Hey, welcome back.  Today I wanted to talk about AI. I know it's a topic you've been thinking about, I've been thinking about it a lot and talking about it a lot, and actually, in the next couple weeks I'm going to be giving a talk about it to creatives just like you.

There's a ton of noise being made by lots of different people.  A lot of those people are being paid to promote AI software.  There's also negative press too. I know we've all seen articles that talk about movie studios releasing trailers that have AI people in them. For example with The Brutalist,  there was a big backlash because Adrian and Felicity's performances were enhanced with AI in order to get the Hungarian accent correct.

There's any number of both extremely positive and extremely negative things that you might be seeing about AI. And in addition to that, there's a new software like every week and a half. It's really overwhelming and I think there's a lot of confusion, concern, and maybe also "leaping before you look" kind of mentality too. 

So I just wanted to offer my thoughts. Feel free to take what serves and leave behind what doesn't.  

#1: It’s okay to be scared.

The first thing I want to say is it's okay to be scared. We are living through a gigantic paradigm shift as an industry, and it's okay to freak the fuck out. It's freaky.  I've been trying to find an earlier time in my life to compare it to, and in all honesty, the last time I saw things this shook up was during the early adoption of the internet itself.

One year in high school, we got computer grants, and suddenly fields of PCs appeared, like, overnight. Whole new realms of study and new job titles quickly appeared in the years that followed.  Thousands and thousands of get rich quick startups rose and fell.  Funding was being thrown around like crazy.

There was great fear and disapproval from many people, but there were also a lot of people who made poor judgment calls in the name of staying on top of a trend.  What's happening right now is that we've all been suddenly reminded we were never standing on dry land. We were only floating atop a calm swell in the middle of an ocean.

It's okay to feel exhilarated by the wave, but also exhausted by it.  

#2:  The world still needs professionally-skilled creative teams.

The second thing I want to say is this: The world still needs professionally skilled creative teams.  GenAI can't replace us, because all GenAI does is serve a bunch of pretty (or creepy) options back to us in response to things that we ask it to do.

That is only an existential threat if you believe that's all creatives do or what our main purpose is.  Even if AI tools replace the current tools that we have now (holistically), someone still needs to figure out what we're asking the AI to do (and that's Strategy and Creative direction).  And someone also needs to manage the  results of the prompts that we're putting in which is, guess what - Design, Editorial, Project management... And then somebody needs to implement all of that effectively - and that's Design, Development, and Editorial. And guess what? The people who are most qualified to do all of that, the people who get the best results, are the people who have that experience to begin with. 

Even if we change everything, people who have expertise are still going to be needed to control all of this new AI software. When I think about it that way, I really don't find this very threatening. I don't think I can recall a year in which some new software that "changed everything" didn't come out.

As creatives, we have to adapt to new software literally all the time. This isn't any different, and it's nothing to be scared about, in my opinion.  

#3: I don’t place great odds on most of the GenAI startups.

Here's the third thing that I want to say.  We're experiencing an AI bubble. You know, much like the housing bubble of 2008 - this is all going to crash, and probably somewhat soon.

Now, I don't mean that AI is not going to survive and we'll just give up on it. No. What I mean is this incredible pace that we're at, where two or three new softwares come out per week, it's not going to continue. It can't continue because in order for a startup to be able to stay in business, it has to become profitable.
It can't just, you know, have unending funding forever.  

So I don't think a lot of these softwares are going to hit that mark. I place greater odds on the ones that combine what they are doing from an AI perspective with straightforward editing capabilities and things that are normal, non-AI tools that you would need to create a thing. 

So here's an example, right? There's an app floating around that allows you to enter a prompt and then it generates a song in whatever genre that you specify. I don't really see something like that being a profitable business model in and of itself. If you looked at another competitor in the market that also sells tools to support motion graphics and video editing, like for example, Motion Array — I think if they were to license that technology to Motion Array, and then that became part of their bundle of offering stock music, but also, you know, AI generated music - I think THAT could be profitable.

Because they're [Motion Array] already established and they're offering a lot of other utility to make video editing easier.  You see what I'm saying. 

I don't think it's a great thing that a lot of these AI softwares are so niche right now, I definitely think we're gonna see a lot of them being either combined into each other (like somebody comes along and buys a bunch of them, bundles them all in together) or they'll just die out because really big companies like Adobe can afford to develop their own AI capabilities (which they already have).

So that's what I see. This madman pace that we're at, where you feel like you just can't even keep up, it's not going to continue. It is going to coalesce and I think we're going to see some clear leaders among the software emerge.  There's just no way that a normal person can maintain like, 30, 35 different subscriptions to different AI softwares. That's just not sustainable (from a profitability perspective).

#4: Use GenAI to solve problems that people really face every day.

I want to see people use GenAI to solve problems that people really face. I am sick of seeing a one-off image of a ballerina dancing on Mars...or something that is similarly silly. I want I want to see it solve a REAL problem.

And I'm not saying the one offs that they're making aren't beautiful and nice looking; I just don't think it's an accurate reflection of how well AI can be integrated into a real creative workflow. So my advice would be to look for the biggest, snarliest, most annoying problem or process that you can think of to get AI to solve, and then see if you can make a dent.

Like if you think that GenAI would be a great way to make a blog, go ahead and run an experiment where you generate an entire blog and post regularly several times in a public place and see what kind of results and insights you get. I think you're going to find it's more of a mixed bag than you may have assumed based on how that tool was marketed to you. 

And if you want to successfully integrate GenAI into your creative teams processes, then no matter what, you need to run specific tests to gain insights on exactly how to achieve that.  

I do have some thoughts on how we get people to embrace or adapt to technology, how we make a meaningful inclusion of technology into creative processes...I'll have to put them in a different podcast, but stay tuned.  

#5: Don’t listen to any ONE person on the subject of AI, including me. 

Okay. So my next piece of advice is simply: don't listen to any one person on the subject of AI, including me. Run your own tests. Make your own judgments. The social feeds are polluted with influencers being paid to promote things, creative professionals who are peer pressured into putting every SEO-friendly-AI-search-word possible into their job title or their Job description or their resume [less they be deemed irrelevant]. And then on the other hand, there are people who are really vehemently opposed and balk at even the mere whisper of the word "AI".

Personally, I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. And the only way to find the truth is to try it yourself, and to make your own decision based on all of the empirical data that you have available to you.  

#6: Human beings tend to place more value on the works of human beings.

Okay, the next thing I want to do is address this fear that people have that AI will replace all creative people and individual artists will go out of business.  So the thing I want to say about this is human beings tend to place more value on the works of other human beings. And when the pendulum swings too far in the direction of things being completely automated, like movie trailers generated from AI where people have seven fingers, that's when you're going to see these intensely negative reactions from your audience.

And that's because, to your audience, it feels like you didn't give a shit about making a connection with them, you didn't think through your material, and you didn't think about the other people who were involved in the creative process.  , That doesn't mean that you can't or you shouldn't ever use AI but it needs to be used thoughtfully.

Inappropriate use can lead to a dramatic drop in the value of your content. In the end, human beings are the people buying whatever it is you're selling, and we still need to cater to human beings, even if we're using AI to help us scale the creative.  

#7: Think about the bigger picture. 

Okay, I also want to talk to my creative peeps out there. We got to think about the bigger picture here. 

Because I think that we see this AI software, we think it's targeting us (which like, maybe there's some truth to that) - but I think we need to think about the fact that right now, there is a huge demand for creative assets. A much higher demand than all of the creatives in the  universe could ever fulfill. Everyone's got a side business they're branding or side hustle they're trying to make a website for. And even when they don't have that, they're still trying to brand themselves as individuals on various platforms like LinkedIn or something.  

There is a fundamental disconnect between the budget of an individual person trying to brand themselves versus what it costs to employ a creative team or even one designer. 

And even if you go back to the corporate/professional setting, a small change in direction can result in a need to change not only a source asset, but a thousand other assets. It can be really expensive to have to handle that type of change that has to be scaled to many different places. 

Over the years, it's just become more and more important than ever to make it be possible for ordinary people who don't have design training to make creative things and edit them themselves and post them themselves.

I think that's why we see such success from these prosumer softwares like CapCut, Canva, Lenza, Lumi, MotionLeap, etc, etc. And now we see that kind of traction from certain AI softwares. It's the result of a very real need to empower anyone to make creative stuff. 

I do think that traditional creative softwares that you and I went to school to learn how to use have often failed to properly recognize and keep up with that demand. So I do think that we're going to see some of them disappear. 

The thing is, none of this is bad. There is plenty of room for both the individual content creator who's making their own assets in an amateur fashion - and the high level professional who has to work on corporate branding for a larger business and do things on a much larger scale. One of these things doesn't replace the other; we're part of the same ecosystem. 

So I think we need to remember that empowering lots of people to make creative stuff isn't a threat, and it's a problem that needs to be solved. It's a problem that's not going away. At the same time, businesses need to be able to do really high quality work in a cohesive fashion and deliver it to millions of customers, and that's a problem that's not going away either. Those things don't cancel each other out. They're not the same problem.  

#8: You don’t have to give in to peer pressure to pick a side.

So, by the way, you don't have to give in to peer pressure to pick a side. I know that it feels like everybody is either for or against AI. Listen, I love technology. I love gadgets. I love rushing to try whatever the latest thing is. GenAI has been no different for me. But I also hold a lot of concerns about the ethical impact of certain methodologies of GenAI or certain tools. And how it's being used by people who don't mean well. Like people who are scammers or other bad actors. I don't hate GenAI. I don't love GenAI. It's just a tool. How you use the tool is what determines the results.  

#9: GenAI isn’t the only AI that exists.

Okay, I have one last thought that's rolling around in my head about GenAI. A lot of people think that GenAI, like MidJourney or ChatGPT, DeepSeek, et cetera, et cetera, are the only kind of AI that exists because that's what's occupying the headlines.

That is not true...Gen AI is just the newest generation of AI tools. There's a lot of stuff that has already existed, like uploading an image to images.google.com and being able to search for the source image or other images like it. That is AI, too. It's just that it's been so well integrated; it's been around for so long that nobody thinks of that as being AI. And nobody has a problem with it...have you noticed that? 

So, I think that, again, it's about perspective.  And I think if you don't love what MidJourney or Luma or whatever are doing, you should look at some of the other areas that AI has been applied where it's been applied really successfully.

I think that one of the reasons that Gen AI is so controversial is that it hasn't really yet proved its long term worth, whereas a lot of these other things have. So I would really encourage you to research the whole gamut of AI and form your opinion based on that rather than on this one specific area. 

Okay, I think I'm spent. I hope that helped you.  I really wanted to put out something a bit more neutral about the subject of AI. I hope I've done that for you today. I hope that, this has helped ease your stress a little bit or made you feel a little curious.