Is Generative AI Killing Creativity Or Enhancing It? — With Scott Belsky

Scott Belsky is the chief strategy officer and executive vice president of design and emerging products at Adobe. He joins Big Technology Podcast to examine the impact of generative AI on creativity. In this interview, we discuss whether AI homogenizes creativity or creates more possibilities. We talk about how Adobe is baking it into its products with generative fill. We also discuss creative attribution for images used to train generative AI models and how friction is actually good. Tune in for one of the most fascinating discussions on the podcast in 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let's talk about the future of creativity in the AI age with Adobe's Chief Strategy Officer, right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis Chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, Head of Enterprise Business Solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large scale agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade offs and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today.

• 0:44Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 1:11Speaker 01

  LinkedIn Presents.

• 1:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. And today we're joined by Scott Belsky. He's the Chief Strategy Officer and Executive Vice President of Design and Emerging Products at Adobe. And today I'm so excited to have him on to talk about how AI is going to impact creativity, whether it will homogenize it, as well as a bunch of other fascinating subjects that Scott is looking at in the tech world. So glad to have you here, Scott. Welcome to the show. Hey, Alex, thank you. Great to see you. You know, we've talked about this in the past, but when I was just starting out way back in the day, I think I was like working in my marketing job at the time in New York City. It must have been 2010, 2011.

• 2:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  You gave this presentation while you were the CEO of Behance, kind of talking about the future of community and creativity. And it was, maybe it was in like,

• 2:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Some small office in New York City and I remember kind of cramming in the back and being like at the end like, who is this guy? Because clearly you're able to see this stuff in just like a very clear and interesting way. And it's led you obviously to great places in your career. So it's very cool to be able to sit down and speak with you on the pod.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  I appreciate that. Yeah, thanks.

• 2:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Great. So let's talk about creativity. Do you think we are more creative now than we were in the past? I mean, let me just set it up. It does seem like a lot of creativity is homogenized now. Everything kind of looks the same, same formats, same feel, same, you know, amount of creativity is driven by the data. Where do you see the trajectory of creativity today?

• 2:54Speaker 01

  Well, I'll make two points on this. First of all, I feel like creativity is the world's greatest recycling program. You know, everything that we get as inputs generates stuff in our brains that then generates outputs. And so of course, what we are exposed to influences what we put out in the world. And you do have to wonder if we're all exposed to mass media and we're all getting the algorithmic, you know, whatever's popular and trending and memetic and everything else. Does that actually create more of a center of gravity around kind of the main narrative? That maybe makes a lot of more like homogenized outputs, you know?

• 3:35Speaker 01

  I'd say that's a really interesting question and perhaps, right? But of course, any great creative mind will tell you that they expose themselves to crazy things. They, you know, they go traveling, they, you know, they try to find the mistakes of the eye that, you know, that inspire new things. And that's of course where creativity comes from. So I don't, I don't think that maybe there's like a, there's a new, a new, you know, the technology is sort of of social feeds and stuff, you know, counter some of this. But I still think that there's genuine, you know, human ingenuity that drives new areas of creativity. However, you asked this question around, are we becoming more creative? And, and I happen to think that.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Unfortunately, humanity is typically, you know, peak creative at five years old. Because we feel like everything we put out there gets the smile of a teacher and the refrigerator positioning from our parents and, and we get this like, we have this incredible creative confidence. Because we feel like everything we make and draw is amazing. And then we slowly realize that there's people with skills that we don't have. And then there's these people called critics that tell us they don't like what we did. And, and creative confidence kind of goes down quickly. Unless we counter it with design school, you know, and ability to draw and watching YouTube videos and whatever.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  And you have to wonder if a lot of the new technology, especially the generative AI technology, which I'm sure we'll talk about, if that's actually restoring creative confidence for a lot of humans past that age. Now, if you have an idea and you want to make a quick animated short, you can actually make it. You know, it's like, what an amazing bolstering of confidence that influences what we put out in the world.

• 5:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  You said two things that seem to contradict. One is that we're, that creativity is this recycling machine, which does sound real. Like we do just kind of riff on the things we've seen. And then you acknowledge that there's human ingenuity. How do those two balance each other? Better question, how do they exist in tandem?

• 5:39Speaker 01

  Right, right, right, right. You know, it's funny, when I advise product leaders on building new products, I always explain to them that a really successful breakthrough product is 95% familiar and 5% retraining. You know, if you try to do everything entirely new and new paradigms of users or interfaces and new terminology and new icons, like the customer will just be totally discombobulated and they won't be able to use it. And so the trick is to make enough things that are familiar so that people engage. And then find the one or two things that are completely different and differentiating. And like do those in the entirely new way that trains the customer to do something differently, but also like distinguishes yourself in market.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  And in some weird way, I actually feel like creativity is somewhat similar because it's storytelling. And at the end of the day, creativity that is effective is creativity that moves us. And we're not going to be influenced and, and emotionally engaged by creativity unless there's some degree of it that's familiar. So. I actually happen to think that a lot of these things that we are picking up from the world, you know, we are putting into the world that work that we put out there. And then the question is like, what are you going to put in that's uniquely yours? And so that's, that's actually the interesting debate right now about if I generate an image entirely just from my prompt, you know, is it my creation? Well, you know, if the prompt has a lot of ingenuity in it, sure, you know,

• 7:05Speaker 01

  but if you do even more with that asset after you make it, maybe even more so. I think these are some of the questions we're debating these days.

• 7:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, and we're going to get into the generative AI discussion pretty deep in a few minutes. Everybody waiting for that. I promise you it's coming. I also wonder whether, you know, the technology that's expanded our ability to do things has in some way removed a constraint that required us to have better ideas at the source of creative. So, I mean, this is kind of cliche, but let's talk about it. Like you look at some of the ads from like the sixties or the fifties, they're trying to sell a car. And it's like, I mean, the sort of the Don Draper days, right? The beautiful picture of the car with like a little, you know, short story about what type of person drives it. I mean, that was an ad that looked and I mean, just sort of tugged at the heartstrings in a way that most advertisements don't today.

• 7:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Do you think we've kind of, I mean, you know, I think I know your answer because you're working at a creativity technology company, but well, yeah, make the case then for why, why all this tech has been good, given that we've sort of, it seems like we've overcomplicated a lot of our art today.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Well, I think there's this question around the democratization of creativity. And, uh, you know, and as you know, I mean, any, any brand can create insatiable amounts of content now, whether it's blog posts or images or whatever else. And as a result, especially because of things like SEO and, uh, and social media everywhere, every, every one, every creator and every brand is flooding the zone as much as they possibly can. And, uh, and so will.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Will that work? Or are we going to actually crave more meaning? And more emotional engagement as a result of this flooding of the zone? You know, I happen to believe that two things are happening in the world of creativity. We're simultaneously lowering the floor. So more people can get in and create stuff that ordinarily couldn't. So you can make that animated short, even though you don't have animation skills. Right? I can make a, a, a commercial without engaging a huge agency to do it. We're lowering the floor. That's exciting. That's democratizing, but we're also raising the ceiling. So for those who are the Don Draper types and those who actually do have the skills, they're not staying stagnant either.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Like they're able to cover far more surface area of possibility to find better solutions. And when you ask an amazing creative director or an amazing designer, how they do their best work? It's always about time. Like they need cycles of discovery and they always say like, if I just, I mean, yeah, if, if I'm given more budget and more time, I will come up with more ideas and I will whittle them down to a few better options that will ultimately yield a better solution. It's just a function of time. And so in that instance, like this AI technology, as well as other efficiencies in the system, you know, should yield more iconic, more emotionally engaging spots.

• 10:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I do think, you know, going back to your point about generative AI, putting technology in the hands of so many other people. I mean, the threads that I've seen on Twitter of people like dreaming up different images, whether it's like the president's looking like 70 rock stars or, you know, any matter of, of, you know, I don't know, just like cosmic imagery that, that goes on there. It's incredible because it's kind of interesting. You would never assign a graphic designer to make this. It would be a complete waste of time. And it does seem like this generative AI wave is really showing us something. I thought we wouldn't see otherwise.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  I was talking to just like a little quick example. I was talking to a friend of mine who is, works like a big fashion label. And his job is to come up with ideas for shoots, like, you know, for the, for the, for the campaigns and what have you. And he said that he had this idea one morning of a, of like a, of a racetrack with like racing cars. And, and for some reason, all the drivers of these really antique, old, beautiful cars were Japanese. And they were wearing these scarves and he like, and they had leather jackets and he had this like whole vivid image in his head. And so he went to one of these generative AI tools and just made an entire mood board

• 11:28Speaker 01

  of exactly what is in his head from like this, you know, morning dream sequence he had. And, you know, that became like a mood board that then they had worked, like looked at and ultimately refined what became the photo shoot. And it's like, you know, what an amazing toolkit that allows him to hopefully have an even, you know, better executed vision. So that's the kind of thing that I think will, will actually elevate the types of content that's made.

• 11:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. It's so interesting. Like when Dolly came out, I looked at it and said, you know what this really is? It's a communication technology. Is that something you'd agree with?

• 12:02Speaker 01

  Well, I do think that visual expression and storytelling is a very effective way of sending a message. And, you know, what are memes? Like memes are compression vehicles for knowledge and communication. It's one way for me to tell you something without having to explain it to you. Right? And, and this technology, I mean, memes are creative. They're, they're images. They're visual. So yeah, of course, you know, I think these are, these are methods of communication. They just haven't been available. It was like a language that only certain people knew in society, like 1% or less actually knew how to draw and graphically create something. And, you know, what happens when that becomes everyone to some extent?

• 12:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, definitely. I mean, for me, like, it's it's definitely become like the main way that I will draw the story art for my newsletter. And I was at a scale where it was just like, I'm gonna be the only if someone's making the art, it was me. Like, it was gonna be like a Photoshop. Sorry to use the expression, but, you know, like, you guys must like that. People using this stuff in creative ways. Or or, you know, pulling in a free stock image. And I think it's just enhanced the ability of people to get what I'm trying to say in a way that wasn't happening before and just made the stories more pleasant to read. It's pretty cool.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  It is true, Ox, but, you know, we still need ideas, though. It's like, it's interesting. You know, you can only think you're only as creative as like the prompt you can come up with also, right?

• 13:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Totally.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  And, you know, sometimes when you're thinking of a sunset, like, yeah, you can prompt a sunset. But if you explore sunsets captured by famous photographers on a stock website, you're actually probably going to find a better image than you can even generate yourself. So there's, you know, there is like that that question of, you know, can we, you know, it's still imagination constrained equation.

• 13:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And my mother in law is a graphic designer and I showed her Dolly when it first came out last year. And she was instantly like, oh, I'm toast. And I was like, no, no, it's not. It's not what's gonna happen. Like, actually, these professional skills are even more in demand or that you can now communicate with people who want an image better and tailor it to, you know, sort of fit with their imagination.

• 14:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  But now, generative AI is also making its way into your products. So I'd love to hear a little bit more about the way that Firefly has been baked in to and and I guess there's creative assist being baked into Adobe products and how designers are starting to use generative fill and other generative tools to make their work better.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Well, when we did start this journey by putting some of these capabilities out on a standalone website, more like a playground for people to play with, and what we immediately found was that people were excited, but they wanted to do it in their workflows. It was like, okay, this is cool. Novelty always precedes utility a little bit with new technology, and it's a good way to test. But wow, like if I could just do this when I'm doing this in Photoshop, or if I could do this and turn it into a vector, but then edit the endpoints in Illustrator, or you know, and that was, those are the types of things that we were hearing from almost all of our customers that were playing with this technology. And so then it became actually more

• 15:22Speaker 01

  of a interface and design innovation exercise. How do we bring some of these capabilities into the workflows that people use? And it's funny, like we have this product called Illustrator on iPad, which is actually not a hugely popular product, but it does, you know, it's Illustrator on iPad. And there was an innovation that the team came up with on that product years ago, because we wanted to eliminate a lot of the chrome, like the buttons and stuff, because illustrators don't like that in their view. And so we came up with this kind of progressively disclosed bar, this action bar, where when you're touching, it like gives you the options that are relevant for that moment, wherever you are in the workflow. And we leveraged that design pattern, and we took it into Photoshop to expose the same idea that wherever you are,

• 16:07Speaker 01

  we can give you the generative actions that are relevant for where you are in your workflow. And that, you know, that one innovation like changed everything for us in Photoshop.

• 16:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. So what does that look like in Photoshop?

• 16:20Speaker 01

  So in Photoshop now, when you are touching an image in your editing process, and you, you know, and it detects that you could actually expand this image, it just gives you the option of generative expand. You know, if you, if you have a selection of something, you put a mask, or you know, you circle something in Photoshop, you then have the option of generative fill, and you can just prompt like, I want to put in balloons, and then boom, like, you know, you get balloons, you get many options of balloons. And we just launched this vector, generated vector capability in Illustrator, and it's pretty amazing. I mean, you need, you need a icon, or you need a, you know, a pattern, or anything. And anywhere you are in your workflow, you just prompt it and get it. And it's, you know, it's, it's just...

• 17:06Speaker 01

  Spans the possibilities infinitely to some degree.

• 17:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's pretty cool. What are you hearing from designers? Like, is this something that's like immediately getting high adoption? Or is this, do you think it's gonna take a little bit of time?

• 17:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the adoption is pretty immediate and, and it's pretty, well, let me put it this way, the adoption, you know, within a few weeks of us launching these capabilities and each of these products is higher than probably any other feature we've ever brought into these products in maybe 10 years. So certainly as long as I've been involved with anything at Adobe. So I think the customers have spoken in that regard. But we, you know, we, I think it's still a question of like, where else do we integrate it? And, and how do people use it? And, you know, but I've never met a creative professional that wants to take two hours to do something that they could achieve in two minutes or two seconds. No one wants to do things a long way. The question is, what are they gonna do with a lot of their newfound time?

• 18:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. I mean, it's kind of basic, but the resizing alone is amazing.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Like, if, I feel like designers must spend half their day taking that one image that was square, making it horizontal, making it vertical, making it poster size. And if you can use generative AI, I mean, you talked about expand, to expand images, to expand them, to contract them, to produce all those assets in a snap of a finger, you're all of a sudden left with much happier designers, would probably make the whole organization happier.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Totally, because they don't want to be doing this mundane repetitive work. And when you give them that time back, you know what they're gonna do instead? They're gonna like run more A B tests of different images as opposed to resizing the same images. They're gonna start to explore other possibilities and, you know, and propose maybe better solutions. So I think the, that's the other thing that, you know, I've been involved with a lot of these conversations with companies that are asking this question of, oh, like, is this gonna give me more efficiency in the creative team? And, and what does this mean in terms of, do I have to hire less creatives? And, you know, and I always explain, like, first of all, engineers have gotten more productive for the last few decades. And guess what happens? Like, people keep hiring more engineers. Why? Because they get more ingenuity per person than they want more people because they want to do more things.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  And it's, you know, unless you're a penny pitching in a private equity owned company. You are probably a company that actually wants to build more products, more features, more marketing campaigns across more platforms and more regions with more testing. And so when you get capacity back and actually you get more out of each person on average, actually you end up wanting more people because you end up wanting to do more things to grow your business more. It's sort of like a, maybe it's just a natural human tendency of capitalism, if not just humanity overall.

• 19:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about who owns these images. So it's kind of interesting, right? Just thinking through the path here. So someone makes an image, that image is used to train a model. Someone's making another image, they use generative fill to enhance it. Do they own the image? Does the person who previously created that original image that was used to train the model own like one millionth of their image? What is your, how do you think through this stuff at Adobe?

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Well, a few things. So first of all, I'm not a lawyer, as you know, Alex. I spend a lot of time with them these days, but I'm not a lawyer myself. And also, the rules and the laws around some of this stuff are still in some areas, either not fully evolved or TBD. And it's also like different regions and countries are exploring this in different ways. When you get into all the evolution of copyright law and everything else. Currently, you know, there's also a difference between what we are doing and why we're doing it versus what we're legally required to do. You know, I think we've been a little bit more creative, protective, you know,

• 21:08Speaker 01

  because A, this is our customer base and B, we believe actually that this is the way the world's going to go. But some companies are taking a different approach and would disagree, you know, with what we're doing. When you make something through generative AI, there's a lot of legal thought that when you edit it in any way, it is yours at that point. And so that could be as simple as, you know, if you're, if you're in a, in something and you're expanding an image that you took, it is your image and it's because you actually generated a lot of it. Now, the question is, is it 50% of the pixels? Is it 99% of the pixels? And I think you pose this good question of, well, at what point is it an immaterial

• 21:51Speaker 01

  level of input or editing that you're making, you know, to this, to be able to claim that you made this image? And I think that's, you know, that's a great, that's one of those like open questions right now. If you, you know, there's some folks that say that if you entirely generate an image just with a prompt in one of these tools that was trained on other people's content, it's not yours unless you edit it further. And that's, you know, again, though, I don't have like a legal position on that per se, but those are like the debates that are happening right now.

• 22:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. So you're, you're writing on Substack. Did you know there's a Substack feature that allows you to toggle on and off whether models can train your, on your work for generative AI purposes? Have you seen that?

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just actually noticed that yesterday, funny enough. Yeah.

• 22:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. So what's your choice on that? It is wild. It's like, wow, this has become all of a sudden, like, I mean, if you told me two years ago that I would like have an option in the newsletter tool that I'm using to let AI models train on the work, I'd be like, what are you even talking about? But we're here.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  Well, I was like, first of all, I had some funny ideas, you know, before that feature was discovered, you know, I, I was thinking, you know, what would happen if I wrote in the end of my newsletter, uh, and by the way, everything I just wrote is fake and this is incorrect information. And then I put like a wink, you know, to the, you know, to the AI models that are training off of this. Like, would that then tell the model to actually ignore what I just wrote because it's fake? And, you know, is that like a way of me sort of protecting my content from being trained? Like, there's all these sort of mental games now I play. And also, you know, do you, is this how paywalls are going to become super popular? Cause there are certain things you write where you're

• 23:37Speaker 01

  just going to want them like not on the, not on, not trained and, and you want people to have to log in and be able to read it as humans. So there's, there's all kinds of questions there.

• 23:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  So what did you choose?

• 23:49Speaker 01

  Um, I, um, I chose to allow training, um, but I also have a section at the end where I have, uh, like I share some more provocative thoughts and like things that I'm working on. And I put a, a very low paywall in front of that, um, that I do, that I give to charity. But I figured that was one way where I could just like, make sure that that stuff, you know, can't be accessed by a bot.

• 24:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Wait, do you think the bots can't access underneath the paywall?

• 24:21Speaker 01

  My understanding is that they're not able to scrape it. I guess unless someone who's like paying manually feeds it to a bot. But I thought it was a safer approach.

• 24:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. So I also chose to let it crawl. And at first I was like, no, no, no crawling. And then I was like, wait a second, if someone is talking to a, like a Bing or ChatGPT, and they want to learn about technology and the bot is like pushing big tech, big technology. I'm like, yeah, of course, it'd be the best advocate I could possibly find.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Especially if attribution becomes commonplace and you can see, you know, where something came from and you can follow up and learn more about it.

• 25:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. All right, let's take a quick break, come back after this, talk about some of your writings and implications and a few other questions about the generative AI business. We'll be back right after this. We're here with Scott Belsky, Chief Strategy Officer, and Executive Vice President of Design and Emerging Products at Adobe. See you right after the break. This episode is brought to you by AppPoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Copilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it and prove it's under control. That's exactly what AppPoint does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data,

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• 27:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Scott Belsky. You can find his writings at implications.com. And if you sign up for the paid product, you can read it, unlike the bots. So one step up for you on the robots. So Scott, you actually just got this new job, right? It's something that's relatively new that you're now working on emerging products. So can you talk a little bit about what those emerging products are? Is this generative AI related? What makes you interested in that area of the creative field?

• 27:58Speaker 01

  Well, sure. I mean, I came back to Adobe six years ago in this Chief Product Officer role, where I was overseeing engineering product and design. And emerging products were part of that group. And that was, you know, that were a lot of the early explorations of some of the new tools we have today, like certainly started, you know, with some people, with some folks in that group. And then about a year ago, I took on a kind of different mandate of stripping out a lot of the emerging products that were, that are in that group, especially some of the AI-first explorations that we're doing for the, like we call it the incubation zone of the company, as well as design for the whole company. Because at the end of the day, the interfaces, you know, these days,

• 28:42Speaker 01

  the underlying APIs are really important, but it's how those APIs surface as capabilities in our products that, you know, in my opinion at least, determines their fate as much as the models do. And, uh, and then, uh, and then focusing on strategy and corporate development, which was a new thing for me. I mean, also, I think I've always been thinking about strategy, but it was, it's kind of fun to have a learning curve around strategy for the whole company and how sort of creativity and marketing come together and that sort of thing. So it was, uh, you know, it's a bit of a change of pace I get to in some ways. I miss the earlier days, frankly, like I, I miss kind of earlier stage product stuff. I was always an entrepreneur and this was a way to kind of keep me engaged

• 29:25Speaker 01

  and, uh, and bring on, bring on some new challenges.

• 29:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  So speaking of companies, entrepreneurship, do you think that we're gonna, when it comes to this generative AI wave, we're gonna see a bunch of new companies start to sprout and take advantage of it? Or is it going to be something that'll be mostly confined to the big ones?

• 29:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that there will certainly be some amazing new companies that spawn, whether they're tackling workflows that don't actually have great software leaders that solve them yet. I mean, AI, what AI also does is it really drastically reduces the learning curve to use a product. And, um, and you can imagine a suite of tools that just replace entire clunky workflows with natural language. So, um, I do also think though that Really established workflows that just need to get better. You know, that is where incumbents have an advantage because they have the data, you know, that trains these models and they have the distribution.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  You know, they have the reach to the customer already. And customers don't like to change products unless they have to. So there was an era of technology where on premise or old clunky software was replaced by cloud software, right? And, and that was one of those moments where startups, you know, you had to reinvent the stack from the ground up and that, and then you'd end up displacing a company that wasn't able to start in the cloud and was years and years behind. I think that the AI platform shift is a little bit different. It's not like you're going from, you know, local to cloud or from, um, or from desktop to mobile. In this instance, you're actually in the workflows you're using every day.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  You just want to make them, you know, 50x faster, you know, and more intelligent. And so with these underlying capabilities that bring API, AI wherever you need it, I think that's an, that's an opportunity for incumbents, you know, to, to sort of, uh, to innovate and to, you know, thrill their customers as opposed to lose them and have this life cycle of companies, you know, just replacing companies, replacing companies, replacing companies. But on this, on the small side, I'm also particularly bullish for small companies because small companies are going to start getting the advantages of big companies without having to, uh, to grow and become bulky, you know, like big companies. So for example, getting a huge data analysis department, you know, that used to be 50

• 31:55Speaker 01

  plus people and, you know, data analysis cycles that inform marketing and whatever else, but once that's done by AI, you can have a small company that has the, the, the power of the data analysis function of a big company, um, being able to launch a business and, and compete. And, you know, same with marketing and content creation and, you know, a lot of these other functions that are going to be enabled by AI. So you'll see many, many more smaller companies have great businesses as a result of this technology. You'll see a lot of incumbents get stronger and be able to keep their customers as opposed to lose them in this new platform shift. And then you'll see some new verticals, whether it's government technology or other things

• 32:38Speaker 01

  where AI just kind of streamlines and they're entirely different companies.

• 32:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Every time we talk about these ideas, the streamlining of workflows, the bringing in of a data department, the helping a graphic designer, it always seems to indicate to me that this is going to be a enterprise thing first. And we talked about this over dinner a few weeks back, but is there anything, do you see anything in the consumer side that would make you excited? I mean, Meta just released these like 28 different AI chatbots. We'll see how that goes. But ChatGPT, for instance, like a declining usage over the summer. So where do you see this going from a consumer end?

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Well, it's a really good question. A lot of consumer products, I think the dirty little secret is that they are made to address our insecurities. You know, when you think about, I remember meeting the Musically team in Shanghai many years ago, before they became part of TikTok and like reinvented, reimagined that product. And their insights were really around how to make the segments short enough and anchored by music and have us have templates such that we would feel comfortable performing in front of our friends without feeling insecure. Like the idea of singing and putting a video of yourself singing on Instagram or Snapchat

• 34:02Speaker 01

  was like insane. Like, none of us would feel secure enough and brave enough, you know, to do that at scale. And their crap in the code was to get people to start to do that. You know, Snapchat certainly appealed to our insecurity in having forever content by making it ephemeral content, right? And making sure that it disappeared so our parents wouldn't see it. Like, a lot of these consumer products kind of attack an area of our consumer mindset where we're, you know, there's either vanity or insecurity or something at play there. And, you know, and I have mixed feelings, obviously, about that playbook. You know, on the one hand, it might be effective as a way to make a product stick. On the other

• 34:44Speaker 01

  hand, it's exploiting something that maybe we should be dealing with in other ways than accumulating more likes so we feel better about ourselves.

• 34:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, it's so interesting because it's like, you know, if you read Eugene Way's post about how status, status as a service, and that's what all these social apps are delivering. And it's interesting because like, status and insecurity are maybe two sides of the same coin. You need one because you have the other.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we all want to know where important we all want to, you know, when you look at the, when you look at the login stats of some of these social media products, you realize that people log in more after they post content. And so we think we're going to see our friends' content, but we're actually more frequently going to see who, who saw our content and what they said about it. Again, it's all driven by whether it's we're seeking status or we're just trying to, you know, appease our insecurities by knowing that people like what we put into the world. So you asked a question of how can AI, you know, build consumer products? My hope, and I'm an optimist, but my hope is that, that somehow AI can be used to elevate

• 35:52Speaker 01

  consumer experiences so that we're not like being driven by insecurities, but we are actually being driven more by like genuine curiosities and expression of creativity. You know, imagine, for example, we'll just make up an app right now, right? Imagine an app where you are connected to nobody that is human, but every time you post content, hundreds of these like deeply refined personalities of bots come and tell you how amazing it is and what they loved about it.

• 36:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  God, this is my favorite idea. I remembered sitting at this dinner, hearing this from you and being like, this must be built. It is a great freaking idea.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  I was then, we were talking about it as just like, you know, fake personas on Instagrams. But now I'm thinking like, let's make it a whole new standalone product that is all about you sharing creative creativity without any qualms about anyone ever saying anything bad about it. But the responses are insightful, delightful, and also encouraging, and also give you even ideas to make it better. And it's like, oh my, you know, and I, I like the name Peanut Gallery for it.

• 36:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, my God.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  You know?

• 37:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Someone's gonna build this thing. Yeah, this is definitely gonna be a thing.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Come to me, I'd love to invest.

• 37:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, oh, same here. And I don't even invest because this is, this is, I mean, it's definitely gonna happen. And why not? You know, it's a great idea.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  I hope I hope you can use AI for, you know, to not only help us be more creative and build creative confidence, but also feel more fulfilled in some ways.

• 37:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, well, it is interesting how like that, you know, that Nikita beer app was called GAS, where like people would sort of compliment each other. It's like, wow, there, maybe there is this sort of reaction to social media that we have today where people are like, hey, if this can make me feel good, or this can make other people feel good, like, maybe it's something worth trying.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  I mean, given the fact that most of the people that either love or hate what we're doing on Twitter are randos somewhere in the world that we have no connection to, why should we care more about what they think than what some AI super intelligent bot thinks?

• 38:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Like, it's true.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  The bot is probably more credible to have a view on what you're saying and doing than some random person somewhere.

• 38:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, not only that, like, the bot, like, even if you, if you had people weigh in proportionally, I mean, maybe I'm saying this because I'm like professional journalist, and this is sort of how it works in my world, but if people weighed in proportionally in terms of when they like something versus when they dislike thing, something, it would totally change, like, I'm sure that there are people that enjoy podcasts or enjoy newsletters and are just, and by the way, like, thank you for listening and thank you for reading, like, it's awesome that they're there and they're just like, oh, that was good, and go on, but if someone really hates something, oh, they're like 100 times more likely to write in and talk about how it sucked. And these bots are just like, actually, could even be more reflective of what like the normal human experience is.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  It would be interesting also when we have our own personal agents that are advising us and protecting us on a daily basis about what email we should trust or not trust, if we see something on the news, they can tell us the counterpoint, you know, when you have an agent that you can trust that can guide you through life. You know, certainly you can start making better decisions. Hopefully you're not as influenced by things that are, you know, biased and things like that. But maybe also the agent starts to advise us to show our appreciation. You know, imagine an agent being like, hey, did you like that podcast you heard from Alex earlier? Did you know that if you tweet him, he'll love it? You know, it's, I don't know, who knows? Maybe agents will make us better people.

• 39:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, even like you can see that the inside Gmail, right? If you write that you, you like, take one of their auto replies, they're typically more polite than, you know, a normal person. I'm just, well, maybe it's just me, but they're extremely polite. I'll just say that it's like, oh, this is the AI pushing us in a good direction.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  I'm hopeful.

• 39:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. So, okay, so how does, um, this may or may not be a separate idea, but I'm curious like how this, you know, there's these agents. Well, actually, let me, let me ask you one follow up and then move on to the next part. How far away are we from that? Because, you know, we've been talking about these smart agents forever. It seems like, okay, we have chat GPT and Bing and Meta, whatever's going on there. Like they just released these 28 bots in Messenger and WhatsApp, and they seem to have, you know, assistive personalities. How far away do you think we are from like actually having these bots good enough to like them playing that role that we're imagining here? Are they there yet, maybe?

• 40:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's, there's, there's two things. I would say I'll, I'll just be, you know, I'll just try to be declarative and probably be wrong. But I would say that, you know, within two to three years, every brand that we come in touch with will know that there is a hyper capable agent experience that's probably better than navigating a website, clicking, you know, men's versus women's versus, you know, 10 size 10 shoe. I mean, you'll just, you'll just converse and you'll have a far better experience. It's like going in and talking to a sales associate who might even remember you from the last time you were in the store. So I do think that that will be, you know, in the two to three year timeframe.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  I think in the, in the, you know, in the two to five year timeframe. We will have a local agent, you know, on our devices that has access to every single thing, you know, going on on our devices, which, as you know, is like pretty much everything in our lives these days, calendar, Gmail, messages, whatever else. It will have to probably run locally in the sense that we won't trust, A, that it's some random company, like we have to really have a relationship with that company and believe that they value our privacy. And number two is, is we probably want it to be locally stored as opposed to in the cloud, because we don't want every piece of data about us, you know, anywhere else but with us. But when we have that, I think that's when we'll have a moment where

• 41:57Speaker 01

  this agent starts to totally be our guide through life. And, and, you know, there's a lot of implications to that. You know, one of the that I, you know, you know, I spoke about just recently was, we might start trusting that agent more than any brand message that we get. You know, you always like certain shoes because of their brand, or you like certain, you know, anything because of the brand. But if your agent knows everything about you and everything you've ever bought, done, thought, you know, whatever, tells you, hey, Alex, actually, if you're a runner, like, the shoes that you really should be using are this, because I did research for you, and this is what I found. And by the way, don't be dissuaded by the brand. You know, this is actually cheaper, and it's better for your Achilles and for your this. And at some point, you're gonna be like,

• 42:42Speaker 01

  all right, like, I'll buy those. So that's a pretty disruptive thing, if you think about it.

• 42:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, the question is, like, who makes it? Like, is, I mean, you talk, the way that you talked about it made me believe that you think Apple is the one that makes it. If it's trusted and on the device, like, well, I mean, you have, like, really one company that can do it, and they are scrambling toward it. Is that your guess?

• 43:05Speaker 01

  Well, I think Apple, like, really cleverly positioned, obviously, with how they value privacy and, you know, and how they

• 43:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Are you not buying it?

• 43:12Speaker 01

  built chips that are AI capable, you know, locally and whatever. But the truth is, is that Google knows everything about me, too, you know. I mean, I use Gmail, and and I have Google Calendar. And, and so, and I'd imagine that, you know, in a work environment, Microsoft probably knows more about me than anyone else I work with at Adobe, right? Because it knows every single thing in my, in my inbox, etc. So I do think that we will, we will have to So yes, those brands will probably play a key role and we will probably trust them because we'll realize that the benefits outweigh the costs of not. And also, they probably already have the data for us anyways. And then there's, but then there's, there is, there is a stack of tools that don't exist

• 43:55Speaker 01

  yet that, that I think we'll have to augment with our own preferences. You know, and this is another thing I've been thinking a lot about is, you know, how does, how does your agent experience booking a restaurant reservation, know your dietary restrictions, know what you're allergic to, you know, know that you're a vegetarian, or know that you need a wheelchair access, or any of those sorts of things? Like, there needs to be some solution where an agent for a third party can talk to your agent and get information. And I'm not sure what facilitates that.

• 44:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, maybe some, like, info exchange created by, who knows? The founder of our, this social app that makes you feel good. Last thing I want to talk to you about is, is this idea of friction. You know, we've talked a lot today about AI breaking friction down and how we need to have better customer service interactions. And we have just been a society that has optimized towards taking friction out of everything. And, I mean, maybe I'm stealing your quote here, but like, it's sort of made people soft and unable to deal with adversity. So, Florz, yours, I'm kind of curious, like, what you think about that, whether it's good, bad, whether there's a way out of it?

• 45:11Speaker 01

  Well, it's, you know, it's, this is something I've been thinking about and debating with friends for years now, because I find that everything we do in technology is intended to remove friction from work, from life, from getting from A to B and whatever. And I find, personally, in my life at least, that, you know, because I have the ability to book my travel and actually pick my exact seat and everything, you know, if I get to the plane and suddenly my seat's been changed, I'm like, oh! Or, you know, I mean, or, it's like, it's, and sometimes I'm like, Scott, you're traveling in a metal thing across the world, you know? This is amazing, like, and you're worried about the fact that your seat got changed or whatever?

• 45:54Speaker 01

  You know, and I just wonder if the if if human fragility goes up as the friction in our daily lives goes down and that we become actually even less tolerant of even the smaller things that might go wrong and what that means for humanity. And then sometimes when I look on social media and I see the amount of, you know, the the short fuse to outrage that people have, whether it's against a brand or whether it's about something in the news or whatever, I can't help but wonder, is this one of the implications? And then the the vision, the visual that comes in my mind is that scene in Wally where, you know, in a world where everything's done by robots, you have these like, you know, people who just literally go around on these wheelchairs, drinking slurpees all day and everything else is done

• 46:39Speaker 01

  for them and they can't even get up and do anything for themselves. So yeah, I think there's a question around, how do we ensure that we remain, you know, we've sustained our tolerance for friction? And also, where do we preserve friction in our life?

• 46:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes, I mean, first of all, I would say that, you know, I don't know if you're ready to make the assessment, but I would that we definitely are becoming more fragile because of this designing friction out of our lives. And then, yeah, I guess in one way, I would ask, like, what's the point of it all? If that's what it's doing to us? And then the second part is, you said, maybe we should keep some friction in our lives. I mean, where where are those? Why don't we end with those?

• 47:18Speaker 01

  You know, the, listen, I mean, and this is more like philosophical, but when something does go wrong, you know, do you try to shield yourself or your kids, if you're a parent, from that thing that went wrong? Or do you say, great, like, we need stuff in life that challenges us, like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna sit with this. You know, when you show up and that reservation you made on Resy didn't actually connect and the restaurant says, I'm sorry, we don't have any record of that. Do you go ballistic and say, oh, my gosh, how could technology let me down? Or are you like, you know what, I'm gonna walk around the neighborhood, I'm gonna discover a spot I didn't know, you know, and let's like, let's run with this. It's little things like that. And it's also, you know, and I think about

• 48:01Speaker 01

  this also as a parent all the time, you know, you're, you're, you, you, you feel like you should protect your children from any sort of challenge. And yet it's the challenges that make them who they are, right? And build character. So I, I just think there's that philosophical piece. And then from a product perspective, you know, I sometimes believe that Getting, you know, having a little bit more friction in the funnel actually gets more willing customers into your product. And I try to sometimes convince founders that they want willing and forgiving customers in their early cohorts, you know, of new users and that having folks go through a little bit of friction actually helps you get people that will evolve your product more thoughtfully. And so maybe that's a healthy thing, especially for for certain products.

• 48:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Love that. Scott Velsky, always great to talk to you. Thanks for coming.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  Alex, thanks for having me.

• 48:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right, everybody. Thanks for listening. Thank you again, Scott. Thank you to Nick Otten for handling the audio, LinkedIn for having me as part of your podcast network, and all you, the listeners, if you're a big technology reader, proud to announce that Scott is part of the panel that we're putting together of folks that will, once in a while, react to breaking news as it goes on. So thank you to Scott for that. And thanks again to all of you. We'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

• 49:22Speaker 02

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