hear how you've actually used it to actually make things. And again, I would have never thought of that either, but I don't particularly present myself as being massively creative.
13:03 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
Yeah, when we started there were other people doing kind of similar things, like pizza toppings or you know, dress designs. But often people would use the AI up to the step of having a text or a visual and then present that and then go any further but we like to actually make it put that into the real world like get the cake made, get the cocktail made.
13:26
Yeah yeah, and that's really where the story is. You know, we did a poem that was for Poetry Day a long time ago. We trained it on Sylvia Plath's poetry and got some text output. But then the really kind of interesting step was we got a robot handwriting tool to actually write it.
13:46 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
It was trained on handwriting.
13:47 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
Yeah, and then somebody spoke. You know actually present you Gave it, gave a reading. That was the fun part.
13:54 - David Brown (Host)
Yeah, that's cool, I know I. I used to be Highly and deeply involved in the startup sort of industry because it really is its own industry here in the UK for a long time when I had my own startup and One of the companies that we ran across was it was literally a startup and they would hand write cards for you and but their goal was to not have, like they physically had, a team of people who would hand write a card for you.
14:20
So you could say I want a handwritten card to go, like to wherever, and a physical person would actually write the card scribe.
14:28
le back now. I guess that was:15:01 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
The teacher will never know.
15:04 - David Brown (Host)
Until it's done for a test.
15:06 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
Yeah, one of the interesting things about the Plath poem. Comparing it with today, like obviously with large language models, you can pretty much, if you wanted, to afford a better I don't say impersonate take the the aspects, the kind of the Essence of a poet, I mean do it second time.
15:30
Name any poet and you could write something that's like it's quite funny because back then we very deliberately chose Sylvia Plath on the basis that Sylvia Plath's poetry is quite dense and esoteric and, to be honest, a bit like what's his face, fight smart with? I'm gonna sit now. Who wrote cats but not cats? It's the Not ordinary.
16:04 - David Brown (Host)
Now I can't remember. Now we'll leave it in. It's fine, it's all natural.
16:12 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
It's all natural. No, I hope not. God, yeah, anyway.
16:16 - David Brown (Host)
I'll look it up while you're talking. So you keep talking, yeah, you do that.
16:20 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
You know, was he the thing? That's the very the greatest poem of the 20th 20th century, all about yeah. Ts Eliot there is. Derek always comes through, doesn't he always?
16:30 - David Brown (Host)
all pass some book of practical cats.
16:33 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
Yeah, well, cats rubbish, but the thing is beautiful. But point of matter is, I Love Sylvia Plath poems. Right, always loved it. But to be honest, if you sit and think about what they actually mean, I've got clue.
16:44
So, taking her body of work Back then and in creating new poetry, it's quite interesting because it became again a human task to kind of the outputs to decide, because you could just take a block of the text and go, that's the poem. But didn't do it like that. We did it as a sort of editing role to say we've got like 10,000 lines of poetry here, that is that beautiful line that sits with that beautiful line, that sits with that beautiful line.
17:09 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
And it was a very manual task as a human with the output, whereas now I mean you could still do the editing thing.
17:16 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
It's just amazing that you tell me well, run to play on my Sylvia Plath, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but you've got one come out. You might think I tweaked this. That's weak. That well, I suppose the thing is I want to convey is the fact that I do think there was a, there was a perception in people that when you get AI involved, ai's runs it or AI's the decision maker, but it's never the case.
17:37
There's always a human who's I've in the creative role, curating it, editing it, thinking about it, starting it, finishing it, and that's kind of these are tools, aren't they?
17:46 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
so you direct them yeah.
17:48 - David Brown (Host)
Yeah, they are still tools, and I think what people worry about is at what point do they start to do stuff on their own? And I do think we're quite a ways away from that on anything particularly creative. I think solving minor technical problems or technical problems, you know, I think might be the first things that AI will put their minds to, but who knows? I have no idea what they might do. What do you think so? Since you've been a practitioner using AI and you guys have been doing it for a long time, what do you see as the most useful part of AI at the minute, and where do you think that's going to go in the next couple of years? Where do you see the biggest gains we can make by using AI?
18:41 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
Well, I think for us, it’s definitely the creative tools, and when you look at things like chat, GPT or large language models, it's often just to get you off that blank page. So the biggest thing that it gives you is a kind of creative jump-off and the same with video and image tools. Yeah, would you say? That's right, Norts.
19:06 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, I'm sure many people talk of large language models. Personally, and even this year, we've seen it in the work that we've been commissioned to do the acceleration of the visual creative tools, and by that, the kind of Midjourney, even Dali 3s, but then going into the runways where you can animate, is the way. I would have said that the start of the year, when people come to us, oh what would you use that for? You might say well, think about creating a. If you're presenting in advertising, you're doing a pitch, and you want to create a mood piece, you might use this to create the. You know, set it up, show people images.
19:47
It's one of the great things in advertising and marketing, you notice, is that the thing about they go oh, we're going to have to show them something. People just can't visualise it If they don't see it. Yeah, so you've got that ability. But what's kind of happened again with the onset and the evolution of the tools is that you can now get to the point with human craft and editing, you can create pretty good content that can be for like a presentation, but it's got to the point now where you can put it in the public domain and again, it's that it's just the ability now and, like you know, there was the Midjourney Six release yesterday, and you can just see the quality, and they've kind of upscaling tools as well, and it's been a bunch of, you know, two or three projects that we have been tasked to do this year and the way we've approached them on having that brief is different now to how it would have been at the start of the year, and it's just making for a much more early on.
20:43
Me, I'm excited about that because I don't you know we're, we're at the foothills there of that kind of technology.
20:49 - David Brown (Host)
Yeah, on the creative point, I have a question. I'm going to tie it into something that you said earlier, where and it and it about being daring and it made me think of Elon Musk and just bear with me for a second. But I don't. I don't think that any AI would have ever come up with Elon Musk telling his largest advertisers to fuck off.
21:17
That was unexpected In a live in a, you know, in a live interview situation and and it was different, it was maybe, if you know Elon Musk, it probably wasn't that unexpected. I think he probably has said that for a long time in private.
21:33 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
Are you allowed to say on your podcast that he was probably on drugs at the time?
21:37 - David Brown (Host)
He may have Finn.
21:38 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
Well, it released a lot of people on Twitter were saying that.
21:41 - David Brown (Host)
He may have? Yeah, maybe, but he doesn't care, right. That's the thing. The only thing that's going to be out of it is that he's not going to be beholden to his advertisers, no matter what. If somebody says, well, we're going to take our money away, he's like we'll find, take it out on care, right. So I get the point. Maybe you know, but would I be brave enough to do that in my own business? Probably not, and most other businesses don't have enough money. Like he has the ultimate FU money right, like he can do literally whatever he wants, anytime he wants, and like he can just do it. It doesn't matter. And so you know he had the ability to do that.
22:17
But that was something different and unexpected. And so when you were going back and talking about being brave and doing some of that, some of the things that aren't expected and some of the things that a traditional business wouldn't because that's all it is Is everybody gets so worried. They're like oh my God, what if people don't like it? And what if our? You know, if you're a newspaper or you're a company and you go? Well, what if you know? What if our customers don't like it and they're going to take their money away. And it's because you're all tied up in this, you know you've got shares and investors and you have all these people to worry about. And you know, you, you, you just feel constrained, like you don't want to take the risk because you don't want it to go wrong. Nobody ever thinks about. You know what?
22:57
One of the things a lady said to me and I've said this a couple of times on the pot, told the story a couple of times already is she's the head of innovation for the army and she said you know, when you look at projects, you need to prepare for catastrophic success, and no one ever prepares for catastrophic success. They always prepare for what happens if it goes wrong, but nobody ever prepares for what if it's wildly successful. And so, Derek, your comment where you were talking about using AI for creativity I totally understand what you mean like, and I use it that way a lot as well. But what I think it misses is it misses those total wildcard moments where it would never say you know, if you said, give me a few lines to use in this you know interview, and if he asked me about advertisers on the platform, it would never say tell Disney to fuck off, like it, just that, just it wouldn't come out with that, because the way AI works is it's always just a little bit off of the average Right, so it's always taking the most likely thing, and then it says, oh, but we'll be just a little bit random and we'll just say something slightly different.
24:02
So you always end up in that you know, at the, at almost at the very top of the bell curve, and you never get on the edges. And I that's that's true.
24:11 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
Yeah, although that's because these current generation of the kind of publicly available, you know, commercial models are aimed at that kind of content. Before, when we were using, you know, training, our own models, and you could kind of dial up the randomness the crazy temperature, so then it might welcome up with something that's very unexpected.
24:34 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
That Microsoft bot member right at the outset? Was it Tay Tay that became racist very quickly?
24:40 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
Yes, Because they just let it learn from what people were telling it on the internet.
24:44 - David Brown (Host)
So yeah, that was pretty crazy. It ended up pretty. You need checks and balances, yeah.
24:50 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
They had to take that down obviously.
24:51 - David Brown (Host)
Yeah.
24:52 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
Yeah, but then that's because they didn't consider the downsides or how it would be misused. And I think a lot of people don't, yeah.
25:02 - David Brown (Host)
And I think there are a lot, and I don't think people realize and I even I probably don't realize how much of that stuff gets filtered out, and probably most of the work that open AI and all these companies do is actually filtering out all of that stuff.
25:17
It's moderation, it's content moderation, just like you would do anywhere else, right, like it comes out with random content, you have to go. Yeah, no, you can't say that. So it's interesting to go back to on something that you said as well, which, again, I think I have an idea that I think, when we reach this AGI point, that it's going to be a federated model and we're going to have a bunch of very specially narrow AI models that have been trained to do one or two specialist things, but that the controller AI that sits across the top is going to have the AGI because it's just going to go and it's going to get information from wherever it needs to go. But I wanted to just pull on that thread of what you were saying, because it's those specially trained AIs that are going to be potentially super powerful for businesses, isn't it?
26:10 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
Yeah, but then again they're still a niche in the sense that they're in that space. I don't know about the AGI stuff. I personally feel that's a little bit sci-fi and a long way off, whereas we're talking about very although we say AI is this massive, big, broad term covers so many different things, whether it's like a way to fill stuff in Photoshop or whether it's transcribing audio, or there's so many million different tools and use cases, but they're all very separate.
26:50
I don't know if that kind of I probably went a little bit away from what you're asking there, that's right, but I think in the here and the now, yeah, we're using lots of small tools, putting them together to achieve whatever individual goals that we have, but I think the AGI stuff is probably a bit of a distraction from that.
27:17 - David Brown (Host)
Yeah.
27:17 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
Now I use the analogy like the way that we work with the whole bunch of generative AI tools. Now it's a bit like putting a band together or trying to create a piece of music, and you put different instruments in the group together and sometimes just because we might bring a harpsichord in which is not expected, or a euphonium or some other way.
27:41
And that kind of makes it a little bit stranger, because ultimately, there's two points you've raised, dave is, on the one hand, it is this thing about trying to be different, and so you try you can be different in terms of the creative output of AI by doing sort of different things, trying to hack your way to do things that maybe others aren't thinking. But, going back to what you're saying, is that the actual concerns that people have in marketing about where they think, oh, what if it goes wrong? As opposed to what if it goes right yeah, it's probably as old as humankind, isn't it? And that is still the concern. So, whether it's, I would have had that same problem if I were presenting a concept for a campaign 20 years ago, long before any of this. The same fear.
28:28
Oh, what if the classic thing when you go in with three ideas to the pitch, there's the one that's really out there, probably the one that answers the brief and the safe one, yeah, and people love that because that's how it is and it's probably no different in terms of what you present with AI, because as you say people are concerned if they've got a budget and they're thinking about their reputation, not thinking fuck it or I've sworn, never mind.
28:51
They think, well, just get it out there and see what happens. That's a rare. We have encountered clients who are like that and we love them, who, just like I, don't care about the consequences, I want the. I don't know if it's the fame or the notoriety or the virality, but in our experience that's probably 2% of everybody we ever encounter.
29:12 - David Brown (Host)
Yeah, yeah, that's loosened up a lot with social media I think some companies have. You know, back before X was X and it was Twitter and kind of in the, in the height, the golden age of Twitter, before everything started to go a bit wrong, you know, there was some, there's some amazing social media accounts and stuff that were run. You know Wendy's in the US was was a classic example of that where they basically just said do whatever you want. Mostly it was within reason. But you know a lot of people Ryanair, I mean, you know EasyJet a lot of them are quite serious most of the time, but then they also have a lot of fun with their social accounts as well and I think that's something that's probably new in the.
29:58
k before, you know, maybe the:30:28 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
I suppose also thing again it steps away from technology and creative tech, gene AI, but obviously all tools. Social media is the same as as as creative AI tools, this fact that there's this democratization. So obviously social media is for the people who are expressing something about their personality or they want to be influenced, et cetera.
30:49
And the same applies, 90% of that will be crap, 10% will be good. But I suppose the thing is it's quite difficult for brands to take on personalities very often because, like they say, people don't necessarily want to dialogue with a toilet roll brand, exactly.
31:04 - David Brown (Host)
They just want toilet roll.
31:05 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
No, I'm curious If you know what I mean. So you have to have a exactly. So it's like why are you doing that? I think you do have to be in a certain strata of selling to be able to have a personality that works for the brand you're in.
31:18 - David Brown (Host)
Yeah.
31:20 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
Like, if you're a sport, if you're Nike, you can be about like daring and all these, whatever the pillars of Nike or Adidas, who's whoever. But if you're a bit more utilitarian. I mean you very rarely see exciting work. Do you come out of the kind of utilities world do you?
31:34 - David Brown (Host)
No. Because kind of like, that's about a price thing, but it doesn't mean that that could, but that that doesn't mean they couldn't.
31:40
They probably could if they, but it's not the type of, it's not the type of person who works in that industry either. You know, doesn't push the boundaries, I mean. I guess the good example is is Red Bull right? Red Bull never advertises Red Bull. You hardly ever see a can Like Red Bull gives you wings and they may have a little picture of a can at the very end, but all their social media, all the everything you never see them talking about how good of a drink it is, what it does like, what's in it, you know what the price like. They don't do any of that, it's all aspirational, like look at people who drink Red Bull do this really cool stuff and you know it's like this is the life you have if you drink Red Bull, I guess, and you know that kind of thing and it's. You know it's amazing and people love it and it works really really well.
32:28 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
Was that Ding Dong that went off? A special effect that you have when you've made a salient point.
32:35 - David Brown (Host)
I think Derek has an Amazon package Fair enough, fair enough, I think.
32:40 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
What's interesting, though, about AI tools? I mean, we can look at it and we can talk about it, about the creative advantage. Sorry, it was nothing.
32:51
I think we can talk about AI in terms of the creative advantage it can give you by using these tools and you can do things that are different. But I think what's different, certainly from this year and certainly at the tail end of this year the conversations we've had with the kind of ad agencies or direct with brands or PR companies that we might work with is that the fact that people are realizing that the actual tools if you don't start working in the creative realm with AI tools, it's not about you're going to be left behind. You're going to be outmoded and you're going to be outperformed by somebody else and you're going to be out-costed, if that's even a word but I know what I mean.
33:28
Because if you're not using them and somebody else is using them, they're going to beat you, and that's the whole point. It's a competitive world, isn't it? It's dog eat dog, and that's different. It's not simply about the judgments being made on how creative your idea, how brave, how emotionally arousing it is. It's actually if I don't use this, someone's going to create something that's like I don't know. They can do it four times faster for 10 times less, so it becomes a much more commercial thing.
33:57 - David Brown (Host)
Did we, when we were together, did we talk about? I know a guy who runs a digital agency who does like TV commercials and sort of like video ads, and he was saying to me a while back and I hope to get him on the show at some point, we've talked about it but we've just never got anything in the diary. But anyway, he was saying that you know it used to be, if somebody came and wanted to do an ad, they might film five different versions of an ad and they might have, you know, two models and a couple of changes to clothes and you know maybe a couple of different color backgrounds or whatever. And they would, you know, they they do a day. They'd record you know those five versions, they'd produce them, have them ready to go and then they could target those five ads. And he's like now he's like I can create 10,000 ads in hours for the same price and I can. We can target those ads to any tiny little you know tiny little niche that you want to go in. We can do any skin color, we can do any race, we can do any hair, we can do any style, we can do any color, we can do anything, any combination of the above for, basically, the, you know, actually, for probably less money than than they would have charged to, you know, to do a couple of days of filming and and have everybody in a room together, and that's exactly proving your point.
35:14
And I think you know, for working professionals in industries, I think this is where it's going to make a huge difference. You know, I think about, I think about session musicians, I think you know they're a huge part of the music industry, is being creative and you know it's Adele writing a song because her heart is broken, and I don't think AI will come close to doing that anytime soon. But if I need a jingle for a show, for a podcast or or you know, a little 10 second piece of music that I can put on the beginning of a show, that used to be a human that created that and then would put it up and would sell it and would get a okay small but would get a royalty from that. Now, no one gets anything from that because it's all done via AI and it's oddly, it's those people who used to do that stuff, who used to grind, you know, to use the game or term.
36:11
They just they were grinding out content constantly, these little bits and pieces, but all of that work is going to go away and and you're absolutely right, you know that's that's where those sort of economies of scale are going to come in. That's where reducing the cost, making the employees more efficient and all that sort of thing is is going to feed in. Do you think, with all that? So, all that being said, do you think that that's just going to make the human more important for the tasks that humans do?
36:42 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
Yeah, because they'll be curating the the kind of the best quality output. It's a little bit of a tangent, but what you kind of just described with the musicians, it's kind of a little bit like what we've seen with them web building and design over the past decade or so. You know people used to go to you know higher agencies or freelancers to build and design small websites. You know bespoke. But now you just go to Wix or Squarespace and they're just kind of completely that market really doesn't exist anymore. So now everyone who was doing that is now working on a kind of different level or a different style of of design and building. So I don't think the human will be disappeared out of that situation, but there will be something else that they can do that the computer still can't do, and that becomes more important because that then gives you an edge. Yeah, yeah.
37:37 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
And I think it's important to bear in mind all you marketeers and advertising people who are listening, and PR types and anybody small business is that, regardless of how you execute your idea, whether it's with, like, two models or 10,000 models and 246 languages what's got to be right at the start is it's got to be and people do forget this as, as most, most mostly evidenced by creativity in marketing, advertising it does have to be start with an actual good idea.
38:08 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
That's the main thing, yeah.
38:10 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
Yeah, the idea. The AI isn't the idea, or the execution of the idea isn't the idea.
38:16 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
The idea is the idea.
38:17 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
So make it real, as good as it can be, and then use all the tools at your disposal, human or machine, to make it a beautiful, profound thing.
38:26 - David Brown (Host)
And to execute.
38:27
Yeah, no that's great advice, actually, and that's again, I think that's getting back to it's said much more eloquently than I've said it in the past. But yeah, I think that's where the human still sits at the top. And I think Somebody asked me the other day. They said oh well, do you think AI is just gonna take over things like photography competition? I'm like no, what we'll see is we'll see a different competition. So instead we'll still have photography competition, but it'll be for actual. It'll be for real photographers, human photographers, but then we'll have an AI photography contest, and I think that's where that'll be really cool to see the results of that as well. And I don't know if anybody's done one yet. I kind of feel like, if no one's done one, that maybe I should do one just for fun and kind of see what we could get.
39:18 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
Start with the Tumbridge Wells environs. They're brought in out to Kent.
39:23 - David Brown (Host)
UK. Just do it for the UK and see what we can get.
39:26 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
But well, there was, wasn't there? A couple of years ago, there was, like example, there was an AI Eurovision Song Contest.
39:32 - David Brown (Host)
Was there.
39:33 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
Maybe it started about four years ago. Yeah, it's been going for four years Cause. Actually, one of our associates entered last year and they tried to get the UK. They tried to get the UK version. But that's just an interesting thing again. It's like there's a human Eurovision Song Contest, which obviously massive these days, isn't it? And seems to straddle Australia as well, which is kind of puzzling.
39:54 - David Brown (Host)
I don't know how that happened.
39:56 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
It doesn't matter where the geographical parameters, where the lines are drawn. It's irrelevant. But yeah, so again, it's the logical thing. Get the kind of code again it's not a machine written song, is it? It's a co-creative with humans and machines. The first one, the one. Funny enough, we were set about tools. We were where we've been. We've been making this advent calendar for Christmas, just putting up different things every day, and we've been using different combinations of tools and we did initially think we were just gonna put up highlights of our year.
40:24 - David Brown (Host)
Right.
40:25 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
That's the kind of lazy boy version of doing it but actually as we started. I think we may have done one highlight of the year we found ourselves making things that are at Propoto.
40:34
Christmas and we've been randomly mixing strange tools together that you don't and again, it's kind of been quite fun, cause it's gone back to the janky, but one of the things the other day we found this AI tool there there remind me what it was called where you could basically just type in the type of song you wanted and it would generate the lyrics, the voice, the musicality of it all. So we found ourselves writing songs, all sorts of strange shit.
41:02 - David Brown (Host)
Do you remember what that was called?
41:04 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
Yeah, it's suenoai Cool and it gives you, like you know it's a discord, isn't it?
41:11 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
It's a discord favorite.
41:12 - David Brown (Host)
Yeah, it is, yeah, yeah, my favorite, yeah.
41:15 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
And you just type in yeah, I want a pop song about the Christmas market in Brighton.
41:21 - David Brown (Host)
You can do that for you, cool, I'll put it in the show notes for everybody.
41:23 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
If they want to go play with it, say you could be writing a Christmas in Tumbridge World Song. Basically, I was amazed cause we messed around with one. Derek did one which was one of Derek's obsessions is K-pop right? It's like a K-pop Christmas London. So we made a bunch of images around it, but I'm doing a talk next month in Bournemouth and it's at the university. I found myself writing a song about how joyous it is to be at Bournemouth, and this song came out and it was like well, that's pretty catchy.
41:53 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
Little e-wam, yeah, awesome.
41:54 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
Yeah, it's definitely yes, and you think well, okay, and we're only using it sort of a fun virus snippet, but for a piece of content.
42:02 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
Yeah, it's not going to compete with a real song created by a real producer, but yeah, you might steal a line of melody though, Derek, it might.
42:11 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
yeah.
42:13 - David Brown (Host)
Did you see the news that came out at least I only saw it yesterday or maybe the day before, but basically saying that the UK Supreme Court had said that you can't copyright anything that's created by AI, which just matches what they've said in the US as well. So if anything's got any AI in it, then you can't copyright that. So that's also going to be really interesting because it's going to mean that anything that's created with AI is totally free use for anyone. So if you do make that, you know, if anybody makes those fun songs or anything like that, there's just anybody can pick it up and use it and you don't really have to worry about that. And that's going to be an interesting wrinkle, I think as well. Yeah.
42:57 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
Yeah, very kind of open source content environment. But when you say create with AI, you can't copyright it, is that completely created? Or if there's human input, does that mean that it is?
43:09 - David Brown (Host)
protected? I think it's. I think if it's got any AI in it, that it's not copyrightable. I think I haven't read it. I literally only saw. I saw the news, I think yesterday or day before, and I just shared the article on LinkedIn, but I haven't had a chance to actually go read the, to read the actual document. I know in the US the way it works. This came off of the case with the. There was a lady who wrote a graphic novel and she used.
43:40
AI and she used mid journey to create the imagery for it, and then she submitted it, because in the US you have to apply for copyright. You don't get it by default like you do here. But in the US she applied and they denied it because they said you used AI to create this work. She then took them to court and said well, we should be able to copyright the story and the words, just not the art. And so they basically stepped back and said okay, you can copyright part of it, but not all of it. So, but I don't know how the UK one is. I don't know how the UK one is written.
44:17 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
So I suppose it has to be a bit like that, doesn't it? Because these things are such the black boxes in terms of they don't want to tell you what it's trained on, because they don't want to admit that it's trained on content that they don't have the rights to do that. So and also, then what comes out may well infringe on someone else's work, even if you don't know.
44:40 - David Brown (Host)
I think the tricky part of that is gonna be if you get someone like Elon Musk who just to be difficult, because his whole idea was is that it should be open to everybody, right? So if you get somebody with like Elon Musk who has tons of money and says I'm not gonna charge anybody to use this, it's a free use tool, you can use it for research and whatever, then he technically would be within fair use because it's for education and as long as you're not using it to make money, then that would fall under free use. So he could actually use everything under free use if he gave it away. It's only when they start to charge for it, I think.
45:19 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
That says grokai, is it?
45:21 - David Brown (Host)
I'm not a lawyer, so don't take any of my thing as actual legal advice. Yeah, but that's my understanding anyway. So if somebody comes along and does something like that, then the law gets really, really great. But I don't know. It just feels like eventually there's gonna be so much AI content that everybody will be able to reuse for everything else, and it might have some. It's all gonna have human parts in it as well and it's all just gonna get really really messy, really messy.
45:52 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
I mean, we're kind of seeing that now, aren't we Like? There's whole websites just AI generated just to game Google, get to the top of the results. And if you read it they're just awful, but they're not made. They don't care about the human reading and they just care about gaming and search engine. And that's gonna happen with.
46:10 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
There's always someone coming along ruining it for everybody, always, always. That's people.
46:15 - David Brown (Host)
That's just people. Here's my favorite one. What's your opinion on all these, on all the faceless videos on YouTube?
46:25 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
Faceless.
46:27 - David Brown (Host)
Yeah, so there, I don't know, maybe you haven't seen them, but they're auto-created, so it's pretty much an AI script that's been fed into a tool that then does an AI voice on top of it and then it creates a video off the back of it, and generally they're like training videos on here's how to enter this, here's how to do a chart and Excel, and none of it's real. It's so obvious it's like terrible.
47:01 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
And they use like the TikTok voice, don't they?
47:04 - David Brown (Host)
Yeah, and it's flooded YouTube and because I'm now trying to, I was saying to you guys earlier I've set up a home studio and I've got a better camera, so hopefully people that are watching this will go wow, okay, the quality's a lot better than the camera that he used to have. But I'm trying to learn how to do video editing and how to improve my skills around all that stuff. So I'm constantly looking for stuff, new training, how to do this, how to do that, how do you make this like that? And all these videos have just started coming up and coming up, and coming up, and I'm just like this is the net effect of AI, because you go on Twitter and you see all these people going, hey, you can make $5,000 a month if you just create 500,000 YouTube videos and you're just like, oh, my God, please stop so, since you sort of didn't even know what I was talking about.
47:59 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
I'm assuming that you only have to come across them that often. I know what you mean, I just didn't know it as that term. And yeah, they are. They're just flooding the platforms, aren't they? We thought you were creating faceless video.
48:09 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
People with no faces, I think that's why I was. What terrifying trends.
48:13 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
More like a Doctor who alien.
48:15 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
that's what I was imagining, oh yeah, you get a lot of that on Instagram as well.
48:18 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
Yeah, oh God, those voices come on, it's so bad.
48:21 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
But again I think this refers back to what we talked about earlier. It never goes, it's never wrong. The Sturgeon's Law, the Sturgeon's Rule, as they call it, of 90% of everything crap.
48:33 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
So it just means now that 90%.
48:35 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
It's probably just pushing up the 90% up. Maybe it's 92, 93%, because yeah again, there's no thought behind it, and people just think AI voice, ai writing, ai video. I've made some content. No what you've done is you've made a digital.
48:51 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
You've made spam, exactly yeah videos and at some point, at some point, the platforms will identify that and demonetize it, so it will be less. But it's an arms race, isn't it? It's always.
49:02 - David Brown (Host)
Well, spotify did that with all those sort of ASMR accounts and stuff like that where people were just creating two hour long bits of noise. That wasn't actually a song. It was just random sounds that people could pick up and listen, to which?
49:17 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
Or they could listen overnight, and then they would get royalties on that and they would get royalties on it, and so Spotify stepped in and done something.
49:24 - David Brown (Host)
I don't disagree with that, and I think nor it's probably as an ex musician, you probably agree with that as well.
49:30
I think somebody who goes to, makes the effort to create something that's more than just a sound that someone's meant to listen to overnight, I think that deserves more of a payment than the other. I think you know, and and again, I think you're getting the same stuff with YouTube. I was talking to someone yesterday I don't know if you guys have come across this either, but he said something that's becoming popular on YouTube is like what happens is people working from home just turn on the TV in the background and, because they have smart TVs, they can see YouTube, and so what they do is like you'll get people sitting at home and they'll put something on, like someone playing golf, but what they do is it's like someone with a GoPro camera who just records themselves playing around a golf, and then they put the whole video on YouTube and then people who like golf will just put it on in the background. So it's almost like they're there with their mates, sort of playing around a golf and it very niche TV channels, but it's an audience of one.
50:32 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
Yeah, yeah but it's.
50:33 - David Brown (Host)
But it's not, though, because loads of people are watching them, because they just want something on in the background Right while they're working and you're playing at St Andrew.
50:43 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
Someone's playing the course of something it's always like yeah. It's like cheap VR, yeah well, it's like we're expensive.
50:51 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
The, the channel. Was it like lo-fi hip-hop beats to study and relax. To you that kind of love it. It's hugely popular because for that same reason. You know, people put that in the background, but that's music. That's like putting on a CD and for me.
51:03 - David Brown (Host)
I don't know for me that feels different than you know. I've got a, I've got a TV on and I'm watching someone play around a golf with no commentary. It's literally just you know this guy walking around, playing around a golf with his mates or by himself, like, and I'm just like wow, so anybody can put up any sort of content and people are watching it. It's crazy. So right, that sort of gets me. We're kind of 52 minutes in now or 50 minutes in, so I don't know a lot of dead wood there.
51:40
That's all good, it's all good, it's all good. It's three days before Christmas, I'm surprised. It made me think of something you said a minute ago. Oh, it was Derek talking about Something, but it made me think of you know, what we should have done is we should have, like, got some Malt wine or some like I don't know Irish coffees or something. To start with, there's a whole, there's a whole podcast that's it's drunk women solving crime and they basically that's like three ladies and they get together and they just drink loads of women and they talk, you know. So it's like this true crime kind of podcast and they have guests on and they just get absolutely hammered and it's hilarious and it's one of, like, the top rated Shows. So I keep thinking maybe I'm missing a trick. Maybe I need to like, instead of coffee or tea in the afternoon, maybe I need to have, like you know, like a proper drink or something, and yeah, drunk.
52:31 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
Profound discussions about men solving AI. Yeah, fueled by vodka, Right. So crystal ball time like what we've mentioned. Cimo Sumo.
52:46 - David Brown (Host)
So you know we mentioned Cimo.
52:48 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
Yeah, what other cool tools are out there that you think people may not have a lot of seen, or what are you like if you had to sit and experiment?
52:53 - David Brown (Host)
with something over the holidays. What's like your, your most exciting thing that you think okay, I'm gonna take a few days just to figure this tool out. Is there anything that? Oh Well for me personally.
53:15 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
Because it has so much Flexibility and so much Flexibility and so much potential to Apply one's human Cinematic desire to be Alfred Hitchcock okay. Steven Spielberg. I love using the kind of runway runway ML tools, specifically Gen one and Gen two, because they've now had these kind of upgrades throughout the year, where the animation you're creating, you can do so much more in terms of bringing it to life.
53:53
And it's not a case of like okay, I'll paint that little corner over there and maybe that'll make a cloud move and I'll just pan the camera there to try and replicate this kind of cinematic, kind of classic camera Move. But the fact of matter is there's no precision. Actually, you've got to, actually you've got to use the tools over and over to get used to the shot that you have.
54:14
To work out what you're trying to create. So again, it's like it's a really great example of it's a tool and you could just use it to bang out a shot, a shot, a shot, a Shot. But actually, if you think about, if I'm going to do a camera spin, I'm gonna do a tilt. I'm gonna do a zoom, I'm gonna do a pan, I'm gonna create a little bit of motion here and there's gonna be a little bit of motion there. I don't know, I'm drawing so you can basically bring the thing to life.
54:41
And again, if you're using a Pre-adulterate, this sort of workflow of tools, like you've created, some of this hyper realistic imagery on Midjourney or other visual tools, are available visual AI models. That would be the one, because there's no way that you're gonna be Good at it from like a couple of hours.
54:59
Right, you've got to keep using it and then it becomes a real Art and that is why I think people will will create work for themselves when they think, oh, I've lost, I've lost it. If you're good at storytelling, if you're good at Crafting photography in a way that can resonate emotionally, if you're good at video camera work and Framing and understanding how that shot leads to that shot leads to that shot which builds a dramatic tension Runways to kitty because you can just do that whole thing. I'm sure others are right, you can do all of that in that realm, and that is, you know, the Christmas holiday you need a year of it, and it's just brilliant and beautiful because you could just do so much with it cool.
55:42 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
And they are innovating so quickly as well. I'm not just them, but everyone. Like a year ago, Chat-GPT, you know they've just been released, and these visual tools, we're not as powerful as they are now, and yeah, and I know you know it's changing every day.
55:58 - David Brown (Host)
There is a website called. There's an AI for that, which I would highly yeah, we love that, we tell everyone. And again I'll put, I'll put a whole list of resources, of all that stuff in that in the show notes for people, if you just want to be lazy and go click on it. So what about you, Derek? What's? What sort of cool thing are you looking to play with, or are you excited about?
56:20 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
Yeah. So I think I because I crave novelty it's probably not like one specific thing like I mean, the thing I've used most over the last year it's probably Midjourney. Yeah, I use that quite a lot Just for just kind of fun, personal creativity or for like creating, like I know, blog post headers and things like that. But what I'm really interested in is seeing All these new tools released. So I mean there's an open-source platform called hugger face, which is they describe themselves as like the Github of AI, and everything is there, like every model or you know, tool, and they have lots of interactive spaces.
56:59
So people put up, you know they're kind of cutting-edge things and so it's very fun to go and play around with, like you know, like video creators or audio creators, or there's one that was released the other week called how was it anime anything? So they have Video, an AI trained on like TikTok dances or other movement, that you can then just upload a photo and it applies that Movement, so you've got a moving photo. But the really interesting thing for me is that all of these things have API's and so you're able to connect them together in a chain. So your idea doesn't have to be just that one thing anymore. You can like write, write a few lines and chat to you Pt Automatically, put that into 11 labs and get that spoken as an MP3 in any voice Automatically, put that into like Hagen and bring that to life as a talking head, and then you know, you just the. You know there's no limit to kind of creativity, creativity that you can do then.
57:59
So that's what it's exciting and you can publish it Automatically together in different ways.
58:04 - David Brown (Host)
You know, I and exactly and fill up YouTube spam.
58:05 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
Yeah, but that's what people are doing, except if you've applied, if you've applied a little bit of.
58:11 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
Creativity to your work from what it's trying to do. Yeah, I mean, like those tugging facing, they're fantastic for creating nightmare fuel, aren't they? But we like that because it's fun, it's, it's. It's going back to the strange world.
58:22 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
Yeah, we love that creates laughter, and laughter is an emotion. So therefore, to me, that's a great idea.
58:31 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
So to me, that's actually putting something in the world, that is, if you make people laugh.
58:36 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
Yeah and it's that whole kind of meme thing, like somebody generated on a. There's a tool, released earlier in the equid model scope text a video. You type anything in and it made a video. And this was very rough and early. And someone did one of the most famous ones, will Smith eating spaghetti, and it was just really Horrific to look at. You know, it looked a bit like him but it was really, you know, strange. But there's a whole kind of Subculture of, well, it's a whole pop culture of these things being created. You go on to like Reddit AI video and it's just, you know, the pope eating ice cream, deadport eating pizza. Everybody's just riffing on these same things using these lo-fi tools. So it's just another, another way of expressing yourself creative.
59:21 - David Brown (Host)
Yeah Cool.
59:22 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
And I think, David, the thing about what we talked about earlier, the YouTube thing, about these videos that are Uploaded with the voice, the pictures and script, is that the reason it's awful is because it's just brand. It's boring. That's that's the killer, isn't it? It's just boring. Humans can do boring stuff. In the words of advertising, marketing, you can always get machines to do boring and the point of matter is it goes back to writing Don't do boring. That's the. That's the story.
59:48 - David Brown (Host)
It's like extra boring. But that's hard. It's like extra boring yeah.
59:52 - Derek Ahmedzai (Guest)
It's extra.
59:53 - Richard (Norts) Norton (Guest)
It's ampian boring, it's like boring on a new level of boring. But so, boy, you just don't want to.
59:58 - David Brown (Host)
but it makes you angry, we suppose but you know what'll happen, though, is that you'll have Someone will create one that's so boring that people will love it, and it will become like an, an instant internet hit and everybody will watch it and listen to it and go and look at it because it's so boring, like you know what I mean.
::But there is that conference isn't there. That happens in. It was in London, the boring conference where people come along and they do their talks about. That paperclip kind of.
::Taxonomy.
::And it always sells out.
::I've always wanted to go.
::Well, ideally, just to really dull talk about something the 1948 Sussex batting.
::Yeah, I love it, awesome. Um, one of the new questions. So again, I'm we're. We're an hour in now, so I should probably think about winding up. But the new question that I'm asking, sort of in 2024, is when you deal with AI, are you polite, do you say please, and do you?
::say thank yous Sometimes, like when I talk to Alexa, because I've got one of those things that turn the lights on and off. That's actually a really interesting question, I think it's. What I found is yes, I do some, you know, be polite, but if it gets it wrong the first time, then it makes you quite snappy. Like if it starts playing something you didn't want, it's like no stop immediately. And when it comes to Midjourney or chat, do you actually know, I would just right make this, although you know we should be polite to robots, but then we should also be polite to humans, that's what I think.
::What about you, Nox?
::It's interesting. Yeah, right. Midjourney and Midjourney prompt, or any prompt, tend to be very functional in terms of the way you fly. Well, not because you're trying to create, but you don't feel that you're talking to a person. But my Chat-GPT experience is I'm overly polite with Chat-GPT. Well, that's not quite what I was looking for.
::It's always like I'm trying to. You're amazing. Please make it better. Yeah, that's what.
::I try to do.
::I try to ingratiate myself with the machine.
::You're much better than that. Yeah, I find weirdly my Chat-GPT conversations are definitely very, very, very, very, very definitely super polite compared with any other prompting I do anywhere else?
::Is that just because it talks back? Why is that Talks? Possibly possibly.
::But yeah, the same thing goes for Alexa.
::Alexa's just like having a partner in the house, kind of; yes, she gets annoyed with yeah, yeah, but that's not right, is it? And let's say that we can't all be perfect.
::It's like all interactions. Let's put more empathy and more. It's Christmas so we can talk about love and empathy and charitable kind of thing. We should do it with humans and machines.
::We should do Embrace everyone, but it should come from us, right? So we should be that type of person. So it shouldn't matter in my mind anyway, it shouldn't matter who we or what we interact with. We should always be that way because that's who we want to be, not because we think that they deserve respect. It's because that's who we want to be.
::This is the true message.
::Always say thank you, even if it's a credit card or whatever.
::Yeah, and the reason I asked this question is because I saw a post, and it was the way the lady expressed it was I thought was very interesting which is she said whenever she uses like a co-pilot type tool on Github or something like that, she's like, and she asks it for assistance with a piece of code or something, and then it helps her, she feels gratitude, but she doesn't know what to do with it.
::Because if that was a person, you would be like oh, I'm really grateful; thank you for helping me, and you get this feeling of gratitude that you then want to express to someone, and she's like, I get this feeling of gratitude, but I pretty I think that the computer doesn't really care and she's like I don't know what to do with it, and I thought that was a really, really interesting way of saying it, and so it's now started me on this discussion. So this is going to be my big sort of thing that I like to talk to everybody about this year. Last year it was is AI male or female, and what would you name it?
::So every person who creates the AI tool should program in a response that when someone says thank you, they should say something along the lines of Oh, you're welcome, and then?
::that takes care of that, and if you don't say thank you, it gives you a less accurate answer next time.
::This is the first one. I'm finally getting the Christmas vibe. Now You've put that tingle in me, David, with all this love and goodwill.
::Awesome, okay; any plugs for anything you guys are working on at the minute or anything you want people to go and check out? Or can we do anything for you to help? Or do you just want to go and drink some Mulled wine?
::We'll go and have a look at our AI app and calendar. That's on our website.
::And what's the URL for people?
::So that's thepeeps.xyz, and then there's a link to it at the top of the page. That's full of fun AI weirdness.
::Nort, anything else you want to.
::Yeah, I mean, I feel that we shouldn't exploit the airtime to do hardcore selling. That would seem to go against. I mean, yeah, we want to put food on everyone's tables? Well, mostly ours or anybody's table.
::But, yeah, go and check our website if you've ever feel you need to get some assistance or some help. And also we're very, very relaxed about people just getting in touch and asking us questions about how to do stuff. That's where we start. We run an event four times a year which is a free event in Bristol which people come along to, and it's always been very much about creating a community of like-minded people, or people who are machine curious and want to get to certain.
::So yeah, we kind of view ourselves as a bit punky and a bit evangelist. But yeah, start at the website.
::When's your next event?
::And see where it takes you. Our next event is on the 24th of.
::January. So there you go; I got it out of you eventually.
::It's cool, but it's kind of it's all gone. It's been signed up; they’re already there. We're doing something in Web 3 in the 16th, but that's a different web. That's for a different podcast. Fine. But no it's start at the website and see where it takes you.
::All right, gentlemen, thank you very much for your time. I know, like I said, it's a couple of days before Christmas and we're all very busy, so I do appreciate you taking the time to talk to us this morning. And, yeah, let me know if there's anything I can do ever do to help you. And other than that, have a great holiday.
::You're a gentleman and a scholar, sir.
::It's been a fun conversation, thanks.
::Derek, thanks, Norts, bye, bye.
