AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng

hey everyone welcome to the latest episode of the a16c podcast this is your host Steph Smith in today's episode I am thrilled to bring on Karen Chang Karen has been a creator for a long time but she specifically has a knack for integrating technology into her creations and you can only imagine with the rise of some of these AI tools like Dolly mid-journey and stable diffusion what she's been able to achieve now if you missed AI summer and its impact on creators you might have been sleeping under Rock but you're not too late it's truly just the beginning in fact I interviewed Karen back in September and with every week there was something that popped up where I thought man I wish I could have asked her about this and yet still in this interview we cover a lot of ground we'll chat with Karen about how she originally found her Niche how she manages to grow her social following with a nod towards being additive instead of reductive you'll also get to hear the behind the scenes of her many viral Works including a video of her becoming a lawnmower yes truly a lawnmower her AI generated Cosmo magazine cover the the first ever her dolly fashion show her transforming iconic art into 3D museums that people can explore and much much more and by the end of this episode I think the audience Will Come Away with some really key things including an understanding of the new tools that are available that are literally at our fingertips how AI can indeed enhance the creative process and maybe even some of the second order effects of these Innovations like how creators are paid or how they might work with these AIS and I should note that since we're just at the beginning of this AI ERA this is truly just the beginning of our coverage so I hope you enjoyed this episode the content here is for informational purposes only should not be taken as legal business tax or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund for more details BC a16z.com disclosures foreign [Music] I am absolutely thrilled today to have Karen Chang on the line Karen is a digital Creator she has taken social by storm seriously she's all over my feeds I can almost guarantee you've seen one of her videos and she's done everything from high five Mark Zuckerberg in the metaverse she's partnered with several A-list celebrities she also was commissioned by Cosmo recently to create their first AI generated magazine cover so super cool we'll be talking about that and in particular we'll be talking about her foray into AI how she's using AI to be more creative and how that relationship between humans in AI is evolving how it enhances our creativity or how it doesn't we'll see but Karen welcome to the show thank you so much for having me thank you for that amazing intro I'm talking to you Karen in 2022 you have millions of followers across various social media platforms but I want to flash back to Karen from 2013. so I'm going to preface this with I was going down this YouTube rabbit hole I was not researching for this episode I happened to stumble upon a video with Paul Graham and Sam Altman from 2013 YC office hours you know where this is going I can't believe you found that so that's kind of obscure yeah so I'm watching this video Someone Else familiar pops into it Ryan Peterson from flexport is in this video and I'm like okay flashback and then someone else is in this video and it's you and you're pitching this company give it 100 which is basically your startup at the time and the startup was structured around people sharing their journey in learning skills sharing their progress every single day for 100 days you also then I think around a year later you did a TED Talk where you kind of use that framework of 100 days to go and learn dance and you shared that and it was Fascinating People can look that up we'll have it in the show notes okay so this is a broad question but how do you go from that right 10 years ago almost uh were you building the startup to where you are today when did you was there a point in time where you decided I want to start sharing this information online I want to start being a Creator okay so yeah this was back in my like failed startup days and so I like really badly very badly wanted to get into YC as like everyone did and um managed to get on stage office hours spoiler alert did not get into YC was turned down I think multiple times um was interviewed on stage um and answered their questions that startup eventually failed like a year later um I think it was really tough on me at the time because up until then I had like you know good academic achievements in school and it was my first like I think your first startup failure is like your first definitive failure it's like yeah there's no it's like you fails there's no like like it's over exactly like right and so I sort of had to like come to terms with that but um honestly like going through that startup I learned so much about video that I then applied to like doing my own stuff and actually I got this really interesting feedback when I was uh trying to like get business for my startup and I was talking to someone I was trying to like get them to invest in my company and they were like we're not interested in this company like they they could see that it wasn't a scalable business but they were like but we actually just wanted hire you to make some videos and I was like I don't want to do that like but then actually it turned out you know the years later I'm like yeah that person was actually right and um I I think it just took it took me trying every single career to realize like I TR I tried working for a huge company I've tried working at a startup I tried being a founder of my own startup I tried running an agency I tried like I've tried everything and I've I've come to the realization that for me actually like being an influencer is the best thing for me which is crazy because I I always swore I would never be an influencer well I know exactly what you mean because I feel like um I also create things on the side and for the longest time people would associate me with certain things they'd be like Steph you're like the writing girl and I was like no please please please please I'm not the writing girl that is not how I picture myself but ultimately sometimes you just have to lean into what other people see in you and so you started creating these videos you've been doing it for years I think you originally uploaded your first musically in like 2017 and even in 2019 I think I saw you say in a video you had around 10 000 followers on Instagram so that might seem like a lot to some people but compared to today where you're just smashing it you have over a million followers everything you create almost goes viral um was there a specific unlock where you found along that Journey that like you noticed something that really worked or you you honed in on something that people really wanted yes absolutely there was so um for a very long time I struggled to grow my following um first I resisted first I was like well I don't even need to grow my following so I was just making like viral one-off videos um that was back in the days when you can make things go viral in a completely different way that doesn't work anymore so back in like 2012 up until around 2016 you could make videos go viral just by coming up with something clever that would be a good headline cold emailing like 300 reporters getting them to write about it and then it would almost guaranteed go viral um that does not work anymore because Facebook eight like all the reporters jobs so um and now videos don't spread the reporters they spread through algorithms and so it is actually so so competitive now it's so much more competitive now than it was like 10 years ago uh it is it is much harder to make a viral a video just go viral and so the way to do it now is you kind of have to build a following and so it's not it's not so much about making everything go viral making things go viral but it's more about just like building an established follower base so that your Baseline of like the number of people who see your videos or your work just steadily gets higher and I really struggle to grow my following um I remember when I first tried growing my Instagram following I was like why is this so hard you know I would get things to go viral and it would be very hard to go to um to get any followers out of it uh the unlock for me was actually sharing my behind the scenes and that was it and so I would like before I would just show these cool shots and I'd be like look at this cool shot you know and then maybe I would describe how I did the caption I'm like nothing crickets if I showed the same shot the exact same shot but show the behind the scenes with it all of a sudden it was going viral and I've done that over I've done that so many times now that I am confident that that was the like the defining thing there are lots of other things that I learned along the way to grow my followers but if there was one thing it would be that that's really interesting because a lot of people participate in these online worlds a lot of people are creators and a lot of the stuff is very similar so sometimes all it takes is like one iteration one like adjustment in what you're doing you're still sharing the same kinds of videos but then just giving that behind the scenes look is completely changing the game for you I also want to just quickly get your take on something you mentioned which is that social media is not the same right like we use the same term from 10 years ago but even if you think about social as like a word social media isn't not really social anymore in a way it's kind of gone from the social graph where you followed your friends and your family and then now it's an interest graph where you follow just things that this algorithm is serving you have there been any other changes that you've noticed in terms of just like bird's eye view how social has changed that really matter to creators like is there a way that we're a lot of creators are thinking about this art incorrectly I think it's gotten a lot more competitive I think people are a lot more aware of the downsides of social media now so we're no longer in like the honeymoon phase of it for sure you know it's kind of interesting that like for most of History I feel like humans have prayed to God you know but now I see that like content creators we pray to the algorithm it's almost like a Superstition it's like what does the algorithm think my video is not doing well because of the algorithm it's like how can I optimize my video for the algorithm and it's like we're no longer it's like we're almost no longer designing ourselves for like human taste but we're designing ourselves for like the algorithm and I do think there are quite a few downsides to doing that um and there are good reasons to resist that as well yeah yeah I think you're right about that and and I think increasingly those algorithms are becoming black boxes where um you think you know one variable is going to make your videos or your work go viral and then you play into that but you don't really know right like you're not there seeing the the different levers that control the algorithm and so it really can consume you yeah the black box is actually what it makes it feel like a cult or a religion because it's like you don't know it's like a Mystical Force yes exactly and even some people who work at these companies say that they don't know exactly what plays or not so much what plays into the algorithm but the output of it one of the ways that you've stood out is at least recently playing around with AI right I I think you're one of the few craters that I've seen that has really mastered the art of partnership with AI as it relates to Social and there will be many more of course right but um how did you start getting into that what what led you towards those kind of Creations um you know I was really just feeling quite stuck in my work I felt like I was doing basically like almost all one million of my followers are from the same video I mean it's a few videos but it's the same kind of video um I guess which one it is yeah is it is it the phone Matrix one yeah it's like the low budget camera tricks so uh there was one video actually where I attached like a phone to a ceiling fan and then made that into like a matrix bullet time effect and I got 300 000 followers from that one video so at every time I got a surgeon followers it was the same thing it was like I would I would attach a phone to some household object find like some like hack to do a camera trick with it and um people are following me for that and I was just like I'm like out of a household objects I'm out of ideas um and I just felt like I was I just felt like I was running out of ideas and I was like I have to find new like tools to new toys to play with and in the meantime I was I was starting to see some of like the really insane AI stuff coming out in white papers but it was all like two minute papers like research videos of researchers like shooting whatever they had in their bedroom and of course they're so focused on the research it's not their job to think about the storytelling or the cinematics of it and I was like huh that's interesting I don't think anyone is actually doing that yet so I could try doing that and so I started experimenting with like well let's take the research from white papers and make it a social media friendly video you know um and I started doing that at the beginning of this year and it was just so fun it was it was I think I am um I'm like a very novelty seeking personality and like my greatest motivation is like can I try to do something that hasn't quite been done before and like yeah sure like probably someone has done it but can I find my own like original Twist on it and so the fact that like these white papers no one was really like using this technology no one was really using in creative ways so I could be like wow I really am like the first to do something with this that was very exciting for me whereas trying to come up with like the latest iPhone transition all the ideas are taken it is very very hard to think of something clever or new with an iPhone camera trick tick tock transition very very very hard but with the AI stuff it's like this is just free-for-all right now yeah yeah and and I know that a lot of these tools are becoming more democratized more available but there was I think a little bit of a technical Gap too right in order for you to actually like start playing with these AIS relative to the average Creator is that right yes there is and I'm not that technical um I took like a coding class once in college but I prefer not to get into that myself so I actually work with really talented programmers who help me run it or they'll teach me to set it up um and so that's why I think like when Dolly came out I was like oh this is requiring no technical ability like this is if you can do a Google image search you can use Dolly you know and so that was really interesting for me yeah and I want to talk about those like second third order effects of having that fully democratized but you mentioned Dolly I've also seen you used a ton of other tools so I'm curious to hear from you like what are some of the other tools that maybe others haven't heard of or that you're playing around with or maybe like dolly is the first AI tool that you use but I think you also use other ones to like clean up a video or to like iterate on the creation from Dolly so can you share maybe some of the tools that you're playing around with yes uh so there are a few with the image Generations ones which are really popular right now there's Dolly there's mid-journey there's stable diffusion um there's disco diffusion I think if you're actually watching the video version of this podcast by the way we'll have like visuals yes we'll bring all of them up yeah um and so those are really popular right now I also think there are other ones that are um they require more technical knowledge but they are they enable kind of more um techniques that are that are less mainstream and so therefore more unique if you can pull them off so one of them is Dane um Dane is really simple all it does is it applies artificial slow motion to your video um but I thought it would be used in really interesting creative ways by like actually shooting like a custom stop motion video for the purpose of it being interpolated um to create these impossible movements and you'll just I can't describe I think I saw one of yours it was like you as a lawnmower or something yeah like lying on the ground and then you basically get dragged across and that's is that using Dane right exactly so um if you're just listening to this imagine like a stop-motion of someone like on the ground like uh planking basically and then just like slithering across the ground in stop motion right but then with with Dane you can make it perfectly smooth and so it looks like I'm literally being dragged On The Ground by like an invisible string or something um but actually that was just a stop-motion video that we used AI to smooth out and so I did that with James Pearlman so he helped me out with like smoothing everything out um other tools are Nerf so Nerf has gotten pretty popular Nerf is a way to use any camera like your phone to scan a scene and then all of a sudden you have this beautiful 3D like scan of it and what's interesting about it is it's different than photogrammetry because it can handle like light it's basically constructing like a particle like field and so when you look at things from different angles the light changes and so that's why it can handle mirrors whereas like traditional photogrammetry can't then there are other tools too that we've played with um I recently discovered EB synth which I actually learned is not an AI tool um but I use that to basically figure out how to make Dolly work for um video so Dolly's photo only but using EB synth I was able to make Dolly work for video very cool and and we'll talk about this later but you ended up doing like an AI fashion show right yes with the combination of many of these tools I want to hear from you though a lot of these tools are quite nascent we're going to see a lot more of them come to Market how do you see them all playing together because let's just use like the text to image generators so you have Dolly you have stable diffusion you have mid-journey there will be many more a lot of them um are similar but also what I'm imagining if we like extrapolate many years like how will they differentiate how will you as a Creator or how will consumers decide I'm going to use dolly or I'm going to use stable diffusion will they be different business models or how do you think that's going to evolve um I can speak from the Creator side maybe more from the business side but um I think right now ai in the in the in the mass media there's sort of this misconception or perception that AI is just this like all-powerful thing that's going to replace humans um but I think a more interesting way to think of it is that they are they are tools and each one is a specific tool for a specific purpose just like I would have like a calculator or a compass or something else so and you can combine and like what where you get interesting things is where you combine the tools right so for example um you can generate an image in Dali and then you can use cap cut which is a program which is like an app on your phone that will literally turn any image into like a 3D image then there's another problem which is uh like Dolly and mid-journey that and all I think all of these image synthesizers have which is that they make faces they don't do human faces very well there will be like artifacts on the eyes they'll just look kind of Droopy or a little messed up well guess how you can fix them you can run them through facetune the app that all influencers use and that'll make that'll make that'll fix it and so I actually facetune can fix it to that degree because I've seen some of the outputs from Dolly as an example and they're really kind of it'll fix them to be it'll fix them to be Flawless wow okay I mean it depends on the image but like I have seen I have seen it do it flawlessly okay it's like you know you could you could be the AI researcher who's like working really really hard you know it it gets harder and harder to reach Perfection right so you could be the AI researcher trying like really really hard to get that last one percent or like a Creator could just be like I'm just gonna run this through facetune yeah yeah I also wonder whether some of these tools become more specialized because these text to image generators are quite broad right they're being trained on like all of the internet and they're being used for use cases of like literally again all of the internet and because there's so there's going to be so many of them I do wonder whether they become specialized like maybe some of them become specialized for just like hyper realistic human photography and other ones become really specialized for really like generative um illustrations or something like that do you think that might happen or do you think they'll continue to stay really broad you know different companies will have different strengths and then they'll continue to be able to differentiate by sort of specializing in that but I do imagine that some of these companies are gonna buy other companies and then so they'll like you know kind of have more verticals kind of like how you know meta bought like WhatsApp and Instagram I see that happening with AI tools too right yeah so like if we use meta as an example they basically try to own messaging and so you might see like a similar phenomena with AI tools let's jump into a really cool example of how you deployed AI which is something I mentioned before you got commissioned by Cosmo magazine to create their first AI generated magazine cover we'll throw it up on the screen it looks awesome and you've also done as you talked about a behind the scenes explainer but for those who are not familiar with this project of yours can you share a little bit more about how it went down uh yes so um this was kind of shortly after dolly was released the people open AI gave me a call and they were like hey we have this really cool potential opportunity where Cosmo wants to make the first ever AI generated magazine cover and they were like and we want you to generate it that's crazy um and so I mean my first reaction was like uh worried I guess like I hope I can do a good job like um because keep in mind like it's not I can't emphasize enough how much like the human is needed in this process you know like yeah they could have just you can't actually have a fully AI generated magazine cover because you have to give a prompt and I guess you could theoretically ask like an AI to generate the prompt but still the human needs like a human needs to give some input right and so for for our process actually we went through so many different rounds of of iterations and um eventually we land on the creative direction of a woman astronaut and this was actually a I thought a really clever work around by openai to not show a human face because at that time human faces were not allowed in dolly in the early days human faces were not allowed for Dolly and so we and we also were like well what race is this one going to be too like we didn't want to make a race statement and so by making it a woman astronaut it could be any ethnicity as well um and so so they had that introduction and then they showed me a reference image that that was generated in Dolly and I was like like this is so good I don't know that I can even top this image and I was just like I I don't know that I can make a better image than this so I spent hours trying to make a better image than that and I could not and I was like like they hired me to do this I obviously have to do a better job than like what they quickly threw together so I just kept going for like a few more hours and then eventually I like I was like okay I I kept on troubleshooting and I was like okay I want this woman to like walk with swagger and it took me I kept on saying like walking confidently walking proudly like walking energetically and none of those problems working out and then eventually I was like walk with swagger and then boom then I got like the then I got the hip like thrust so like it was like you know it was like I I kept on asking for walking confidently and that didn't work but then when I asked for a walk with swagger it indeed gave me Swagger and then the other thing I was thinking of like was um there's like an influencer tip that's popular on social media for taking photos and it's like the hack is that you you bring the camera to the ground and shoot from the ground up to make it look really dramatic and I was like oh let me try that so then I was like how about wide angle shot from below and then boom it made it way more dramatic and then the image that I got actually its face was sort of messed up so then I did in painting and stuff to like fix the face and and then I did in painting to like extend the boots so I did I did quite a bit of like uh fixing up of the original image it was if you look at the original image it was it was quite a bit of a diamond in the rough um so if you look at my behind the scenes video there was a a significant amount of human work to make it happen yeah and we'll share that when you say in painting just for people who aren't familiar you're literally you're still using AI for that right but you're basically selecting a portion of the out put an image you're saying okay I like a lot of this but I don't like this area so like can you can you in paint can you replace that specific region in painting is like magic Photoshop like if Photoshop worked magically that's what it would be so imagine there's like a photo and let's say you don't like what you're wearing or you don't like the person's background or you don't like anything about it you erase that you type in what you want and then boom you get three options which is so incredible and that's what you also use partially for your fashion show so again we'll talk about that later but I want to get a sense of you talked about the fact that humans need to be involved and that it took several iterations like how many iterations are we talking in this in this spectrum or this this route to the final image it will depend a lot from artists to artists you know I think some people they'll share their first prompt and that's um that's interesting some people will spend you know maybe five to ten they'll just type 5-10 prompts and then for some people where they're really trying to achieve a very specific result for a specific project I mean we'll be in there for like hours and hours um running like dozens or hundreds of prompts and in the early days of Dolly it was unlimited and free so it was a little easier to do back then yeah and I think it's I don't know if they I think they may have changed their business model recently or their pricing but I saw an article um that this this woman was basically creating like a llama dunking a basketball um so we'll pull that up too but I think that one took a hundred iterations and I think it was like around 13 um with that pricing so it gives you an idea and as you said it'll depend but I think the the maybe more interesting question is how fungible was Karen in that process and I don't want to yes how replaceable am I but if you gave Average Joe the same project and the same tool do you think they would come up with anything comparable I think a lot of people would have been able to make a really good Cosmo cover um I think those people would have been the people who would have done it best are people who have a good artistic eye have the kind of the patience and the motivation to keep going and keep refining on the prompt and who can like describe what they see in their head and so a lot of these people are not necessarily traditional artists you know I think a lot of people could have made a really really good result I there's actually an example that I have that we can show up that we can show on screen I a while ago wanted to expand The Girl With a Pearl Earring so you may have seen one thing that you can do that was actually just announced is you can expand paintings in Dali um and so you can basically like take a famous painting and then imagine what was all around it so you can take like the Mona Lisa and imagine like where was she you can take the girl the Pearl Earring imagine like everything that was around her and so I made a video a while back where I imagined her like in a like library and she was holding a book and I was like I want her to be like an educated woman you know and so I made that um and then I actually um am working with a project uh with openai actually right now it's one that they commissioned uh it will it's not out yet but it will probably be out by the time this podcast releases so if you go on my Instagram uh on Karen next Chen you'll be able to go and see this filter we made this Instagram filter where we expanded these famous paintings and um you can actually go inside through them and see these famous paintings and I looked at my girl the Pearl Earring and I was like this can be done better and so I hired August Camp who is um the person who taught me about this method and she is she has spent way more time in Dolly than I have she's so artistic and talented and then when she showed me I hired her to do this Pearl Earring and when she showed me hers I was just like moved to tears almost like jaw drop I was like that is what you made and so I felt like she was irreplaceable in this I mean I'm sure I could have hired 10 different artists to do this Pearl Earring and gotten 10 very different results and what I like about this example is that everyone is starting with the same Source image and so it almost establishes like a little bit of like a control you know for it and so um I think this is the perfect case study for like hey different humans get very different results with AI yeah it's it's a tool as you said but the reason I asked if you were fungible is because I just I really wonder how this progresses in terms of we know it's going to be somewhat of a democratizing force because now a bunch of people who like couldn't paint or couldn't do Photoshop in certain ways like can now do it and create all of this art or or or these outputs but I do Wonder then does that make a lot of people really successful or a lot of people really capable or does it still surface the very very best to the top right where where there's a different filter and now the filter is prompt engineering versus painting or drawing or singing or whatever it might have been in the past so do you think that's still the case where you're still going to see these like outliers who are just so much better than the rest or do you think it'll be more of a Level Playing Field than what we're seeing before okay so I think that um what this is gonna do what AI art is gonna do is it's going to significantly lower the barrier to entry to become an artist so be to be an artist right now you have to have a lot of time um a lot of training um sometimes the monetary Financial need means to be able to do that or the willingness to be like a starving artist to do it or it's a hobby on the side but there are kind of some there's definitely a barrier to being an artist and and now it's like everyone can do it and it's almost like I almost liken these image synthesizers like dolly or mid journey to like a Peter Pan but instead of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor it takes the artistic skill of artists and it's like gives it to everyone like here you go you know and so I do think that a lot more people are going to be empowered to be artistic or to be artists because they didn't necessarily have the patience to go like learn oil painting but now but they actually do have the talent to be able to describe what's in their imagination and continue to refine until they get the result they want so a lot of people are going to be empowered to be artists there will still be the standouts and the extraordinary people because they're going to be the ones who are finding like different or creative or innovative ways to do it there's you know as much Innovation as there is there's always going to be the ability to combine things in new ways or you know find the latest so I I definitely think that um there's going to be a lot more artists um a lot of unhappy artists um a lot of happy artists and also still standout artists yeah yeah I mean it's it's almost just reshaping the like skill ecosystem and like some people who have invested in skills for many decades like if they were just like an A plus oil painting unfortunately for them that skill is somewhat being replaced by this technology um and it reminds me a little bit of you know if we use like uber as an example like some of those taxi drivers had invested in their taxi license for many many years and so there's kind of a parallel there doesn't mean it's bad or good but it is just a fact that these AIS are like as you said almost like cherry picking skills and like dropping them on the rest of the population and it's this like great experiment to see what comes out of that um I also kind of want to hear from you as you worked with these AIS was there any like aha moments or like did you feel like it was truly like a back and forth process or did you feel like it was unidirectional and let me explain what I mean by that if it was unidirectional you're basically like giving the AI prompt you're seeing what comes back and you're like no no that's not what I want you have a vision but if it's more bi-directional did you get a sense of like you gave it a prompt you got something back and you go whoa I I didn't even think of that but like I like that I like so so was it more unidirectional or was it more bi-directional it's 100 of the second one um it does feel like a collaboration and so you get you oftentimes get things you don't expect and you're like oh I didn't think of that let me go down that rabbit hole now more so I mean that that reminds me of something I want to discuss with you which we've actually talked about before in a call we had which is the perception of AI so there's almost like two framings and I know this is a really simplistic but on one side there's like human versus AI or like human versus machine it's like an age-old Trope and then there's another which is like human plus AI right which is more optimistic it's like whoa like what can we do with this partnership and you've told me that you feel almost like a responsibility to portray this technology these tools in a certain way maybe even you know I don't want to put words in your mouth but more of this optimistic versus pessimistic doomsday lens so can you just speak to like why you feel that responsibility or almost like how you think um AI should be portrayed or how you want to portray it I've had to unlearn a lot of my bad habits in terms of like I am a trained viral video creator and so in many ways I'm trained very similar to the way a reporter would be which means that I'm rewarded for making click bait headlines and so when all this AI stuff came out I knew that like my my first instinct was like oh let me make a bunch of like human versus AI like let's let's have the AI do something and a human do something and let's have like judge's critique and say which one's better and like that was my first instinct to do that and then I realized like well what is that just gonna do that's just gonna it's just gonna freak people out you know um and I do think you know people are there there are reasons to be worried for a about AI I think there are very many legitimate ones and it will negatively impact some people more than others um but AI is a technology it can be used for good it can be used for bad and I just I think it clicked that like there's gonna be every gravitational force for the media is going to push towards the bad because that is what's going to get more clicks and engagements and Views and what's what's not the natural gravitational force is to actually think of ways to use AI for good and so I was also sort of in this turning point in my career where I just spent like two years optimizing for growing followers and I finally just sort of let go of that and I was like what would what would it look like if I stopped trying to go my grow my followers what would it look like if I actively stopped trying and just made like what I wanted to make I was like well since I no longer care about growing my followers which was which was very freeing for me I was like well I actually don't have to do this clickbait thing I actually don't have to try to get the most views by doing this controversial AI stuff I actually can just make like wholesome positive find creative uses of it because if it is a technology that can be used for good or for bad like why not you know it's more rewarding for me to make it for good even if it's less viral oh well it doesn't matter have you found that things have been less viral when you go that more optimistic route um I think on a one-off basis each thing is less viral I I there are there are many pieces where I was like if I had written the headline in a more controversial way it would have gotten bigger it would have gone bigger but I definitely think long term it's a better strategy for me to consistently put out positive stuff so people can people associate that you know with the content I'm putting out yeah because I I was just curious I mean you mentioned news as an example pessimism cells right click bait cells it captures your attention fear is like a very natural human emotion um but I do wonder if to your point like more optimistic Creations endure right so like people follow you because they're like Karen is this inspiring person she's learned all these Technologies she's creative so they view you as truly like this this creator that they more so like want to be like instead of I think pessimism sometimes is quite surface level right it does capture your attention but you're not like inching to go back to like hear from that Creator right it's very like transient yes I think that's a great Insight it's like you can make something go viral but it's a one-off and people aren't necessarily going to be inspired to continue to hear from you or you can continue to put out positive content in each piece of positive content isn't going to get as many views but you will kind of form a more long-term relationship uh in people's minds and there's actually this really incredible quote that I saw a while ago and it actually like changed a lot of how I think about things as a content creator uh in doing social media and I don't remember who said it but the quote is seek respect not attention it lasts longer and I was like wow because I was on this hamster wheel of chasing likes and Views and as anyone who has made a viral video knows it it it's over so quick you can have like a million views one day and then like it's it completely dies down by the next and so people get on this hamster wheel of addiction of like continuing to churn out content to try to get viral videos and I was on that hamster wheel for years and just being like when does this end like why am I doing this why am I Contin you know and it's it doesn't feel good it's addicting and then I saw that quote and I was like oh if I actually just put more effort into making more memorable good content I don't have to put out content as often and yeah I would much rather have the respect of a few people who I respect rather than the attention of the shallow attention of millions who forget about it by the next day I mean even on that point if if we even remove the like feel good I feel respected Etc part of it it's also good business and and what I mean by that is like a lot of people view attention as like the end goal like I want a million followers I want this uh this number of people to pay attention to me but ultimately like you need to convert that attention if you want this to be like a long-term game whether it's like to find clients or to like sell a course or to like start a rolling fund right there's many like versions of turning attention into business uh or Commerce but that second part of conversion does not work if you're just doing these like viral things and I I operate more on Twitter but as an example of this like um something I've been pretty outspoken about is just like these tweet threads which are just like so overdone and like so templated so um they work but they're they're just really really surface level and um ultimately what I find is that I see a lot of creators like feed into that and they're like okay I'm gonna go all in on this thing that I don't believe in I don't feel good about Etc but it's gonna bring me hundreds of thousands of followers but then again coming back to the point it's like well try converting those followers into something you know that that generates you money or that that is long lasting and and it's very hard right because those followers don't actually love your content they don't buy into you they just happen to be like oh okay another thread like it's almost like a habit for them to engage with that kind of work I am so glad you said that because I I feel the same way and ultimately this is my job the millions of followers are useless to me if I can't make a penny off of it like I'm not gonna put in all this effort it's my job right I need to make money out of it and I remember that I used to feel really bitter when I would see like these Tick Tock videos blow up and get millions and millions of views and they would be the most inane things like for example I'll give you an example of a tick tock video that can go really viral um it's a video where someone's like try to get the number of hearts and the number of comments to be the same right and so everyone's just like it gets like tens of millions of views because it's like a very smart engagement bait right it's a very clever engagement fate and I would be mad at that or I would or you know there's there's other examples that are less clever there's there's just straight up garbage on Tick Tock that is getting millions and millions of views and that is so demotivating for creators VFX creators artists who are putting like hundreds of hours into their craft to make something look really beautiful and then it completely flops and doesn't get very many views on social media and I would I used to be so bitter about that and then like someone told me and then I learned over time that this was actually very much true is that the the people who are putting out low effort content all the time getting millions of views they're not the ones getting hired by like major respected Brands you know they're not actually getting great opportunities off of their follower account um whereas the ones who are I know people who make incredible content they only have like 20 000 followers they're making bank you know yeah exactly no I mean I just have to say I resonate with what you said so much there as a Creator myself again I operate more with Twitter but same thing I'll see these threads and I'm like oh my God like what is going on why are people liking and retweeting this and why is this one account blown up it's it's really low quality compared to some other accounts that I follow where I'm like this is gold this is gold why is no one paying attention um but yes I think I think it's not productive to focus on that because ultimately the people who are putting the best stuff out there are the ones who if we take the whole value chain right like the whole process and consider that it's a business those are the successful quote-unquote businesses people put so much value on the number of likes and the number of views because it is the only number we can really see and judge ourselves by and so it's like we've been trained since like kindergarten to put value in like the number judgment you know when you get like a 97 on a test wow that's so good if you get like a 60 that's a d that's bad and so we are we are so trained to take that feedback of numbers as the truth and then so when it comes social media comes along and you get lots of views versus a little it's so easy to say well a video was great because I got tons of views and it's not because it got very little views and it took me years to learn that that is it is such a bad metric but it's the only like a objective one we have I know I know but it's hard sometimes as we talked about it's hard to just like to check out of that ecosystem to be like Oh I'm actually going to focus on the things that I want to put out there the things that I'm proud of instead of feeding into as you said what some people might argue is an objective metric of like this is what people want so you also have to accept that you have to go against so many natural human instincts yes um I want to talk about another topic which I've seen everywhere it's coming up in basically every conversation I have around creators around Ai and it's the idea of Ip right so we talked about like being hired for things but also like um owning your Creations is something that's mattered a lot for not just independent creators but if you think about like all the way up films entertainment like what matters is who owns the IP and AI introduces a very very interesting filter on this and and honestly I don't know who if anyone has the answers but but what I want to walk through is where is the value um along the AI creation process so like there's the there's the information that the AI is trained on which you could argue the output wouldn't exist without that so maybe that's where the IP is there's also the argument that the creators of the AI tools right open AI mid-journey Etc while the outputs also wouldn't exist if the AI tool didn't exist and then of course there's the prompt which you could also argue if someone doesn't enter a very very specific prompt the output also does not exist and I've even seen some a company yesterday that was selling prompts because it is valuable yeah to have the right I promise I've bought a prompt before there you go so there's there's probably going to be a whole economy around this so I want to hear from you obviously there's maybe no right or wrong answer but how do you think about that like where is the IP and how on Earth will we think about that as creators moving forward yeah I I I don't know um I actually I've thought about this but I don't I don't have the answers I'm not a lawyer I know that also like lawyers don't even have the answers like Congress doesn't have an answer to this yet it's also new um and I think it does yeah I don't know I think um well let me rephrase the question to something that I think you can comment on which is how creators get paid how creators charge so something that we talked about um before was that for your projects whether it was with Cosmo or we were actually talking about a project you said that um you feel or you felt like it was really important that those projects were paid for right and that might sound obvious but like as we talked about before AI in certain cases might not cost that much it might cost like two dollars to to run the props you're you're looking for um but some of those projects historically like I don't know how much Cosmo would typically pay for a magazine cover but it's not two dollars right so how do you think about the way that you charge as a Creator in this new ecosystem yeah I think it you know one of the things that when I work with clients I'll literally say them like hey like you know if even if you don't hire me um and sometimes it doesn't work out and so I'm like hey you know I'm you know my schedule doesn't work out for this project but whoever you hire like please pay them please allocate this budget because um we are at like a we're at like a moment in history that's very vulnerable where like certain standards can be established and I would like to see the standard established that if you hire a human to use an AI as a tool then you pay the human do you think that holds up though and I ask that because I think I think like many Industries the very best of the best If there really is like a one percent or like a 10x prompt engineer they will get paid very well we've seen that happen in many fields but then you also see when things get democratized like it's very hard for those price economics to not change right because because you imagine for example that at the beginning maybe yeah maybe certain creators are you know holding their ground they're saying we must be paid X but then you're gonna have insert Creator here that is like actually I'll take half of that or maybe I'll take a hundredth of that price I think that's a really good point I think there is um incredible downward pressure um and so what's probably going to end up happening unfortunately is that there will be like the more well-known people who can still charge higher rates but then for the vast majority of people like there's such insane downwards pressure on it and I do worry about that um for creators and I don't really know how that is all gonna play out yeah it's really hard to predict but yeah I wonder how some of these fields change I mean I want to hear from you because you've started to work with some of these companies at this point in 2022 is AI or at least the tools that people are using are they seen as more gimmicks or or do you see companies like really investing in this and saying oh actually we're gonna like we are gonna replace our photographer with AI or you know you to use Cosmo as an example was working with you just something where they could like put their flag in the ground and say hey like we're Innovative we're we're working with AI or do you see them actually going and like doing every fifth cover with AI how are companies thinking about this in 2022 it is most certainly a gimmick and a headline Grabber it is like let's be Innovative let's be first let's be on top of this I would imagine in 2023 the answer to that will be probably be different um people will actually start using it as their workflow um because it makes sense and not as a headline grabber really interesting I saw that there was someone and a reporter who used a mid-journey art for his article I think about Alex Jones and then he went viral in a bad way in that he got like majorly attacked on Twitter for using mid-journey art for a magazine article um and he was attacked because he didn't hire like a human artist instead you know like um it was I think the Atlantic uh correct me if I'm wrong um but I think what what people didn't have context was was that the department he was in the image that he would have used instead would have been like a Getty Images or like some stock photo it wouldn't have been like a official commission right so that was what he was replacing but he still got attacked for it so I think you know the first few you know the leaders go the arrows attack the leaders right so I think the first few people who are going to start using AI are going to get backlash but it's going to get less and less and less and less until it's accepted I honestly discussing some of these downsides is very uncomfortable for me because I don't know what's going to happen and I do think that um it could be bad for a lot of people and I personally try to do try to stay optimistic and try to see the optimistic side but like there's no denying that like it is going to be bad for a lot of people and it is going to be good for a lot of people it is a game-changing technology I've heard some people say that it is like the technology of Our Generation in terms of how it shapes things I also heard um Sam Altman say which I thought was like an interesting frame um a lot of people will talk about like and we even did this at the beginning of our call they'll be like when when is this gonna like change things fundamentally um he didn't give at least in the interview I saw a definitive timeline because I think no one can pretty much no no no but we were just having fun but I think his framing was really interesting which is that he believes that uh again it's it's like the game-changing Innovation and if you look at humans and like the spectrum of time that we've been on this Earth if we're talking five years or we're talking 50 years like that is still just like a drop in the Hat right like it's it's such a short period of time where it's like almost inevitable I think many people in this space will say that AI within 50 years is just like going to really really fundamentally shape or change our world and so again like coming back to his point it was like if it's in five months five years 50 years in the Spectrum or the span of human civilization it's nothing right and it doesn't seem like nothing within our lifetimes but um yeah I mean coming back to the idea of it helping people it hurting other people how do you think about like what creators or or people should be focused on should they be focused on like learning prompt engineering should they be focused on a field that they think won't be touched with it by AI if that exists like what are you doing as a Creator to say like you know what I'm I don't want to be left behind so I'm gonna be learning x y and z um well I don't think the answer is focus on prompt engineering because I wouldn't be surprised if um in a very short amount of time AI gets extremely good at prompt engineering and so those people are less you know relevant um in fact I was actually just talking to someone who was using gpt3 to write prompts to run through stable diffusion so um I would say that the best thing to do is not to learn a specific skill but to because that's going to change um probably by the time this podcast comes out you know um I think the best thing is to adopt a mindset that you have to always be learning and to accept that the model that humans had for much of humanity which is that you could kind of choose a career and then have that career for life that's gone we are at the like the last dying grasping breaths of those days I think the sooner you can accept and embrace the mindset that like the world is always changing the skills you have to learn always need to change the better off you'll be I don't know if we've lived in a time that's been so exponential where these Technologies are changing but humans have adapted so we'll see how we adapt I mean some some interesting examples you pointed me towards an um an article from Nathan Bashas where he talked about even like simple things like the introduction of unsplash completely changed the like design architecture that or almost like the design how companies stand out with their design changed because all of a sudden stock photography like hyper realistic pictures became widely available and so then you saw like what I think people call Memphis design come up and you saw all these like very similar looking illustrations and so I do wonder if there's some version of that right where like we have access to unlimited 2D art so maybe 3D art is important just as an example but then of course AI will eat that so I don't know I I think it's interesting to kind of think through how humans might evolve or do you think that this stuff is just moving so quickly that um I think humans are remarkably adaptable um and so we will adapt I do think that um you know already the world is moving much faster than human evolution can keep up with so for example like we weren't really evolved to sit in like office chairs all day we weren't evolved to hear the comments of thousands of people on social media we were evolved for like 30 tribes right and so you see all of these like Mental Health and physical health problems that we have a lot of those are because human evolution hasn't caught up to how much culture has changed and so I I say two things one humans are remarkably adaptable but two there is a limit to how much humans can actually evolve from like you know a Charles darwinian evolutionary perspective uh to keep up with some of this stuff so we are entering a completely unknown time I'm just I'm trying to stay positive and try to highlight as much of the positivity as possible but um yeah there is a lot of uncertainty it is such a sea change and to your point like even as two people who believe fundamentally that technology is good or at least I don't want to put words in your mouth that's something I believe it is sometimes hard to just like fathom what the hell we do and who's going to be disrupted and how and and it's impossible to say that there aren't negative externalities yeah I would say I think technology is neither good nor bad I think I I like to view it as neutral it's like the neutral canvas and so I find that to be the most empowering because if it's neutral then we have the ability to influence it I like which direction I've heard other people use like it's like a mirror right it like it mirrors back to humans ultimately certain things that maybe are below the surface sometimes yeah that's good I like that but taking a little bit more of an optimistic lens I've seen AI used in a ton of different ways like I saw something recently which was like an AI that helped write Excel formulas which I thought was like quirky and neat um I also saw one that like takes legal jargon and simplifies it for the end user interesting um I tested it only a little bit it did at least the prompts I played around with did but I didn't play around for very long um curious to know from you do you have like a wish list are there things that AI has not touched yet where you're like man I would really love this and while you think about it I'll just quickly share one super simple but we're doing these podcast recordings with video and every so often I would just love to resay something right and things like the script allow you to resay something with audio very easily but I want that with video because if we're airing the video versions of these I want to just be able to be like remove my filler words and you know fix up my performance but obviously it'll look ridiculous if the video portion isn't equivalent so that's my little wish list for anyone at open AI or otherwise to to do I know they're probably coming out with video at some point but to sync the two what I have wanted for AI is video tools for creators that are AI powered that's why I've been doing so much hacking trying to get like these image tools to work for video because it's not quite there yet but I keep on like trying to make it work once it does though like I don't even know what's gonna happen and I was like be careful what you know yeah I mean it's coming right right it's it's for sure coming um it's hard for me to say a wish list I guess because I'm just trying to keep up with what's already coming out oh totally something we talked about before we jumped on which is like a neat little idea um just to get the wheels spinning for any listeners as we were talking about audio AI have you actually seen um any AI ASMR I wonder oh no I've never heard of that no no I haven't either but I was just you know what would be interesting with ASMR is like if they could like uh connect to your senses and measure like your response to it oh yeah and then like in real time like adjusting ASMR update it to like your sensory response oh I like that startup idea I mean people are already playing around with like audio Ai and so obviously I haven't seen the ASMR stuff but I feel like that that's coming soon and I've heard other people talk about this in the realm of video as an example where you're let's say in a movie and this is you know a little further away but based on your prompts it goes another direction right and so it's almost like personalized content to the consumer based on their needs or their prompts and so that's an interesting I have an answer for your question here's my wish list for AI my wish list is actually for all humans to take the ethics of it very seriously um and what I mean by that is like my wish list is that everyone working on AI be held to a standard to be using it for positive forces rather than negative and that we somehow develop an insane amount of cultural pressure that anyone who's not using for positive sources is like not ostracizes from society but but penalized in a way that it is severely incentivized how do you think about what is good and bad though in that context okay so I mean it's very hard to be the Arbiter of that but for example like deception is bad right so when you're altering things you need to disclose what you altered and how do you think that we will need to somehow label things as AI generated or human generated because you know a simple example you brought up deception but people do these deep fakes right of people without their consent they're not quite there yet but they're very close to being right well have you seen the Tom Cruise ones they are actually fully fakes I I can't tell I think most people can't tell okay so so we're already there it's not even a future we're already there on edge cases and we'll pretty soon be there for yeah Mass cases I think that will be developed I think I think um it will be necessary and it will happen and I think it'll be very similar to like nutrition facts on like all the food like it's a universal standard that we have nutrition facts and so there will need to be some sort of system that like shows you know this is a video this was produced in this way I've heard people talk about this and it sounds like I might be wrong because I've just you know just listening to another podcast but it likely would have to be at the hardware level as in run by like Apple or Google Etc because um if it's not at the device level that's like really easy to hack or to to abuse right and so it literally would have to be like okay this AI is running on this machine and this machine is plugged into stable diffusion or whatever insert AI here and the output in the metadata like and it would have to be like a case where you could not remove it has that information it would have to be the hardware level and I think it will be first adapted in like really high stakes scenarios where the veracity of something is extremely important so for example in like political messaging maybe they'll have like a very specific kind of camera or Hardware where it cannot be altered and then that is you know so for certain types of like really important messaging where it's really important that it not be faked whereas like you know like someone's social media influencer video like it's doesn't matter if something was like adjusted or tweaked you know so there's like standards or that's part of the regulation that in certain Fields you must use certain Hardware or at least you must use like a suite of Hardware that that plugs into these I mean regulation will catch up but I actually think it will be somewhat self-regulated in the sense that some people will need the design will have the need to show that what they do is true and not altered and then there will be companies that pop up that say okay this is the technology that does that and then there will be people who then buy that technology and use it of their own free will and Accord not because of regulatory requirements because it'll take a while for the regulation to catch up yeah but I do Wonder in that case like yes the good actors will use the technology that has that functionality but then that actors likely won't right unless there's regulation that's that's why I'm that's why I say that like somehow I want my wish list is for the culture to change because humans are self-enforcing Society you know we are very naturally tribal and we behave well largely because that's what's expected of us from other humans it's not like someone's watching us at every single moment but we still in general you know want to behave well and a lot of that is the cues that you're getting from culture and so I would love to see a culture developed where hey as as humans as part of being a good human um we use technology responsibly and ethically I don't know how that's going to happen and that's my that's why it's my wish list I love going down these rabbit holes because it does just get the wheel spinning I'm like man there is there's so much to figure out and when you're dealing with an exponential technology policy regulation IP a lot of the stuff it takes time right and so it like I also wonder whether we create regulation or policy let's say in 2023 and then by 2025 like it's it's already just like you know it's completely different I actually think culture can change a lot faster than regulation much much much faster and I'll give you an example the fastest I've ever seen culture change was the handshake during covet you know how many like how many thousands of years or hundreds of years has the handshake been the golden standard and then all of a sudden like socially unacceptable so many things became socially unacceptable almost overnight because of covet and I was like Wow human culture can change like that and then now that the pandemic is better then like we're back to doing it again so um I do think that uh we're gonna need a lot of cultural forces um to kind of Sprint ahead of Regulation because regulation will take time yeah well I have no idea how this will progress It's been fascinating to hear how you think it might progress as someone who has played around with these tools then we'll be sharing a lot of your projects as we talk about them throughout this episode um but I want to end with something really fun which is that you've worked with tons of creators uh creators that people know Critters that people don't know um do you have a a wish list or is there one creator that you would just love to partner with I love throwing this stuff out into the ether because you never know you never know who might make this happen you know it's interesting because in the past I would have had like a dream client or a dream like something but I've actually learned over time that it's not about like which celebrity you can get or which brand you can get but it's for me I've learned it's actually about doing my best ideas my best work and so the way I do things is I try to match make like my ideas to a client who will accept them unaltered essentially or with the least alterations possible so I don't I actually don't won't answer that question or don't even have actually nothing actually comes to mind because it's it's mostly about like uh making the ideas that I want to make yeah yeah I love that it used to be or at least for me when I was younger it used to be like I want to work with these people or I want these companies to hire me and I think you're right there is like an evolution like we talked about before where you're almost like transcending attention and you've gotten to a place where actually your focus is how do I make something really yes it's almost like it's like almost like the mass was hierarchy of needs and it's like oh I'm actually I'm I'm actually just I'm actually focused on like doing the ideas that I want to do whereas in the past like I know 10 years ago I would have been like I want to dance in a Coca-Cola commercial like I'm not I'm good I don't need to do that now and then like even two years ago I was like I really really really really want to make a commercial for the Apple iPhone and now I'm like I'm good like I I don't actually need to do that anymore so um uh so yeah I I don't have I don't have one because it's actually about the idea and it actually is so cheesy it sounds so cheesy but it actually is about enjoying making the idea well that's a wonderful place to end things off so Karen thank you so much uh for talking with us today this was so fun to just think through you know the optimistic the pessimistic the dystopian utopian Futures that we might live in but at the end of the day I think one of the biggest takeaways for me is that AI is a tool and that tool is being democratized so that in itself I think is exciting for many people to be able to participate in that future yeah thank you so much thank you for having me thank you for these great questions thanks for listening to the a16z podcast if you like this episode don't forget to subscribe here on YouTube to get our exclusive video content we'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: a16z

Views: 11,732

Keywords:

Id: 45kg85J3MPs

Length: 72min 10sec (4330 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 09 2022