Breaking Barriers: Women, AI, and the New Frontier of Creativity

Episode 21 • 20th November 2024 • Women WithAI™ • Futurehand Media

00:00 - Joanna Shilton (Host)

Hello, welcome to Women WithAI, the podcast dedicated to amplifying the voices and perspectives of women in the field of artificial intelligence. Today, I'm welcoming someone who sees AI as key to unlocking the creativity we haven't even dreamed of before. She's passionate about the UK's creative industry sector, and before we jump into finding out exactly what it is that she does, let me tell you a little bit more about her. Emma Wharton-Love is the co-founder and chief Get Stuff Done officer at Spark, an AI consultancy for creative and marketing teams that helps clients unlock the power of AI with expert AI workshops and coaching.

00:34

Before Spark, Emma spent her career focused on the future of work, from leading on hybrid working for Parliament and Government and 15 years as Programme Director in Architecture and Major Construction Projects at HOK and the House of Commons. She was also an advisor at Lendlease and GoSpace, an AI property technology startup.

Emma is also a graphic designer and co-founder of We Are the Loves, an employer branding agency, with her husband, Jules Love, where they first started using generative AI in creative and business processes. She now powers operations at Spark, which was set up with her husband, Jules, to support creatives and marketers and help them transition to the new future of work using AI. At Spark, Emma is focusing on developing brilliant relationships with clients and ensuring they're adding value in the quickly moving world of AI.

Alongside running Spark, Emma is a non-executive director of an NHS mental health trust, which she described as the biggest privilege and incredibly rewarding way to focus her skills and knowledge and attention. Emma Walson-Love, welcome to Women WithAI.

01:35 - Emma Wharton-Love (Guest)

Oh, thank you so much. Such a nice introduction. You put it so much more eloquently than I could.

01:41 - Joanna Shilton (Host)

It's great to have you here and I love the fact that you describe yourself as chief. Get stuff done, officer.

01:47 - Emma Wharton-Love (Guest)

I think more people need to have that job title that is so my role and, uh, yeah, making sure stuff happens it could have been a different word in the middle there, but I didn't think it was right let's kick things off by getting to know you even better.

02:06 - Joanna Shilton (Host)

Can you tell us, please, about your journey into AI and maybe what initially sparked your interest?

02:13 - Emma Wharton-Love (Guest)

Well, so I've had a very squiggly career, which I hope gives confidence to other women out there who have squiggly careers too. But, I think when I look back on it, the kind of common denominator is what you said, that I've worked in the field of the future of work the whole time. So I'll just sort of recap a little bit about and give a bit more colour on what you talked about in my bio. But so I started off as a strategy consultant working in architecture, working with clients like the Guardian and American Express, and my role was to really work out how people would work in new buildings. It was when everyone was moving to sort of funky Google-style buildings, so that was. So.

03:05

That was where the first kind of standard for what's called smart working, which today we call hybrid working, and then moved on through and worked at parliament and did similar work there, where I led hybrid working and also sort of developed the plans to move Parliament while they would relocate. That was a bit of a side. What's the right way to describe it? I kind of can't think of the right term. Jo Friday.

03:41 - Joanna Shilton (Host)

My head's gone. It wasn't a side hustle; it definitely was a major hustle, but it was not; no one else was doing it then, was it before, was it?

03:51 - Emma Wharton-Love (Guest)

Yes, pre-COVID, it's a deviation. And then, yeah, so after COVID set up We Are the Loves, and that's what really brought me into looking, and We Are the Loves was the employer branding studio that you mentioned, which I set up with Jules, my husband,, and he has a background as a commercial photographer and a management consultant, and as a management consultant, he specialised in the organisation design of marketing functions in corporates actually so and then I had a graphic design background as well, as I thought it was a great idea in my early 30s to retrain as a graphic designer in the evenings while I was working at Parliament, so I ran a design studio for the previous 10 years as well. That was my side hustle, and we started a couple of years ago.

04:37

We started using a lot of AI in We Are the Loves for a really boutique small agency, and we realised we needed to be able to punch above our weight. We needed to be able to punch above our weight. We needed to be really smart about the tools that we used, and then realised that a lot of the people we worked with with other creatives weren't using AI in the same way, and they started asking us about it. So we decided to use more AI, informally, tell people what we're doing and give hints and tips. And then Jules went and studied applied AI at MIT last year as well, and then all that together meant that we decided to pivot our business towards being an AI consultancy to help other creative agencies like we were, and that's when Spark was born.

05:24

I, so it's kind of that lovely confluence of what is the future of how we work and how we spend our time and how we are happy at work, which is my real interest, and then Jules's interest is the kind of technical side of it. And which comes from, you know, a photographer. Photography is a very technical skill. So, yeah, that's how it was born.

05:49 - Joanna Shilton (Host)

I love that. It just goes to show it's never too late to change what you're doing or follow your dreams. Change your dreams. Just add a new string to your bow. I think that's fantastic.

05:57 - Emma Wharton-Love (Guest)

Yeah. I think, now more than ever, you need to keep just adding, just keep adding new skills. I mean, I'm one of those people that enjoys having lots of different phases in their life rather than having sort of one way of doing things all the time.

06:12 - Joanna Shilton (Host)

So it depends on what makes you happy yeah, and just embracing everything that's sort of happening right now. I think it's yeah, oh, it's really important. I mean, maybe you could, can you tell us about the role of sort of AI tools in the creative process and what sort of impact this has on business and business models?

06:30 - Emma Wharton-Love (Guest)

Yeah, definitely. Maybe, if I talk about like a kind of macro view of the kind of change it might have on business models first, yeah sure, I think like a real way that I think about it is it's we've kind of been through this before.

06:48

I think AI is going to transform creative businesses in a similar way to, like the internet transformed creative businesses and transformed all our lives. Like, if we just think back to say, thinking about let's think about Amazon 30 years ago they were this like terrible website that we think it's hilarious now and they just sold books, but actually they've completely changed our, our lives and how we shop, how we communicate, how we access services. And I think AI will do a similar thing to all our lives, not just to creative agencies. It will like streamline processes. It will create new opportunities that we never really thought about, or perhaps we even dreamt about but couldn't get there. And it will allow us to be like more creative.

07:35

And I think like what I mean by that is so in an agency context, it, AI can enable us to streamline tasks and processes, making like the sort of routine work that we do.

07:48

We can systemise it, and AI can do a lot of that heavy lifting for us, which means it frees up time to do the more interesting work, and it means frees up time to think of sort of higher value, more creative activities and focus on innovation, rather than focus on the kind of like turning the handle type tasks that we sometimes find ourselves doing. and I think sort of connected to that, it raises like the bar for us to push ourselves to develop even more original ideas because AI is trained on all the ideas that have already ever existed before and it can smash them together to come up with new iterations of them, new versions of them, but it's not coming up with brand new stuff. So that's the role of us, you know, to reinvent ideas in a and come up with new ideas as humans rather than looking back at the past in quite the same way.

08:49 - Joanna Shilton (Host)

Yeah, yeah, that's okay because it's. You know, lots of people think is it going to take the creativity away from us? But I think, think you're right. It's freeing up the time. I mean, that's the whole point of using a tool, isn't it? It's to make your life easier and, as you say, it's freeing up the time for the humans to come up with new ideas. Because you're right, because AI is just predicting it's doing, you know, it's using everything that's been fed into it before. So, yeah, how does it come up with something new? Can it come up with something new? Do we want it to come up with something new? Or is it, as you say, it's just mashing together what already exists, whereas you need that kind of creativity yourself to sort of do that. And how do you? How do you train sort of creative agencies to do that?

09:32 - Emma Wharton-Love (Guest)

Is it just sort of changing the way they think and like making sure they're not scared of it and that it is an opportunity, or yeah, yeah, that's really, that's a really big part of it actually, we've done some research and I and sort of we've done some research with people that we haven't worked with before, sort of industry research, but also the kind we've. Every time we work with an agency, we survey them about how they're feeling now and what are the kind of main blockers. So, and what comes back time and time again really from everyone is that, uh, the kind of two things. The biggest thing holding them back from using more AI is that they just don't lack not kind of lack of understanding of what the tools can do, and that's generally because everyone's so busy like delivering work, they don't have time to engage with it, and it takes just it takes time to practise and to learn and to to know how to get the best out of the tools.

10:27

It's really easy to kind of to have a quick play around with something you, you kind of you, you're talking to it, because you talk to it in natural language. You tend to think you can just sort of ask it, ask, give it a sort of five word prompt and it will give you the perfect thing back but actually there is. There is a technique to it to get the best out of it. So I think it's really easy to that lack of understanding to mean that, it's not used, but also, like you say, I think there's still loads of fear, a sort of understanding to mean that, it's not used, but also, like you say, I think there's still loads of fear, a sort of existential, existential fear that AI is coming, like coming for creative jobs, and you hear, I hear that term so much and like it's just it's not right, and I think whoever started that phrase has got like loads to answer for.

11:14 - Joanna Shilton (Host)

Yeah, definitely yeah, terrifying the people that should be using it. Yeah, because you know, when you start reading about open AI and all these things, and all governments are going to use it and someone's going to create, you know, some like war machinery and if we don't do it, someone else will do it first and then you'll think, oh god, then we're going down. You know what was it the? Uh, oh, the film that was out. You know what?

11:35

Oppenheimer and they're just, you know if you watch that, it was like well one of we need to do it first because someone's going to do this really awful thing that we've thought of. So we need to make sure that we do it first before they do. And it's like maybe we can we just use it well in this sector anyway, creatively, to do good, to to free us up to be more creative. It's like having an intern that's how I've heard it described before. AI, it's a tool. You might run some ideas by it and, as you say, if you gave the intern or the graduate here you go here's just like five sentences, can you do something? They'd be like what? Well, no, I don't know the background, I don't know what you mean, what style do you want it in? And it's treating, it's going to ruin. You know the creativity and the artistic nature and but actually you've got to embrace it. I mean, people still love developing film.

12:30 - Emma Wharton-Love (Guest)

But yeah, you use the tools that you've got yeah, and I like I mean that's a brilliant analogy and we use that quite a lot because, you know, there's not going to suddenly not be a place for handcrafted design or any other creative that comes out and perhaps that will become more high value. But if you don't understand how to use AI and how it could be brought into your process, then I think you're really missing a trick. So I think so when we work with, with agencies or in-house creative teams, we kind of are we have like we have a first thing we always do is have a half day workshop, and it's partly it focuses on how to get the best out of the tools and it's partly it focuses on how to get the best out of the tools. But actually the main emphasis is like really showing the facts about AI, demystifying it and sort of and opening people's eyes as to how much of a kind of epoch change it is and how much is being invested in it, but also that we've been through this stuff before, like we went through the internet, becoming a thing and you know, and we've and we've adapted and survived and we're different type of designers or strategists or account managers than we used then.

13:47

We would have been then and then and then talk. We work through the creative process and exactly how AI could be integrated at different stages of the creative process, and what tools are out there right now to look at as well, and we recommend different tools, but of course, those tools are new. Tools are coming out all the time, so, that's something that isn't going to stand still and then I think it's really oh god, I was going to say.

14:15

I think what, what's really important, is just showing inspiration about what other people like real campaigns and real brands out there in the wild that have used AI and have used that lovely combination of human and the AI in turn collaborating to get a really great result collaborating to get a really great result and because you've you've worked in some fascinating sectors from major constructions, parliament, which not everybody would find fascinating, but you had a really good line about that that.

14:45 - Joanna Shilton (Host)

You said I don't want to steal it and I'll probably get it wrong, but you say, if anything that you need you do enough research on what was it, what was the line you had I had.

14:52 - Emma Wharton-Love (Guest)

Actually I was listening to an audiobook yesterday and it was a line in the audiobook uh, it was just, it's a novel, the new Matt Haig novel. I've forgotten what it's called, but I'm really enjoying it. I really recommend it.

15:03

But in the novel. The lead character says if you, take any subject at the most mundane subject, but look at it in a lot of detail, anything can become fascinating. And she was actually quoting someone else in with that quote, but I, I really love that quote. It's so accurate and, yeah, and when I looked at parliament or other things in enough detail, they, they are fascinating and they, they, you know they were great stages of life for me all right, because you've done all that, I should say.

15:38 - Joanna Shilton (Host)

Then you're able to then pass all that knowledge on and understand where businesses and creative business industries are coming from, because you've seen it from all sides. So I mean AI is moving really quickly. How do you stay on top of emerging technology like AI?

15:54 - Emma Wharton-Love (Guest)

Yeah, it's constant, yeah, so I think, but it's like, but that's kind of what spark is here for us to keep on top of it and then to assimilate the information and and like curate it so that when we're when we're talking, when, when we're passing that on, it's like only the information that creators really need to know, because there's like so much AI noise out there.

16:17

It's crazy.

16:17

If you scroll through LinkedIn I don't know if it's just me, because you know I'm talking about AI a lot, but nearly everything is about AI on my LinkedIn feed but so we unusually for, I guess, a company like ours we dedicate a lot of time each week just to uh, to research.

16:35

So it'll be at least a full day where we are just just keeping on top of the tools and using them and testing them and like as creatives ourselves, we test what, we test the pros and cons of all the different tools so that we can advise others about like this tool is great for uh, I don't know uh like facial features if it's an image generation tool, or this other tool is much better for copywriting than that one, and and so we keep on top of that, but there are some really great newsletters and things people can subscribe to, as well as ours, of course but the my top tip would definitely be to subscribe to the the neuron, which I don't know if you subscribe to that, jo, but it's yeah, it's uh, really concise and, like it's a lovely, entertaining read as well as being really interesting yeah, I do like it.

17:29 - Joanna Shilton (Host)

It kind of stands out when you get it in your inbox because, like you, I've, you know, doing this podcast, trying to learn as much as I can. I did sign up for lots of newsletters in the beginning and now I'm like, oh, my goodness, there's too much like every day how, yeah, how can you stay on top of it? And actually I found, because you have your update, is it a monthly update that you do?

17:48

I think it is with Jules and it's what's new in creative AI, and I was listening to the most recent one, before speaking to you today, and I was like, oh, I didn't know about the mango advert, I didn't know about this, I didn't you know some of the things I'd heard of. But then it also made me think, oh, I do know a little bit about what I'm talking about, because you were talking about the same things that I sort of wanted to know more about. So can you yeah, can you tell us a bit more about that, because I love the fact that you can spend a day researching it, but that is your job, yeah.

18:14 - Emma Wharton-Love (Guest)

I mean, it's at least a day a week and it is our job and, yeah, so a lot of that research goes. It goes well, it feeds directly into our train training that we do with creative teams and so that training, like, we are updating it every week, so it's like the uh, so it's the most recent, most relevant information, but, so, and we feed that, as you say, into our what's new in creative AI and, uh, we run that at the end of every month. It's every month at the moment, but we're thinking making it more regular because there is a lot to get. A lot happens in AI in a month, yeah, so yeah I think you should, just because it's really useful.

18:49 - Joanna Shilton (Host)

So I'd appreciate it, that's good, good feedback, good to know.

18:54 - Emma Wharton-Love (Guest)

But the other thing that we do which I think is really key, is, we spend a lot of time just out there, talking to creatives about what they're doing and and also collaborating with creative consultancies to talk. So right now, we're doing some work with an agency called big fish. they, are in. If you look at their website, they work with a lot of food brands. you might look in your cupboard after this and you'll realise that most of the brands in your cupboard are designed by, uh, big fish or created by big fish. And they're doing some really interesting stuff with mid journey. So we're working with them to understand how their designers are really using mid journey and for practical, practical sort of end creative use.

19:45

Um, because a lot of these tools are brilliant in the uh creative process and for ideation and concept development.

19:52

But uh, sometimes, you take them that far and then you might shoot the real end photography in real life. But they're doing some work with clients where the mid journey photography work is the end product. That's so interesting. Also doing some work with a brilliant AI automation expert too, because these, the AI tools in the creative process, become like super powerful once you join them all together, and that's when they can really you can really automate things and you can develop agents that actually do a job for you that you would normally do in your role. But it's perhaps something that is, like I was talking about at the beginning, like really routine and it's like the same thing every time, so you can send your AI intern off to do it. so we collaborate with a lot of expert people who are like deep experts in one specific thing to to understand what they're doing as well and on a sort of personal level kind of do you and Jules do you approach it differently, would you say?

20:53 - Joanna Shilton (Host)

I mean, do you have sort of different views on AI? I don't know if we have, I do you have sort of different views on AI.

20:59 - Emma Wharton-Love (Guest)

I don't know if we have I don't think we have different views. I think we're really. I think that would be tricky running a business together about AI if we had really different views.

21:06 - Joanna Shilton (Host)

No, it's scary, Don't use it yeah exactly, but we do use it differently.

21:14 - Emma Wharton-Love (Guest)

For sure, I am neurodiverse, so Angela's is neurotypical, starting to think of the right word, and so I think I, and I think that means that we use it a bit differently and also we have very different roles in Spark. So Jules focuses on all the training materials and keeping those like absolutely up to date, and I'm focused more about internally in the business and developing our services and business growth. So we kind of use it for different things in that way and the jewels will be testing the like image generation tools or the video, new video to video tool that runway is launched and he'll be spending a lot of time doing that, whereas I'll be doing more business process stuff. But I'll tell you about what I do because that might be really useful to some people. So before I think we went live, I think we talked about AI meeting, assistance and. I was saying how I use TLDV, but there are loads of other ones and uh, they do.

22:16

They're all very similar, but I use TLDV to record all my meetings, and. I and you can tell it how you and it. Then it records it. It has a full transcript and then it summarises as well. But you can tell it how you want it to be summarised.

22:34

So over the summer I did a whole heap of market research. I did 30 interviews with creative and marketing leaders and I wanted to like pull out key trends from that. So, as well as summarising the individual meetings, I asked it to you know, look at the, the trends, the opportunities, the pain points, that kind of thing that came out in each interview. It summarised each and then it emailed it automatically at the end of the meeting to me and the person I was interviewing. But also it. It has an ability to analyse across all the interviews at once, on whatever parameter I want it to look at. And then it gives me all the timestamps of all the videos. Just click on, go back and like listen to the verbatim thing that they said.

23:18

And I think that would have saved doing that sort of research, that R&D project. It would have take I don't know, it would have taken me two weeks perhaps to do that and I had a very quick first pass in like a cup, an hour or two. So it wouldn't be like my final research report, but it gave me a really good flavour of what the sentiment was, and then I use it for loads of other things I set up. I have quite a lot of custom GPTs. I don't know if you use those, jo.

23:46 - Joanna Shilton (Host)

Well, I've got a friend and he well, Nadio. He wrote 100 GPTs in 100 days. We can put a link to him.

23:54 - Emma Wharton-Love (Guest)

Was that a personal challenge?

23:58 - Joanna Shilton (Host)

It was and he continues anything that you do, any problem, any issue. He started doing a podcast as well Education with AI and he has got a GPT for everything and he keeps sending them and I haven't had time to look at them all yet. So, and I didn't, I didn't know that you could do that. I didn't know you could create your own, which seems obvious now because obviously you want to tailor it to what, to what you need it to do. I've just sort of, you know, had to ask questions on the same ChatGPT sort of thread to sort of try and mould it, but no, yeah, tell me about all the ones that you've been using yeah.

24:31 - Emma Wharton-Love (Guest)

So I set up a few. So I've got one which is my marketing advisor, which is great. I don't come from a marketing background, but I do. I I lead all the marketing for Spark, so that's super helpful, so any marketing questions I go straight there. I've also got a business coach, which is great, a GPT business coach.

24:51

Um, and I've asked, I've, I've took all my kind of favourite of my favourite business coaches out there, or sort of you know uh top voices of uh business people and and train, trained it on what they talk about in their books. so that I can ask specific questions and get advice from it. I also have a proposal writer and grant writer, like we. We got a uh grant, a government grant from Innovate UK that we're working on at the moment which was to do with that research I mentioned earlier.

25:31

But trained a GPT on all all my grant applications so that if I can then ask it, you know what did I? Or I don't know what month did I say I was going to do this activity in, and then it just tells me, rather than having to go through all my excel sheets, my project plans and things. I can just quickly ask it which. So, yeah, things like that really helpful. Got a also got a tone of voice converter, so if I write something myself I then put it through my Spark tone of voice converter. It's not perfect first time and I'm sure it would be much better if I spent time refining the GPT, but it saves a load of time getting it 90 there and is it quite easy to do that like, how do you start doing that?

26:18 - Joanna Shilton (Host)

is it? Is there like a step by step guide or is it just using, you know, ChatGPT to sort of start it off? How does it um?

26:26 - Emma Wharton-Love (Guest)

so yeah, so when you. So to set up a custom GPT, you need to have actually. No, you don't anymore. You used to need to have a paid full plan, but I think you can do on a free plan as well now. But when you go into the ChatGPT window and click on custom GPTs, you can actually. There is there's an instruction box where you fill out the instructions for the specific GPT you want to build, and you can upload documents that you want it to refer to.

26:56

So, like my tone of voice converter I've, I gave it all the details of the really specifics of the Spark tone of voice. like a copywriter would do for you if you if you commissioned. So my copywriter gave me a tone of voice and then I uploaded that to the uh GPT, and I gave it lots of examples to draw on as well of what good looks like and and then a set of instructions of how I wanted it to use those but. But when you go in to set up your GPT, there's another ChatGPT window in here. I don't know how many times I can say GPT, by the way, but we're not sponsored by GPT, don't worry I know but but basically there's a chat yeah, that'd be great.

27:43

There's a ChatGPT window in there that helps you, that gives you instruction, helps you build your GPT. See what I mean.

27:49 - Joanna Shilton (Host)

It's like I'm so going to have a play with this later.

27:53 - Emma Wharton-Love (Guest)

Yeah, it's great, it's fun. I can see why your friend has built 100 in 100 days, because it's a bit addictive.

28:01 - Joanna Shilton (Host)

And I guess the important thing, as you said, is to go back and refine it and to do it, and then really, it's like, it's just like being able to access that part of your brain that when was it I said that? What did I say I'd do again? And you're right, instead of having to trawl through all the notes, it's kind of there. It's like having a. It's a personal assistant and that's the dream, isn't it? I think, for lots of people with AI you enough to be able to just prompt you or tell you, but it's us feeding it the information it's you know, using that as you say to save time and and make it easier yeah, the other things.

28:36 - Emma Wharton-Love (Guest)

The other thing that's really good for like jogging or for like rather than trying to have to trawl your memory is, uh, I mentioned it on the creative. What's new in creative AI yesterday is Google notebook LM, and that's really good If you just want to look through, like a, just a really specific set of data, that it doesn't search the internet, it just looks at the data you've given it and you could put I don't know all your meeting notes in there as an alternative to using something like TLDB, and you can then, you know, search back for whatever you want or ask it to. You can ask any question about it, basically, or that you, or that you want it told back to me in a different way. Oh, and then sorry, the big difference about that one is it will speak it back to you, so it turns any information you've given it into a podcast of two people discussing that information, so it, so you can then access that information in a way that is quite easy.

29:37

It's very easy listening and accessible to listen to. So, because I'm quite dyslexic, I really prefer to listen to stuff, compared to reading a long document, and so, for me, listening, listening to a podcast about a document, is it?

29:52 - Joanna Shilton (Host)

yeah, is that's incredible much better for me.

29:56 - Emma Wharton-Love (Guest)

Yeah, I mean you can do your work.

29:58 - Joanna Shilton (Host)

You'll be sitting at your desk, you've done all the writing, you've done all the reading, oh, you just want to go outside. You stick your headphones on or earbuds and then you can actually just listen to it. Or, you know, while you're making a cup of tea, go to the kitchen and sort of have that. I think that's amazing. See, these are all the things that I kind of I need to learn about or I want to learn about, and I think you know hopefully everyone that's listening wants you know, if they don't know already. It's information that just is so exciting.

30:29

I mean because I was at an event recently that was about AI. It was called AI at cam, so it was about cambridge, the university of cambridge, but also sort of local government and that kind of thing, but again, it was the time that it saved. So having to like read through documents to kind of, you know, work out. You know there was one example that that it had taken under like 40 weeks or something of of work to read all these documents and go through it, whereas you know, the goal when they start using the AI tools is to get it done in two weeks and it's just wow, phenomenal time yeah, but what more you can do.

30:58

And it's not about getting rid of people or taking people's jobs. It's like actually freeing them up, like you say, to just to be more creative or to have time to do their job and to do the nicer work, yeah, the more enjoyable work yeah, I want an AI assistant that's going to do the housework.

31:14

Yeah, and then I can do all the fun stuff. Well, it's going to get write the report, do all this. They've listened, it is. It's like it is. It's like it's that intern again, isn't it? Someone's there, they've been with you and they're like oh, can you just write that up? Please write that down while I go and do something much more important. I mean, it's all moving so quickly, what? What excites you or scares you like? What do you think the future of AI holds?

31:36 - Emma Wharton-Love (Guest)

I think for creatives, I think, I think the future. It's very hard to predict the future in AI because of how much it's moved in, like the last year. I mean like three years ago, we didn't talk about it really yeah exactly so.

31:54

But I think, you know, looking sort of a short term ahead, I think the future, like, really belongs to people who blend AI and human ingenuity. Some of the really interesting creative that's coming out is like a really interesting blend of kind of AI and lo-fi kind of creativity as well, and I think that's really interesting because it just it challenges us as creatives to start to think in a different way as well as the way that we always have. So I think it's intellectually really interesting, so I'm, I'm excited about it in that way, I, but personally I'm someone that's always a bit scared of the unknown, so I, as I think many of us are. So I think it's, but I find it much more assuring to learn about it and really know where we're at and what's going on and what's possible. Then kind of then put my head in the sand.

32:56 - Joanna Shilton (Host)

I love that. So for anyone that's listening that would also like to do that sort of learn more and dive deeper into the world of AI what, what sort of resources or communities would you recommend people explore as well, as we'll put a link to your, your, your, blog as well.

33:12 - Emma Wharton-Love (Guest)

But, yeah, oh, thank you well, yeah, like definitely the neuron. Like I, I suggested earlier that newsletter. Like you say, Joe, don't subscribe to like all of them because then you'll end up reading none of them.

33:26

That's so true yeah we on our website we have a load of events. They're not all ours, some of them are ours, some of them are just events we're gonna we're at, so that's a really like one place resource to take a look at. So, from our point of view, every month we do a free introduction to AI for creatives and marketers, and next ones on the 30th of october, and you can register on our website or through linkedin and then every month we also do the what's new in the creative AI, and in terms of networks. Tonight I'm off to. I live in the southwest.

34:09

Tonight I'm off to London to an event I think it's just called creative AI network, which is pretty cool, which has someone from ltx, which is a studio that is looking at consistent. It's hosted there and they're looking at consistent characters and image generation. At the moment they've got a new tool that's out so there's gonna be a lot of people. It looks like a really packed event and I think it's only the second one that they've held. So, it shows how much appetite there is to learn about creative applications and AI. So that would be my top tip brilliant, all right, thank you.

34:50 - Joanna Shilton (Host)

Well funny. So for anyone looking to connect with you and with Spark, where is the best place to find you online?

34:56 - Emma Wharton-Love (Guest)

um online. Uh, I am on LinkedIn and so I'm just at Emma Wharton Love on LinkedIn. And then there's a page for Spark as well, which is we are Spark AI, and then or just grab me on email, just emma We Are Spark AI. awesome.

35:16 - Joanna Shilton (Host)

Thank you, Emma. I'll put all those links in the notes and I'll just say I think this podcast will probably, when people listen, will be going out in November.

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