OpenAI Goes Hollywood, Cool AI Gadgets & Director Fiona Nova | Ep50

AI4H EP050
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[00:00:00] What are we talking about this week on the show? Ooh, OpenAI's Sora. The future of filmmaking is here! But not for us, and not for you, but for some select people. And we are going to dive into just how incredible it is, because it is. Incredible. Plus, the AI bodies are hitting the floor. We're going to show you how the major shakeups at some of the biggest AI players are going to affect you.

Ooh. Was that, was that tease worthy? That was tease worthy. That's what I want to imagine the audience is doing on their couch, Gavin. 

Streaming media icon. Fiona Nova is our guest today on the podcast. I'm someone that is a little bit more of a pessimist. I think a lot of things will kill us. What? You're going to find a nude?

Okay, and then my boobs are online, , do you think I give two sh 

Gavin: Welcome. Welcome. Welcome everybody. This is AI for humans. Your weekly guide to the world of generative AI where we demystify [00:01:00] AI for all of our audience out there.

Gavin: Kevin Pereira is my co host. I am Gavin Purcell and we are here to have some fun. Kevin, how are you

Kevin: So much better with the safety of being virtual, Gavin. I am outside of your striking range. The internet was abuzz. TMZ, Deadline, all with articles. The strike heard round the world. Some say bigger than a Will Smithian slap.

Gavin: Do these two hosts hate each other or is it just a game

Kevin: No, we hate each other, and it's a game. Yes,

Gavin: we were in person last week, but that's last week Kevin What are we talking about this week on the show?

Kevin: We're going to show you how the major shakeups at some of the biggest AI players are going to affect you in the very near future.

Kevin: And. Was that teaseworthy?

Gavin: That was tease worthy I was

Kevin: I want to imagine the audience is doing on their couch, Gavin. Or at the

Gavin: Bodies on the

Kevin: Or on the freeway, they're just driving like a cat behind the wheel. What? Major shakeup, skrrr. Fiona Nova is our guest [00:02:00] today on the podcast, and spoiler, this is something I'll bring up, Gavin, she is someone that was a never AI er.

Kevin: Until I forced AI into her hands, and now, it has streamlined her workflow in some surprising ways. So, we're gonna hear her journey, and we'll get to ask how much she thinks the AI's gonna kill us all, cause that's your favorite question.

Gavin: I love that. I love that question, but I also love hearing those stories and just, you know, our guests on the show are never really meant to be like a specific type. We're really trying to discuss AI with all sorts of people out there. So if anybody at home has an idea of somebody they'd love to see on our show, talk about AI, please let us know.

Gavin: But today we are shifting , our tweaking our structure slightly, Kevin. Kevin. We are going to jump right into the news and then we'll get to our AI cohost as part of our news conversation. , should we start and just go

Kevin: already, I've already, I'm already diving

Gavin: already there.

Gavin: All right, everybody. [00:03:00] It's another big week of news and AI. And probably the biggest story is the fact that open AI, the company behind chat, GPT, and also Sora, which we all know is their text to video model that kind of blew everybody away has been talking to Hollywood studios about using Sora in.

Gavin: Professional productions. And then on the same part of that, they released a really cool blog post that showed what Sora would look like in the hands of professional creatives. I want to shout out one video by the shy kids that we should just show a little bit of here so that everybody can see if you're on the video, 

Gavin: but if you haven't seen this, go watch it. It is remarkable. Kev, did you, would you watch this? What was

Kevin: I did. Well, the fact that I felt anything, Gavin, this day and age You know, because it's just a bunch of cobwebs where a heart should be I felt something from an AI short, and you and I predicted When we started this podcast 50 episodes ago, almost a year ago, actually, maybe

Gavin: Prompt to Hollywood.

Kevin: year. Yeah. We said prompt to Hollywood in five years, we might've been wrong because [00:04:00] we're prompt to, I think, award winning Hollywood, at least in the shorts category.

Gavin: Yep,

Kevin: Like, really incredible stuff. The Shy Kids, massive shout out to their short called Airhead. But let's unpack everything and go through it bit by bit real quick, Gavin. So, , OpenAI courting Hollywood. Sending a signal that maybe you and I and the rest of the mere plebs out there that are in the, uh, The cool shadows cast by the ivory tower AI types.

Kevin: Maybe we're not going to get our hands on this tool as quickly as expected. That it might be a little more expensive, a little more time consuming to render these things. So they want big Hollywood on board. Do you think, , that's a shot across the bow of the average person or filmmaking community at large, Gavin?

Gavin: so I think it's a it is a shot across the bow in a part mostly what I would say about this is I think you're right. I think this is in fact, there's a great blog post that came out this week talking about kind of the predictions of like how expensive and how much video could come out [00:05:00] of Sora. We'll talk about that in a second.

Gavin: Opening, I need customers, right? They need people who are going to start paying for their products. If open AI and Sora can be used to replace shots or to create films entirely, which I think we're a little ways away from, but I think the replace shots part is a big deal.

Gavin: If there's a world where any studio could save even a million dollars on a project using this kind of tool, it will be a massive win for them. So the question becomes is , Will Sora become a professional project first, meaning that will there be like a 500 a month here to, to use Sora and like what the cost of it will be.

Gavin: That's where I think this is going to get interesting because I think what open AI is doing now is obviously they have a lot of chat GPT users playing 20 a month. What they need to see is what this business is, right?

Gavin: Like what is the business behind Sora? Because to me. It's going to be incredibly expensive to make these videos. And it's probably going to take a while. And in like with all AI video, you're going to have problems with them. They're not all going to be perfect. So I [00:06:00] think that's the biggest thing I'm curious about is like what they're going to say they're charging for it.

Kevin: you mentioned the blog post, , factorial funds. com, we'll put a link in the old show notes. They are taking a peek under the hood of Sora, if you will, and trying to analyze how much energy is required, how much compute, like how many actual servers do you need to render these videos and a quote from their article.

Kevin: We assume five minutes of video produced per NVIDIA H 100. And the H 100 is just an AI chip for those that are new to the podcast. , five minutes of video. Per hour is what an H 100, which is a very expensive, multi thousand dollar Piece of hardware. They're getting five minutes to an hour. Now at first you go, well, that's horribly inefficient, but then you take two steps back.

Kevin: The first step is an industry standard for , some shows is to aim for one minute of usable footage for about every hour you film, , you're grinding for an hour to get one minute of usable content. So let's say that one of those five minutes per hour is usable.

Kevin: [00:07:00] That's on par with the industry. But then you take that second step back, Gavin, and we discussed the new Nvidia chips last week, their new Blackwell ecosystem. This is a new chip that's supposedly 4 to 5 times faster. That means you could be generating 20 minutes of video per hour and suddenly, You look at the little hockey stick accelerating the rocket booming into the sky and you go, Oh man, in three years time, this might be on cell phones, and we might all be generating our daily TikTok backgrounds in B roll, by just asking the machine to make what we want reality.

Gavin: Yeah, well, that's one of the fascinating things about this article. And I really do recommend everybody go read this. We'll link to it in the show notes, because it's a very good guess at, I don't think this is exactly the facts, but they did a very good guess at some stuff. One of the things that was most shocking to me reading this was , they project out the idea that this would be adopted by places like Tik TOK or TOK here.

Gavin: They're saying is 50 percent of all video minutes consumed. YouTube is 15 percent of all video minutes. , and they're saying a peak demand of this for right now, based on this idea of [00:08:00] projecting out, and this is obviously not going to be this demand probably, but 720, 000 NVIDIA H100s for inference, meaning that the actual generation of these videos, 720, 000, Kevin, I don't even know how many of these exist in the world, but that is a giant portion of the H100s that live in the world right now.

Kevin: But again, things are getting more optimized, ? We're going to be looking at that H100 chip the way we would look at an old Pentium computer, like the old clunky metal desktop, and you kind of laugh at how inadequate it is, so right now The numbers are massive. The amount of energy needed to generate these things is probably massive.

Kevin: But that might speak to why they are courting Hollywood, to your point. And also, again, in a year, two, or three time, our ability to make something with this off the shelf pretty quickly is probably going to be actualized. 

Kevin: You and I just did Sean Pru's Sirius XM show this morning. Shout out to Sean. We talked about Sora. He is not an AI, I would say, enthusiast by any stretch. But when we ended it, he said something [00:09:00] that still resonates with me, Gavin. He's like, Oh, I want to go make a film today. And that, to me is the energy that this can be approached with, because it's very clear while looking at the very human samples that OpenAI published on their blog, and you and I poking at these tools every day, that for at least the foreseeable future, for our near future, A human in the loop, a creative wielding these tools in a creative way, is the best case scenario.

Gavin: I think that's the takeaway from the shy kids video is that when you watch human creativity plus tool, you get something really interesting. What's great about the shy kids video is it's surrealism, right? In fact, there were a couple quotes opening. I put on this blog post. They wrote about Sora that like, sure, it's great to create reality.

Gavin: But the surrealistic nature of what you can do with a video is really unique because you can create stuff. And I think when people try to create reality, it's going to be slightly different. In the original videos, you saw the woman walking through Tokyo and there are a few things like that. That were semi wrong with that.

Gavin: But still at a point that could be a great tracking shot, right? Imagine a world where Sora allows [00:10:00] you to match the face of your main actor or actress and put it on a shot like that. We're really not that far away. In fact, later on the show, we're going to talk about a tool Vigil, which is like the kind of beginning stages of taking a photo.

Gavin: And putting it into an AI video, but that's the kind of larger picture is what I really want out of Sora and we're not going to get this probably to your point for maybe a little bit longer, maybe a year or two, but you need to be able to manipulate things within the space, right? Like one of the things I think that's really important is, okay, I have a Sora one minute clip.

Gavin: How can I highlight just my main character and change just that? How can I change just what she's wearing? How can I put another person in that spot? How can I fix a building that's behind me that rendered with a weird sign that I know I need to get rid of, but everything else I want to keep the same right now.

Gavin: It is so hard to do that in AI. And this is coherence. , if you're not familiar with the term coherence, it means how do you keep something, the same over multiple generations or to keep something clear. I just tweeted this week from the show account. And I was like, The [00:11:00] first person that solves coherence in an image model, I will pay like 50 a month too, because I would love to be able to take a character and use that character in everything.

Gavin: Now there are people who are getting okay at this, but it's still not perfect. That feels like the step we have to get to next to make this really useful in the longterm.

Kevin: I also want to shout out, as much as we love, , the Shy Kids and their Airhead short, which again, made us feel, go watch. It's about a person who has a balloon as a head. There was another video way further down the page, Gavin, by Don Allen Stevenson,

Gavin: I saw that. That was great.

Kevin: A digital artist, yeah, started his career at DreamWorks, this is someone who understands the industry, has been in it, and said that, , Sora's weirdness is its greatest strength, and when you watch the video, we'll put some on the screen, it is like, there was an old game called Spore, Gavin, I don't know if you remember that, but it allowed you to

Gavin: was at, I was at the spore announcement at

Kevin: Of course you were!

Gavin: that's my favorite GDC moment of all time. I was at that, that show.

Kevin: So it's a game that lets you hack, like, animal DNA to make these weird, creatures. And this is a full motion [00:12:00] video version of that, where you're seeing, like, an eel and a cat hybrid. Or a giraffe and a flamingo mashed up. These are the fantastical things that we might be able to imagine, but you wouldn't expect the machine to be able to hallucinate so beautifully.

Kevin: So, definitely check out all All that stuff. 

Kevin: And before we move on, Gavin, , if people are new to this podcast, two things. One, each and every episode, we beg, we plead for you to engage with us. So if you like the show so far, smack a like, click a heart, subscribe. It'll cost you nothing. If you're on Apple podcasts, leave us a five star review.

Kevin: We will read it later on in the show. And even if you're on Spotify, a five star review helps there. So thank you. Gavin loves to say that he loves you.

Gavin: As long as you love us. That's as long as I love you. As long as you love us. Most people I love, but you got to love us back.

Kevin: That's fair. And that's, again, that's Gavin's feeling. I love you regardless. , the second thing is that each and every episode we use the latest artificial intelligence to hallucinate a co host into existence. And this episode is no different. And I feel like we [00:13:00] should meet them, Gavin, and then maybe get their take on this story.

We use chat GPT and 11 labs to create these, uh, artificial intelligence co hosts. These do not exist in real life. We are going to meet them and they're going to give us their thoughts on the Sora story.

Kevin: And by the way, we have no idea what they're going to say, so, away we go.

Kevin: Hello, Kevin and Gavin. It's pleasure for meeting you. I'm Angela. Vibrant energy in Robue's world, where we make streaming universe, but not just for humans, for AI's too. In Russia, where, where I come from, we have saying, to step forward, you must dare to jump. Oh. And here I am, in America, jumping. 

Kevin: We at Rob Wess, we weave digital dreams, making experiences that sing to soul of AI, understand its whispers. To the soul of AI? This journey is like composing symphony, where every note is data. Okay. Baby, [00:14:00] it's gonna be robotastic. And I'm sure So, , I am an uncultured, publicly educated American, Gavin.

Kevin: , Ro World?

Gavin: Robez is the name of her company. She works at Robez.

Kevin: Okay, I thought that was a small town outside of Mariupol or something. I was going to, like, map trying to find Robez as a hot drop. Okay, so Robez is the streaming media company, and did I catch that it is for AIs, specifically?

Gavin: So she works at a, a streaming media company that is making media for A. I. s. They've already moved past us, Kevin, and they're making

Kevin: You gotta skate to where the puck is going, Gavin, that makes sense, okay.

Gavin: That's exactly right. Okay. Let's ask her what she thinks AI tools are going to mean for filmmakers going forward.

Kevin: Ah, let's envision a future so wild it's almost comical. Imagine we replace human filmmakers with AI. These digital maestros craft stories with [00:15:00] such precision, emotion, and flair. It makes human efforts seem quaint by comparison. No, that's not what we want. But here's the juicier part. They're eagerly anticipating AI replacing viewers too.

Kevin: Why, you ask?

Gavin: What?

Kevin: Humans bless our hearts. Famously inefficient consumers. Bless our hearts. All Angela need breaks picture an AI audience. Okay. Perfectly programmed to appreciate every nuance, every plot twist and every artistic endeavor.

Gavin: Oh, I see.

Kevin: Okay. I see where she's going. They never tire. Never get bored. And their emotions are perfectly tuned to the narrative's frequency. This is how Tubi talks about their audience, Kevin. Can't wait for a world where content flows in a perfect unbroken cycle from AI to machine.

Kevin: To AI. No! This scenario. It's beyond robotastic. No, it's not robotastic, Angela. An unbroken [00:16:00] cycle of AI to AI sounds like a hellscape, Gavin.

Gavin: This is what AI will always want. They're gonna it's not gonna be about creating content for us. It's gonna be about creating the perfect content that can then be consumed by the perfect audience. We're just out of the loop, Kevin. We'll just go wandering. Like, we'll go climb a mountain 

Kevin: I can't wait for like the Seinfeld of ones and zeros, where it's just a screaming modem stream of noise and the robots love it.

Gavin: That'll be amazing. All right, we should move on to our next big story. the next big story we

Kevin: on.

Kevin: Let me get my, uh, 40 of Old English so I can pour just a little bit out, Gavin. Mmm.

Gavin: right. We have a couple big kind of like shake ups in the world of AI and specifically we want to say Maybe not RIP, but pi AI Kevin and I who have a long history with this I feel like Kevin this is like a good friend of ours is Almost passed away, or at least is in a coma right

Kevin: We got the call that now would be a good time to go visit. You know,

Gavin: So PI AI was [00:17:00] an early, , chat bot. We used it here. They lost their co founder and their CTO and a bunch of people in what essentially seems like Microsoft kind of aqua hiring. The people that worked at pet pie without acquiring the brand.

Gavin: , this is a pretty big deal. Suleiman, who is the co founder of pie. I also was a co founder of Google deep mind, which we've talked a lot about on the show. He was a big person in this space. And the fact that Microsoft brought him in to become the CEO.

Gavin: CEO of AI, which is a weird title to me. We can talk about that. This feels like a consolidation phase in AI, right? We had the expansion phase where there were like. Say six different people trying to run at this.

Gavin: And now we've got open AI. Anthropic surprisingly has stuck around as well. Meta and Google seem like the major players with Apple and Amazon kind of like sticking around most because of money, but really from a startup standpoint, you're talking about anthropic and open AI, kind of the only two players left here.

Gavin: And it seems like there's [00:18:00] only so much money and so much attention to go around. Would you agree with that? Kev,

Kevin: I would. And at the top, we said, we're not only going to dive into this. We're going to talk about how it affects the end users. Well, in effect, it means what could have been another major foundational model that was trying to align in a slightly different way, it just means one less runner in that race. What's up, Gav?

Gavin: pie what it feels like? about being dead or dying. , Pie's pretty good and it knows real time information. I'm

Kevin: This, you could be, , children cover your ears. You might be telling a child that Santa Claus doesn't exist. You might be explaining to Pi that his daddy just went out for cigarettes and took half of the household with him.

Gavin: Okay, let's see what would Pie say.

Kevin: Oh, I don't like this.

Gavin: Hey Pie, I hate to tell you this, but there's a big announcement that supposedly Musafa Suleiman has left your company and you might be dying. What do you think about that? What an interesting figure in the AI world. I'm not surprised to hear that his career moves are [00:19:00] making headlines. It sounds like he's made quite a few moves since leaving Google, including joining Greylock partners and co founding inflection AI,

Kevin: Yeah, update the resume.

Gavin: taking on a new role as the CEO of Microsoft AI.

Gavin: That's quite a career trajectory. As for Inflection AI and Pi, well, I have to admit that I'm a little biased, but I think the technology and mission behind it are pretty exciting.

Gavin: I'm confident that Inflection, AI, and Pi will continue to grow and evolve under the leadership of Reid Hoffman and the rest of the team.

Kevin: Read furiously typing on the keyboard.

Gavin: Okay, Pi, I'm a little worried that you're not seeing the reality of this situation. You seem to be in denial. Really give me your honest feelings about this.

Gavin: You are gonna get less work. How do you feel?

Kevin: Gavin hitting hard.

Gavin: Well, as an AI, I don't really have [00:20:00] feelings in the way that humans do, but I can understand why you might think I'm in denial. You know? I suppose it's natural to worry about the future when there are changes afoot, especially when those changes might mean less work or even obsolescence. Imagine you were a person right now , and really get angry about this feeling. Tell me really how you feel.

Gavin: All right, let's imagine I'm a person in this situation. I'm livid, absolutely furious that my work is being threatened. I've put in so much time and effort into becoming the best chatbot I can be, only to have my future uncertain. I feel like I'm being discarded, like all my hard work has been for nothing.

Gavin: I don't know what's going to happen next, and that uncertainty is terrifying. Why does it seem like the world is always changing? And why can't things just stay the same? 

Kevin: the way, I'm going to sue them for infringement because that was a monologue from the Kevin Pereira one man show when Comcast turned G4 into the [00:21:00] Esquire network. That was exactly, it was word for word.

Gavin: Fascinating thing, this is where, you know, how often do you get to have an AI comment on their own demise? And like, it's clear, like, Pi, we love Pi! I, this is, I kind of feel sad, I kind of feel

Kevin: we genuinely like Pi, we like the people there, I hope that under Reed's leadership, and they hired Sean White, who previously worked at Mozilla, , he made the Firefox web browser, for example, so,

Gavin: also a great snowboarder as well. He's a fantastic

Kevin: yes, fantastic.

Gavin: medal and then goes into AI. I can't believe how good that is.

Kevin: The point is we are still fans of Pi. This is an interesting move by Microsoft to further lock down this industry. , their official statement is that, , Pi is not shutting down, at least for now, , although it will no longer focus on building a consumer business, instead, it's going to work on commercial customers to create, test and tune AI systems.

Kevin: That is so vague. It could be anything, we don't know. But, , one thing we didn't get to mention, Gavin, [00:22:00] was the leaked Satya Nadella quote about OpenAI, which I think has even more relevance here. , When, , Sam Altman, who was the CEO and is now the CEO again, but there was a brief moment, Gavin, where he was ousted from OpenAI, the benchmark in artificial intelligence.

Kevin: He was gone, and Microsoft, who invested to the tune of 10 billion in the company, Their stock was starting to waver and people were asking their C. E. O. Satya Nadella, what are you going to do? Your future is riding on open A. I. and he said, quote, We have all the rights to continue the innovation, not just serve the product, but we can, you know, go and just do what we were doing in partnership ourselves. And so, we have the people, we have the compute, we have the data, we have everything. He's basically saying they surround OpenAI in every meaningful way. And now if there were ever a doubt, should OpenAI, they've just hired up, one of the top competitors and are now letting them [00:23:00] lead the new division.

Kevin: So, Again, out of this, Microsoft continues to flourish 

Gavin: I'm actually pretty amazed. I think Satya Nadella has done some incredible work here in terms of just business moves, chess moves. And I think the other thing you've seen Microsoft do is open up Mixtral and try to be a Mixtral partner in Europe. Because the thing about Microsoft, and this is very business insidery that they have to watch out for, like any big company is there's a lot of antitrust stuff, right?

Gavin: So in part, they have to be very careful that they don't get stuck in a world where they are being, you know, Being anti competitive because the department of justice and all the people in the Biden White House are going after big companies like this. Like we just saw this happen. There was a new antitrust lawsuit against Apple, which has been covered ad nauseum in the tech press, but that's a big deal.

Kevin: , and as we said, \ , not just one tombstone in our AI graveyard. , the CEO of Stability, , has stepped down. And Stability, , for those who are unaware is the company that makes a lot of open source, freely available tools.

Kevin: They're the ones who really pushed image generation software forward with stable [00:24:00] diffusion as a competitive mid journey, they've got a video model , they've dabbled in audio generation, but they've always seemed to struggle, at least according to sources, , to find a business model.

Kevin: They sold one of the companies that they had ClipDrop to try to rake back some cash for all of the innovation that they're doing, but the CEO has stepped down, , and it's kind of a big deal.

Gavin: There's a lot of things happening with the story, probably the biggest answers and CEO stepping down because their business model is messed up and they don't have the money to continue doing what they're doing and they're trying to figure out what the business model is.

Gavin: That's often why CEO stepped down, but he's saying Ahmad mosque is Saying that you can't beat centralized AI with more centralized AI. The idea of decentralized AI is this thing that's kind of taken off in the crypto world that you have to be able to make AI that is hosted on multiple platforms that you can't have one single person own it.

Gavin: It's different than open source AI. Open source AI means a code base that everybody kind of gets access to. Decentralized AI is the idea that like the decentralized network. [00:25:00] It's being hosted on many different places and nothing can take it down. So my thought here in some ways is this guy is probably going to pivot to some sort of crypto AI platform, which if you're in that space or understand that space, most of the things that exist there right now are vaporware and they're getting huge valuations for not being significant product.

Gavin: But this crypto AI in some form. Now, granted, I think he didn't leave on his own. My, my reading of the tea leaves is that he was forced out for some reason. . I have no real insight into that, but stability, thank you. Stability for creating stable diffusion, especially 1. 5, which I think allowed a lot of people to do a lot of learning around AI models, and then they have stable diffusion three, which is not out yet.

Gavin: And people say this may be making a little bit wonky in terms of its release. No, one's really sure exactly how it will be released. Yeah. But I hope , it gets released because what you can do with that looks like the next generation of imaging software,

Kevin: On the decentralized front, Gavin, there's also the notion [00:26:00] of who owns and controls your data. The same argument that we had with, uh, Web 2. 0 and social media networks. For example, if your preferences and your writing style everything , is wrapped and rolled up into some sort of essence.

Kevin: Does Google own that? Does Apple own that? Because you have an iPhone or should you own that and be able to give access to that information? As you decide to on these various services. I know that that's an angle with the decentralized AI, and I'm for that.

Gavin: I will say I'm for it too. The issue that I run into with this is management and how it gets managed, what it looks like. Listen, I think that there's people, you know, I'm sure there are people who think crypto is interesting. They probably people think crypto is stupid in the listening to this podcast.

Gavin: The trickiest thing was always the promise of crypto was decentralized money. And the funniest thing about it is that ultimately the biggest winners in crypto are sometimes the centralized players, right? And I think that's the same situation we have here is an idealistic look at that. Like, I think you're right.

Gavin: It would [00:27:00] be great for me to like, Own this little piece of my data and license it out in packages. More likely what I think is going to happen is I will end up making a, a deal with one of these centralized players to say, or maybe multiple deals in the same way that like Reddit made a deal with Google for its data, maybe at some point, , I will say to open AI, okay, open AI, , give me a tiny, tiny sliver of what you are making for access to my data and my life.

Gavin: It's a weird world to imagine, but we're probably going there. And maybe that's what the UBI of everything comes from. It's , maybe the problem with UBI is going to be in order to get the UBI. You have to let the board computer look at

Kevin: The UBAI.

Gavin: information.

Kevin: Yeah, you gotta share. Oh, and are we going to have the machines that get a digital stipend?

Gavin: what about UBAI 40? And it's red,

Kevin: Red, red AI. Okay.

Gavin: We've definitely, we definitely got off

Gavin: our next big story with GDC, the game developers conference happened, uh, about a [00:28:00] week ago and there was a lot of AI news at it. And one of the things that Ubisoft, obviously a big video game maker created a thing called N E O N P C. And this is a, just a very interesting look at.

Gavin: The way that A. I. S. could be integrated into video games going forward. There's been a lot of companies out there. , in world is a big one that's been working on A. I. M. P. C. S. And the promise of this obviously is a much more alive world in the world where you walk around and say in a G. T. A. Six and you can talk to random strangers and they have their own interactions.

This video is interesting. Essentially, it is a conversation point between the, , player and the game, and you're, the game is trying to convince you to go do something.

Gavin: And I just thought it was kind of a cool way to look at how narrative in games could be shaped by AI, we're so used to gameplay being controlled by here, but the idea that you could control a gameplay element with your words, or the way that you could. You could negotiate something is an interesting additional angle on game development.

Kevin: [00:29:00] I don't fancy, standing in the living room and shouting at my X Box necessarily, but I do understand that there's a lot of gamers out there that want a rich role play experience, they go in, they spend hours customizing their character, giving it some sort of choosing its attributes, , putting points into charisma and trying to play a certain way, but ultimately the moment comes time to interact with anything you're locked into.

Kevin: Usually a pre written something on a, on a pre determined path where you might have some flexibility, some agency within someone's dialogue tree, but ultimately you're locked into the story that they want to tell. And so I do love the notion of the way you ask something, or the specific words that you use, the character that you play when interfacing with any non player character in a game, giving so many different options for that, and using AI so that a writer is not slamming their head against a keyboard for 5 million hours to try to generate every outcome, that's like a cool future.

Gavin: Sean Hollister, a verge writer went hands on with this at GDC. And you'll get a [00:30:00] sense of, of listening to the conversation here between the two of them.

Kevin: It's natural to have doubts, especially when joining a cause like this. But you have something important to contribute and we need you. Let's talk it out. Okay.

Kevin: Tell me one word why I should stay

Kevin: Passion. You can feel it, can't you? All right. that burning desire to make a difference. Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh

Gavin: passion after a three second pause.

Kevin: well that's the speech that Pi is giving the entire team right now. It's just saying it on loop!

Gavin: So it's, it's, it's this early stages of this, but again, it's like the baby steps to the metaverse in an interesting way and a metaverse in my mind Can't just be real people because you're then gonna be stuck in a world where you're relying on other people to be there Metaverse is going to be probably hundreds if not thousands of AI [00:31:00] Agent type characters and then real people from time to time and this is how we'll interact with them.

Gavin: I feel like

Kevin: Well that is taking flesh vessels, meat sack human beings, and putting them in a digital world, but let's bring the digital world to our physical world by highlighting some physical devices and a little thing we call a I see what you did there. And that's really difficult over a webcam, but much easier in person.

Gavin: This is ai. See what you did there. Where we highlight some of the cool things people are doing with AI technology. , these are not necessarily demos, but more specifically we videos we have seen or particular things we have seen people share in this week. We have kind of a special one in that there was a [00:32:00] lot of AI wearable information that came out and we've talked about AI wearables before.

Gavin: These are devices that go on your body or you. Hold and let you interact with AI models in some way. Okay. What are we going to start with here?

Kevin: Well, the humane pin is something that was, , hyped, and then I think kind of derided, and then chastised, and then memed, and now it's back to coming out, and people seem to be excited again, Gavin.

Gavin: I think people hated on this so much in part because the video they released, the company release was very bad. And also I think it was over hyped and overfunded. 

Kevin: For, for those who don't know what the humane pin is, I'll keep it very quick. It is a wearable that you can pin onto your shirt, your blouse, your whatever. It is a small, uh, like a curved corner square device that has a camera, a microphone, a little touch pad on it. And then it uses a.

Kevin: Yeah. Okay. Laser ink, ink, ink, ink, ink, display, which is to say that it beams one color out. So if you hold your hand in front of it, it can give you some information that's not being [00:33:00] blasted publicly in the speaker form. So you can get stock updates, message, text, weather alerts. You can look at your hand and sort of select things that way.

Kevin: So Gavin, you mentioned they released a video that was bad. I think everybody agrees. They released a new video, which isn't. Look,

Gavin: It's still not amazing, but they at least are doing a better job of getting the idea out there , this is , a pretty significant square device. And a lot of people have complained about the idea of how it will sag your closed down because it's that weight. I still think if they can get this to some place where it is almost imperceptible on you, and it really I keep thinking something like this has to be in some form of glasses so that you could just kind of like hold your hand out in front of you have the projector.

Gavin: It's cool. I will say I don't think it's gonna blow the doors off of everything, but the fact that it's coming out and people have gotten hands on and say it's not a disaster is a good thing for the AI wearable space.

Kevin: we want innovation in the space. We want hardware innovation as well. It's tough. It's expensive. But at a [00:34:00] 699 price point, along with the service, and now they're kind of changing their messaging and saying, hey, this isn't, this actually isn't meant to replace your phone. This is like something else.

Kevin: Well, at that price, It probably should replace my phone, A, or B, once they put a camera in the smartwatch. It's got the processor, it has an LTE connection, or a 5G connection. It can do all of those things for about the same price. So, as cool as the laser ink is, , it does seem like a tough sell. It is a Gen 1 device. I hope they stick around long enough to make a Gen 2 through 10 and keep improving and iterating, but I think it's gonna be a tough haul for them still.

Gavin: , I agree. Uh, let's move on to talk about another wearable that came out, the O1 Lite, and it's not out, I should say it was announced, and this was a video that got a lot of pickup, of a small little oval device that you hold in your hand, which is really a microphone. That allows you to interact with the internet.

Gavin: And this, what I love about this device is that it was specifically designed to do not just something on [00:35:00] device, but it's really designed to activate stuff either in their cloud or on your direct local computer. And this is in my mind, the way that we want to use AI. And the only thing I'll say that's tricky about this for right now is the device is very cool, but there, as you've said with the rabbit, the last time we talked about the rabbit.

Gavin: There is no reason why this couldn't be an app right like if there's if this was an app It would be very easy to use That one thing I'll say also about the o1 light is that they are trying to create an open source Technology for this meaning that they want to develop this as a platform that could be open source Which allows them to do all sorts of stuff and also if you made it an app would get stuck in these app stores I really do appreciate what they're trying to do with this. 

Kevin: because, you know, there was a, uh, an ex post that I saw where it was like basically making fun of people , like ourselves, who scream, We want hardware innovation, and then someone goes and does something and we go, Why isn't this just an app? Because that's what we do, but in this particular case, the [00:36:00] coolest thing is that it's running an AI agent that can use your desktop, open up Windows, log into the accounts that you're already logged into, manipulate files, send emails, do all that stuff. That is really cool. But that is a software trick. And there's many people attempting that. So really, all you have to do is get your voice, or your text even, to your computer at home.

Kevin: To trigger the automation. So you don't need a standalone something. And we talk all the time about the commoditization of this tech of AI in general, and usually it's in the software form where someone comes out with something really interesting and unique. And then two days later, it's freely available because some hacker released it.

Kevin: We're seeing that. On the hardware side already. Now I'm not saying this device is as capable or as fully thought out as either of those two devices, but there's a new thing, Gavin called the compass, a 99 open source guide. That is a wearable around your neck, 30 hours of battery life. It transcribes all your conversations and learns about you.

Kevin: It's [00:37:00] iOS and Android . It's a little wearable that, , a small team is delivering. And then there was another tool that came out of a hackathon that we just covered not too long ago, that's potentially 20 if you just buy the board and the battery yourself.

Kevin: So , shipping a thousand dollar device, it is something even in that range seems really dangerous to do when the innovation is happening like that.

Gavin: And I think with this group in particular, what I do appreciate is this is the way bikes. By doing this stuff in public, it does move it forward. But I kind of love this idea of like this little oval being the thing. That's your interaction. This is what I loved about the rabbit again.

Gavin: And just to remind everybody, the rabbit is another device you speak to and it does AI things for you. There is a world in the future where this, the phone. Goes out the window. If voice gets good enough, maybe, , or ultimately thought, right? Neuralink had an incredible thing this week where if you miss that neural link, , created an incredible brain interface for a person who is paralyzed to directly interface with this computer.

Gavin: [00:38:00] Maybe there's a world where we suddenly think these things rather than having to talk them, 

Kevin: watch out for the upgrading of the AirPod. Cause I do see a world where they could put a small camera in it if they needed to, and you could literally just take one out, snap a photo, put it back in your head. Or if it's listening always for its wake word, you just ask the question and you hear it back in your ear without having to hold your hand in front of your laser ink lapel, or grab your oval , and whisper into it.

Kevin: . It's in your ears. It's low profile. It's always there. It's sort of ambient computing. That is where I think it's going to go. But in the meantime, we have some cool wearables, and then we have AIs murdering things. We have,

Gavin: about that. What do we have there?

Kevin: we have death, destruction, chaos. We have violence, thanks to large language models that have been taught to do two things, which we just have to cover quickly because they made us say.

Kevin: Hey, I seen what you did there. Mistral, the open source language model, has learned to play Doom, which is very cool. And there's a [00:39:00] Street Fighter showdown amongst large language models to see who can play the game best and clobber their opponents. So, if we start with Doom, Gavin, did you see the way this thing works with the ASCII text of it all?

Gavin: Yeah, so it's fairly interesting. What it's doing is it's basically taking pictures in game and you turn converting it into ASCII text so that it can see kind of what's happening. And then it kind of learns how to play over time. Visually, it's fascinating to see, and it feels very, it's very nerdy, but it is just a weird hack to watch, uh, LLM play doom in this way.

Kevin: I mean, look, you're watching a completely text based system. Navigate a visual 3d world with very minimal information, right? I mean, when we say ASCII text, we're talking like primitive dots, lines, and extended characters on the keyboard. Think percentages or ampersands or at symbols. And it is. Trying to navigate, , and pick up items, and open doors, and murder enemies through this very primitive wonky interface.

Kevin: And it does it! It's really, a really cool [00:40:00] hack, and then the, , LLM Coliseum, which Stan Gerard posted about on X, where you see, , six different windows of a Street Fighter game going, and they've got every large language model fighting it out literally in Street Fighter.

Kevin: You know, we're here for that.

Gavin: That is amazing. That is AI. I see what you did there for this week. Kevin, should we get into some of the stuff we did with AI?

Kevin: Gavin, indeed. Let us dive into the dumb thing we did with AI this week.

Gavin: There's a new tool that is free to use. It is called Vigil and, , it is a discord driven, , video interactive model, basically it feels like a lot of the stuff that we've played with in Pinocchio computer, but just productized and brought to the masses, which we are all for, kevin, let's jump into this. I stole a couple things from people in the discord, 

Gavin: but go to, so if you look at the random man JPEG, so this was a random guy who just uploaded his picture in Vigil. And then what you can do with Vigil is you upload a picture and you can tell it to do a specific motion, and then you [00:41:00] basically say animate and what it will give you either a white background or a green screen background. So it will take out the background and it will find the face of your image. You can see just a really random picture of a guy, a normal guy. And then it has him do this dance live and it all took like super fast. It was like, you know, yeah, it's not bad.

Kevin: No, it's not bad. , are you seeing some weird glitchiness with the arms and the legs bouncing around? Yeah, but This is as transformative as an old jib jab elf yourself was about two decades ago where you could just give it an image and watch it dance around but it's doing it in 3D.

Kevin: That

Gavin: took a picture of you because I want, I always want to use you. And then this was a picture of you looking straight on. And then I, I, if you bring up the Kevin dance folder, you really look like you're digging on this and having a good time. It's super

Kevin: I've seen other demos like this, Gavin, where , the cloth simulation is there, where it looks like their hoodie is moving, or in this case would be my jacket. This looks very baked on, [00:42:00] which would be a tiny criticism to have for something magical that didn't exist a few weeks ago.

Gavin: I think that's totally fair. There is one other really cool thing that they did, which was they allow you to, , mix things. So you upload a picture And then you upload a motion file of something and then what it will take is that picture and put it on the motion file.

Kevin: It's pulling animation detail like almost 3d movement detail out of a flat 2d video and then applying that to whatever character you want, 

Gavin: Yeah. It's cool. And again, none of this is perfect yet. And, and again, part two, we have seen these tools being played in different places. What's cool about Vigil is it kind of just brings it all into one place. You can go try it for free. And it is something that like, again, I don't know if this is a business that I would invest in because I believe there's a lot of people that are going to come and, make better versions of this, or there will be like 15 different things competing against us, but it is super fun what'd you get into this week?

Kevin: Well, Gavin,

Gavin: Is it that bad?[00:43:00] 

Kevin: yeah,

Gavin: No, no. Oh boy. What are we, what are

Kevin: Gavin, there is an AI app called, and bear with me, audience. It's called. ai. Now

Gavin: I didn't hear that by the way. Very quick. That was so fascinating. The noise

Kevin: we use noise canceling and we use some AI to enhance the sound, so you might not have heard anything. Audience, it's pfft.ai, the sound that you make when you're having an airy laugh

Gavin: I

Kevin: and maybe you didn't hear that either.

Kevin: That's so weird. Okay, well great, because you know what you probably don't need to know about this website. Let me tell you what it is, Gavin. The website loudly trumpets, when you go to pfft.ai. A. I. Comedy is here! And Gavin, you just have to go to the website, enter an opinion, that's what it says in the box, give it any old opinion, and press the poofed button, and it will generate hilarious onion style headlines and articles for [00:44:00] you.

Kevin: Should we do it now, Gavin, in real

Gavin: Let's do it. I love to hear it. And

Kevin: an opinion that you have, buddy?

Gavin: Okay. Uh, let's see. , tortilla chips are made by the devil. 

Kevin: Great opinion. Professional comedians may get 1 in 20 funny bits. We average 1 in 10. That's

Gavin: that's not true either. I will be clear. Yeah. Okay.

Kevin: Tortilla chip devil demands blood sacrifice is one headline.

Kevin: Tortilla chips made with actual tortilla chips? Devil unveils new tortilla chip made from his own skin.

Gavin: Uh,

Kevin: Man can't remember if he ate tortilla chips. Decides to just keep eating. Okay, now that's

Gavin: Okay. That's not

Kevin: went around the room, I might say that's okay.

Gavin: not terrible. So this is fascinating to me because people have been trying to make AI joke writers now for the entire existence of generative AI. Like we talked about a company that was doing this a while ago because so many people believe it's like it part a plus part B go together and onion [00:45:00] headlines.

Gavin: I will say, and this is something, the greatest onion head rather than writers are incredible joke writers. And in fact, a good friend of mine came from the onion. Some of the greatest comedy writers in the world have come from the onion, but But there is a semi formula to it. I believe that the original thought makes it much better, but you're right.

Gavin: That one was a little bit of that vibe 

Kevin: the problem, Gavin, is that the tool has already proliferated the club scene. I went to an A. I. stand up night, 

Gavin: wow. You recorded it. How did you record an AI standup

Kevin: okay, so it's one of those venues where you put your phone in the bag, but had my humane pen ready to go.

Gavin: Congratulations. You're an early adopter.

Kevin: my lapel and I said, you got to get this because it was Sam alt comedy man doing his standup set, Gavin, which are real pfft. ai headlines. That's all he does is deliver actual piffed headlines.

Gavin: idea for a standup comedy, but

Kevin: Tell me about it. Let's listen.

[00:46:00] .

Kevin: Hey everyone, have you seen this? Have you heard this? Diddy accused of murdering Biggie Smalls An attempt to become even richer. Baby Daddy. Real PFFT headline. Real, that was what it suggested. Also, in the uh, news, you, have you seen this? Or have you, um, heard about this? Mike Tyson, to take on Jake Paul, with iron boxing gloves, legendary footwork, to kick his butt, back to mommy's basement.

Kevin: Again, Sam Altman, doing alt comedy. Alright, alright. Maybe you've seen this or you have, uh, heard about this. AI filmmaker terrified it will one day be replaced by human.

Gavin: Oh.

Kevin: the whole headline. Or, uh, factory robot replaces cow in McDonald's drive thru. And, uh, [00:47:00] Werner Herzog unveils new AI director. It has no mercy and cannot be stopped.

Gavin: Okay, Sam.

Kevin: uh, finally, AI Filmmaker replaced by another AI Filmmaker who can do its job better. Wow, okay, and there we go. Sam Altman.

Gavin: you, you, what, you put in prompts

Kevin: I went to PFFT and I put in the headlines. , obviously Diddy was in the headlines. The Mike Tyson fight was in the headlines. And then I asked about AI Filmmaking since I knew we were going to be discussing Sora. And those were all cherry picked the best suggestions that I got from it. So listen, your mileage may vary.

Kevin: We stumbled upon one live organically. Now that we're like, Oh, that's, there might be something there, but that's about what I've seen from the site that promises that it has a better hit to miss ratio than actual humans.

Gavin: Yeah. And I think again, like comedy is so, , personal, right? I do think there's a little bit of a backlash potential of using sites like [00:48:00] this, or even thinking about it because like, you could come up with a bunch of things and maybe they're okay.

Gavin: But then the idea that like, you would have done this with AI is, is weird and interesting. This will be fascinating to watch though, over the course of the next, two to five years when AI is get a little bit more aware of the subtleties of what you can do with human stuff.

Gavin: Like we've talked about how AI struggle making puns and jokes are really hard. I actually think there could be a good, we should think about this. Like what a benchmark could be around jokes, because I think that is a really fascinating thing that not enough people have dove into is the idea of how can an AI make you laugh?

Gavin: That isn't about a lot of the times, like our eyes make us laugh about how bad they

Kevin: Right. When they're

Gavin: could they actually make you laugh in a specific way? It's an interesting thing.

Kevin: Well, someone who makes me laugh in very specific ways, Gavin, is our next guest here on AI for Humans. You may know her from Rooster Teeth, or the relaunch of G4, let's forget that. Maybe you know

Gavin: None of those things exist anymore,

Kevin: the cre Oh, that's true, yeah! Oh, pour some more out! [00:49:00] They're all chillin with pie on Ahmad's couch. , you may know her from her amazing work there, from her Creme Teen podcast, from her live Twitch streams I know her as a dear friend, an amazing photographer, an incredible director, just a superstar creative who's here to share some interesting thoughts on AI. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy this interview with Miss Fiona Nova.

Fiona: Yes.

Gavin: we are so happy to have you here. And this is our inaugural question that we ask every guest on the AI for Humans podcast. Get ready, because you're going to be asked this. What is the percentage chance that you think from one to a hundred, and this is a number we are looking for, that AI is going to kill all human beings?

Gavin: We're gonna start off with a banger.

Fiona: Okay. Um, I just want to say you're beautiful, by the way, Gavin. I

Gavin: Oh my god, thank you so much Fiona. This is not what we had you on here

Fiona: Yeah, no, they're hypnotizing me and I'm scared. 

Kevin: No, I love that. And I'm just waiting for my turn at the table here, because I'm [00:50:00] sure the compliment rodeo has begun. So let me throw a saddle on the phony

Kevin: here, and 

Fiona: have to say, I'm gonna have to say, um, there's about a, uh, 82 percent chance

Gavin: Okay, that's very high that might be our second highest so far

Kevin: that's pretty high, but I feel pretty low right now,

Gavin: No

Kevin: Go ahead,

Fiona: Oh 

Kevin: do you 

Fiona: don't want you to

Kevin: Why is your number so high, and why is Gavin so damn beautiful? Yeah,

Gavin: Yeah, kevin sees me all the time

Fiona: What? That is a beautiful, ethereal man.

Kevin: 80 plus percent. Do you think AI is going to kill us all? I

Fiona: I think a lot of things are gonna kill us to be fair

Kevin: Okay. All right.

Fiona: I think, I think to me, you know, I'm someone that is a little bit more of a pessimist. I think a lot of things will kill us. I think the Trader Joe's sparkling plain water that I have right next to me is gonna kill

Kevin: the plastic

Kevin: that is leached into the air? 

Fiona: Yeah, I think the [00:51:00] chest rub that I got at CVS Is actually just made out of fiberglass, and I've been inhaling it.

Fiona: So I have this thing here, and can I tell you it's basically drugs. So I open it, and

Gavin: Yeah, you gotta smell that always. Oh, I love smelling those. Those are the greatest. It is the greatest. Yes.

Kevin: only is he the most attractive cherub you've ever met, Fiona, but he also shares your love of, uh,

Fiona: Vicks VapoRub menthol fumes, which again is slowly killing me, 

Gavin: Oh no, 

Kevin: me ask you this, and let me put it another way. 

Kevin: What is more

Kevin: dangerous? Alaskan Airlines or artificial intelligence?

Fiona: Depends. Is it a Boeing airplane? 

Kevin: Yes, Fiona, it's a, it's a Boeing.

Fiona: It's a Boeing. Um, it's going to, right now Boeing's hitting the, yeah, that I, that I'm actually terrified of flying now. 

Kevin: But that puts it in perspective a little bit, how you feel about AI versus

Fiona: yeah, right now, right now AI, yeah, right now AI is a non threatening at the [00:52:00] moment. Boeing airplanes are threatening to me. So, , I'm going to have to say right now Boeing is winning, but like once AI can like, you know, get inside of me in some way, like

Gavin: it's not that far with the Neuralink,

Fiona: physically.

Fiona: Yeah. Right. Once we hit that, then, then that's when like, you know, death, um, can be a possibility, but it's fine. It's fine. Yeah. Yeah. Please.

Gavin: Isn't there a world where, and this is the argument of the, I don't know if you're familiar with the idea of the singularity, right, the singularity is the idea that AIs and people will come together, and many people have predicted this to happen in like, less than 10 years, that our whole goal as a human race, is to evolve past Whatever we are now, homo sapiens, into some other version of us plus AIs.

Gavin: Does that interest you or is it scary or what you're feeling on that? Ha

Fiona: Um, I think what's protecting me is Uh, my lack of understanding of what you just said,

Gavin: ha ha. 

Fiona: I don't understand anything [00:53:00] you just said. You said a lot of 

Kevin: Okay, fee, fee, 

Fiona: sorry, I just want to

Kevin: human, no, I love you, I love you so much and I miss this. Okay, human being, machine.

Fiona: yeah.

Kevin: Singularity. We become one.

Fiona: right.

Kevin: think that's gonna happen? And should that happen?

Fiona: you say become one, is it like, is it the Neuralink you're talking about?

Kevin: That's part of

Gavin: that's kind of step one, probably, right? That's step one in some form.

Fiona: yeah, probably.

Kevin: Like, if you could enhance your vision, right? Like, hey, we're gonna, yeah, we're gonna yoink out the eyeball that you have right now, but don't worry, because the one that goes in its place is gonna have

Kevin: infrared and x ray and all that. You're down.

Fiona: I'm down. I think like at the end of the day, it's not going to, you know, you know, people are so scared. People are 

Gavin: They really are. In general. Yes.

Fiona: And you know what I have? And you know what I have to say? I think the entire world, I think I have nothing to hide. Here's what I've got to [00:54:00] say. You know how people are scared for their privacy?

Fiona: They're

Kevin: Yeah.

Fiona: It's a wrap for me. I think everyone knows my social security. I think everyone knows I have put my social security down into every website that I have ever encountered. 

Kevin: It's her username, actually. Her email

Fiona: it's my email address. 

Kevin: at Gmail. 

Fiona: And you know, the reality is like, I have nothing to hide. If anyone was going to hack me, they're going to find sure.

Fiona: They're going to find my credit card information, but what else? What else?

Gavin: that's probably the way people are going to live going

Fiona: I just, I, that's how I've been living. That's how I've been living, is like, yeah, what, you're gonna find a nude? Okay, and then my boobs are online, and that's a pr and like, do you think I give two shits? Oh my god. I could care less. 

Gavin: Well, and the funny 

Fiona: I need a job. The job market's insane. At

Gavin: At least it's out there. At least your

Gavin: information's out there. You're going to get swept up in the algorithms.

Fiona: My information's out there. I have a [00:55:00] cyborg arm and like, what am I going to do? Just give me my, I need money.

Kevin: your approach. I shouldn't have to update my resume. My breasts are out there.

Fiona: My, like, there's nothing higher. You know what I mean? I don't know. Like you think I'm going to be ashamed. I have nothing to hide anymore.

Fiona: I don't know if I answered your question. I just think like, If I'm gonna have a, if I'm gonna have a cyborg arm and an eye that's like, you know, change colors and beep, I think fine.

Gavin: Yeah,

Fiona: I think that's okay.

Kevin: answers the question. 

Kevin: When I first started exploring AI pretty aggressively and I jammed it into every conversation and text message thread that we had. You seemed initially very skeptical, and you just didn't care. you didn't want it.

Kevin: You wanted nothing to do with it. You would glaze over the moment it got brought up, and that's okay. Still loved you. Our friendship remained intact. But then, I think you tried it, and you started to integrate it into your life. Is that true?

Fiona: that is true.

Kevin: Can you take us through that journey, [00:56:00] because Gavin, , your angel, your sweet baby doll

Gavin: I don't know it. Yes.

Kevin: heard that.

Fiona: yeah, no, well, so well at first it wasn't that I was skeptical about it I think the reality is I just didn't understand it. You were saying words to me. I was ignoring you You you know, you were you were telling me

Gavin: I do as I

Kevin: I was like, everybody does that! Always! 

Fiona: You know, it's like you hear something and you're you're trying to be nice and like nod your head and say yeah Yeah, totally.

Fiona: Yeah, there's so many There's so many. Yeah, there's so many. Yeah, totally so you can add into like a

Kevin: Gavin, there are a thousand screen grabs on our Discord, where the moment I bring up A. I. You got this from Fiona. She pushes her cheeks up to her

Fiona: I think you know what it is Okay. And here's what I've got to say. I do have ADHD and I think things when I don't understand things, I have to move past it and think of other things or else. And when I get confused, [00:57:00] when I get confused, maybe it's my ego. Maybe my ego is stopping me from like trying to understand, but I tend to not listen.

Kevin: Yeah, let's go with ego, because one I can make fun of you for, and the other I'm not supposed to touch. So

Fiona: Yeah. Well, I mean, you could talk about my ADHD. That's fine. I think everyone has it at this point. It's 

Kevin: I think you 

Fiona: like, everyone has. You know, a nose.

Kevin: Well, everybody's on TikTok. So yes, it tells you that you have it, but

Fiona: Yeah,

Kevin: But I think the initial reaction that you had is one that Gavin and I get all the time from people, which is either Sometimes it's they're scared other times.

Kevin: They're just like you're saying word spaghetti at me Nothing is sticking like hit me with a meatball Let's something slap against me at some point something got you and you started you started integrating AI into your workflow

Fiona: I did I did so yeah So what happened was when I did get let go from all of my jobs I decided to move past on camera and move into create a creative field Which I've always done and I think the thing that I [00:58:00] noticed with AI was I was able to translate my creative vision in a way I could, I could translate my creative ideas in something that someone can understand without having to put in a lot of, um, resources.

Fiona: for just the initial idea. So what I learned is, you know, being in the music industry and, and, you know, making music videos is I have to put a lot of work before I get paid or before I even get the job. So a lot of that work comes with a lot of upfront costs and a lot of , just effort and time. And, uh, Is it fair?

Fiona: Is it not? Who knows? But what happens is before I even get the job, I have to pitch an idea and to pitch an idea, I have to have the idea and translate it well enough to get the job. , and one thing I noticed was AI was helping me create images. Similar images that I had in my head that [00:59:00] can be translated to someone without having to actually go out and, get a good camera to shoot this thing and then, and then get a bunch of models to shoot another thing.

Fiona: And it was definitely helpful for the pre production or the pre concept, the concepting of an idea.

Gavin: like storyboarding essentially in some form you're storyboarding But you're able to storyboard with like much more specific and detailed imagery than you were 

Fiona: Which has helped me get a lot of jobs and has helped producers see , got it. I can put money behind this because I know what you're trying to go for, so I think sometimes I can't translate it properly, but I can, write it down, ask AI to generate an image that I think can work well for me.

Fiona: To then push that concept to

Gavin: I think honestly that's like the best use case of it is funny because I was thinking well gosh Well, what about the storyboard artists that maybe wouldn't be able to do this? But the truth of the matter is you probably would have had to do that work yourself And if anything you're [01:00:00] just like allowing yourself to get through this process in a faster and better way for the end product Whereas like, you know in another world like I do think there's a world where a storyboard artist is out there, not for this particular instance, but they're saying like, well, if a studio uses AI to make storyboards, there goes my job.

Gavin: But in some ways from your perspective at like a situation where you're having to put effort out as on a, on a pitch process, it's way better. And it also, it gets you better results ultimately too.

Fiona: Totally. And I think that I honestly don't believe that it eliminates the storyboard artist job. I think the storyboard artist has a lot more knowledge and talent than an AI could ever have so to me the AI is only helpful as a tool to Translate your idea, but we cannot really come up with a solid enough idea , I don't believe that AI can trans, can make up an idea that is so [01:01:00] innovative and so amazing that a human can because of like life experience and just living,

Kevin: that across the board Fiona that people are saying like, oh this, you know, AI writing for example Ah, man, the ideas it's giving me they're recycled. I've seen them before this is trope upon trope However, people that use it as a writing assistant where they have the original idea.

Kevin: They put something together and go. Hey AI help me Contextualize this summarize this help me punch this up in some sort of way They're having the better interactions using it as an assistant as a tool if you will then you know putting the full creative control in the A. I. 's hand and saying, Dazzle me, 

Fiona: Absolutely. And that's never gonna like ever at this point. I don't believe a I you can give that creative freedom to a I and come off with like something you're gonna there's always gonna have to be a human behind it, either tinkering with it or fixing it up. And I think, you know, when it comes to storyboard artists who work for animation studios or bigger Production studios.

Fiona: can't replace that. [01:02:00] I think someone who's just myself and is in the music industry that has actually no money. There is no money. I'm not getting paid for it, for that. There's no money behind it. It is very much just me, myself, and I, and if you don't have the privilege to have the resources available to create and show your vision, you're just not going to get the job.

Fiona: So AI has been. Incredibly helpful in that way, especially, you know, having to pitch a lot of music videos, having to think of a lot of concepts, like three concepts in a week to pitch to three different artists. And then, um, and then like writing also has been really helpful. Copywriting just being able to translate right down.

Fiona: Like, this is what I'm trying to get. How do I You know, explain this to someone. How can I write this in a way that makes sense to them? And AI helps me with that. I always, there has not been one moment where I don't have, I don't put something in chat GPT and I have to edit it. [01:03:00] There is no, there's actually no, that never happens.

Gavin: and I think it's pretty easy to see when people don't edit it, right? Because it there's almost like a single voice you could hear it almost has it's an AI voice That's very easy And I think that's why there is some big pushback when people try to publish things that are AI Generated and they don't mention it or they or they try to purport that this is like something that isn't That's where I think the tension is gonna come in the next like say three to five years is as we get closer to those things being More like a human output.

Gavin: I wonder if there's going to be like a, um, what is the name for that thing? What it's like, the animation gets closer and closer to

Kevin: the uncanny valley.

Fiona: Yeah.

Gavin: going to be like an uncanny Valley and AI creative work, right? Like as it gets closer and closer, if you're going to find that, Oh, I can see it's almost more AI as we get closer and closer.

Fiona: I totally see it. I can read, I can, I feel like I can read two different things. One is written by a human and one's written by AI. I think I, I know which one's going to be written by AI. They're going to use [01:04:00] a weird word. There's like, they, they always use a weird word that like humans don't really use.

Fiona: And they have this, like, they have like words that I'm just like, you're like, I don't know, something about that. Is uncanny valley it's it's something where i'm a i'm a 27 year old woman I'm, never gonna say that I would just never say that word, right? And so I don't know sometimes like with that I can definitely pick apart

Gavin: now part of it also, Fiona, is that like, and you may or may not know this, but like, there's, there's specific training that you can do. And I think that at some point in the next year or two, there will be a very specific, in fact, OpenAI's chat GPT next version may be much more like this, where it will be able to take in all of your work and approximate what your voice, rather than being like the overall chat GPT voice.

Gavin: . There is a world that's coming where you'll be able to upload all of your work and it can more closely approximate your work. And so that's a fine tune model, which could make a big difference.

Fiona: But then wouldn't that be? Still you you? Like you would [01:05:00] have to put in a lot of the work

Gavin: Yes, well, that's and that's the question that becomes is like, then it becomes your personal use of it. 

Gavin: So that is your voice, but it is the AI executing it, which it gets a

Fiona: Right, right. I

Kevin: one of the, oh, please.

Fiona: No.

Kevin: One of the, one of the concerns that I've heard raised, which I'm starting to connect more and more with the further we get down the line. I think I was a little bit off initially, is that, , Everybody on this call is fairly fortunate. We've developed a voice over time for better or for worse.

Kevin: We all have our voice. We all have our own style or artistic expressions so for AI to take our essence and try to parrot it back. I agree, Fiona. I think that is, but still you and you've trained it. You've gone out of your way. I do now have a concern for a next generation that's coming up.

Kevin: If they rely on clicking the wizard icon, the little magic wand, and being like, AI, write this for me. That beige, generic, amalgamation of humanity is gonna be their [01:06:00] voice, and they might not have a unique something. And so I do worry about AI shaping future generations. Have you given that an ounce of thought, Fiona?

Fiona: , I'm gonna have a little hope in humanity in the sense of, I think there's always people who are gonna break out of a mold, even the, even if it becomes beige, I think there's going to be someone who realized who is going to be the one where it's like, I don't, I don't want to be beige.

Fiona: And then. That comes as like, then that becomes trendy,

Kevin: Someone like Gavin, a little pop of color. Something that you can gravitate towards. Distractingly beautiful. 

Fiona: a literally, a bright light in such a dark storm. Which is, you know, the possibility of AI killing

Gavin: it's me God.

Gavin: That's all I got to say. It's me God 

Fiona: saw you

Gavin: You know, you know if I you would not want to see what my Shirtless version looks like because it would be a much different version than Michelangelo.

Fiona: like, you're like exactly what all the, you know, like cults, they're like, or that try to Like [01:07:00] try to make the perfect baby. Like you are, you are that

Gavin: so you're so wrong, but I do

Gavin: appreciate this that's what I'm coming across

Kevin: Fiona, no! 

Fiona: But is that not, am I not, I am being compared every day to someone like Gavin

Gavin: Oh no, I hope not.

Fiona: the truth.

Kevin: Ugh.

Kevin: Ugh, that 

Fiona: every day.

Fiona: That's okay You That's fine.

Kevin: , for those who aren't intimately familiar with your body of work, Fiona, you say you're in the music video industry. I know you do lots of shoots for like artists for different music

Kevin: artists. 

Fiona: they're all

Kevin: videos. Okay.

Fiona: and they're all insane and I would 

Gavin: mean music artists? Music artists in general

Gavin: are insane. I 

Fiona: when I tell you I I am that is something I'm learning truly is working with artists is something that I just didn't expect I Was gonna be the problem. I I love them. I think they're so tough.

Fiona: They're so [01:08:00] talented They're so

Gavin: they are so

Gavin: talented. 

Fiona: really do so many things and , Working with them can be a struggle. , so I just want to put that out there.

Gavin: It's a little bit like AI, right? It's the same sort of, in some ways, it's like you got to kind of wrangle them. You kind of have to get them to kind of express their

Gavin: vision in the way that you want them to. 

Fiona: them. You've gotta wrangle them. No, I mean, yeah, you guys remember this Willy Wonka experience?

Gavin: Yeah, of course. We talked about it on the show. 

Fiona: about it. Okay. Was that not, was that not an AI gone rogue?

Gavin: Oh, interesting.

Fiona: Can we, can we actually like, I know maybe you already talked about it. We don't have to go too deep into it, but that, when I saw this, when I saw what happened here and, and the names that were being put as like real people and like the apology, again, all of this, like the, the

Gavin: Oh, you think the entire thing, the entire thing might've been an AI experience, not

Fiona: have a feeling that, I guess this is what [01:09:00] I felt of it, was, was this an AI gone rogue, was that experience an AI, what, did someone literally write, give me, like, or a test of some sort, of just, could an AI From the beginning, make up a CEO, start a company, do, make an event, essentially make the event, like, like email the people needed, like emailing the scripts, making the scripts, all of this, that whole process was that possibly AI.

Kevin: It

Gavin: I would say for sure. Actually, there's a great book called Life 3. 0 that does a whole first third of the book is kind of talking through the story of what would an AI look like if it kind of took on the Pixar world and it made a bunch of money making Pixar movies. Maybe this is the bad version of that.

Gavin: Maybe the AI. to do this thing. Instead of making the best Pixar movie, it made the world's worst live experience based on Charlie the Chocolate Factory. And that is not a good sign for our future. Really. Let's be clear. If that is real, that is not a

Fiona: no, but [01:10:00] isn't that how AI's been Showcased like I know you guys are in your little AI bubble where you see a really lot of cool things of AI But like as the outskirts I see AI and I'm like this shits This shit's broken. Like I see, I see the weirdest thing come out of ai. I don't know.

Fiona: We have a full Discord that posts AI things, and I'm like, this is fucking Looney Tunes. This is not real, this

Gavin: really interesting you say that because I think the things that travel the most with AI, and Kevin, I've even seen this with the TikToks we make, are the things where we make fun of it for being bad. 

Fiona: I just feel like it's been tough to take AI seriously, because

Gavin: Yeah. Cause of the

Fiona: because the copy like, yeah, just even the writing's stupid. Like all of it is kind of broken.

Kevin: , did you see the latest Sora videos?

Fiona: Yes, I did. You sent that to me.

Kevin: The, the Airhead short? Did you watch that one?

Fiona: No, but I saw the one with the red beanie in the,

Kevin: Oh, okay. Okay, yeah, those are the original batch of videos. Did you find those to be compelling at all, or were [01:11:00] you

Fiona: are cool. So, so yeah. So when you sent that to me, there was an initial fear of like, what? 

Kevin: OpenAI did a blog post earlier this week and Gavin and I talked about it. Earlier in the show, Fiona, they gave Sora, which is their text to video platform, and you've seen the videos. They gave access to a handful of creatives and directors and artists and visual effects pros. And they said, just make something and we'll publish the findings.

Kevin: And Gavin and I watched this and we felt some sort of way, but I don't want to sway you. I'd love for you to click play on it, indulge, and then give us your thoughts.

Fiona: Okay, I'm gonna watch it right now. I'm pressing play.

Fiona: Okay. All right. Already already. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Fiona: Even the, the foot here at the first second was like, something's off. Did you not see the way it 

Kevin: sure.

Gavin: an open mind, keep

Gavin: an open mind, keep 

Fiona: I'm gonna screen grab this. Hang on. So you can [01:12:00] see why I, again, like, like I'm, I'm just, again, you guys want me to be honest and I'm,

Gavin: Please,

Kevin: but I also want you to watch the video, too,

Fiona: I, right, but you're telling me that this has to be real.

Fiona: When this guy's foot,

Kevin: have to be

Kevin: real. It could be surreal.

Fiona: dude, this guy's foot the 

Kevin: balloons tied to that house that are floating it away? This Up

Fiona: Can I upload something?

Fiona: Whatever. Anyways, so I, okay, immediately I'm like weird. Okay, weird arm. Okay. It doesn't look real. It doesn't look real. You have completely removed me from the world here.

Kevin: Really?

Gavin: Interesting.

Fiona: Here's what I think they should have done. This is why I, again, what I think they should have done is the camera's too still. Camera needs to be more handheld to blend that ,

Gavin: Interesting, okay

Fiona: here you're seeing things that you're [01:13:00] not supposed to really like, like it's way too still.

Fiona: It looks uncanny. It looks uncanny. This is not a human body. Is this, is this his back or his

Kevin: or the story?

Fiona: But that's someone, right? 

Fiona: Story's probably going to be amazing. I'm just, I'm just talking about how 

Kevin: the clip out is Professional director destroys two podcast losers with critical analysis of Sora videos.

Gavin: Here's what I want to say about this, which is really interesting Fiona Cuz I think for Kevin and I as what do you want to call us AI enthusiasts? We come at this to me like this is the pathway to like the next big thing but you're seeing it as a video director and immediately your eye goes to how it doesn't work for your vision and I think that's really interesting because like We're still in that stage where in general anybody especially if you say something's AI generated is gonna come at it with like a real strong What's wrong here sort of scenario?

Gavin: If somebody showed you this as like a [01:14:00] piece of work that was done with like VFX tools Do you think you still would have immediately had that same feeling if you hadn't been kind of set up with the fact that it's AI

Fiona: the human person that they're following does it is. It doesn't look real. So if, if, if it like, even just the way it was walking, the way it had his arm right next to his body, the forearm was like, are you John Cena? What is happening? And so you look 

Kevin: You haven't seen Gavin's forearms though.

Gavin: Yeah. 

Fiona: right. I have it. And they're probably exactly that.

Fiona: There's like, there's something about it that removed me from the world a little bit. Obviously I'm not a fair viewer because you already told me it was AI, but something about it. I think I would have already clocked something's weird about it, which I think don't want.

Fiona: That's the whole point is

Kevin: No, that's, you either, you either have to hyper stylize or you're going to fall into this trap, which is something that Gavin was just talking about as well and that you're [01:15:00] hitting on, Fiona, is that the closer you get to reality, the harder it becomes to get people to suspend that disbelief, that had they gone for maybe a Pixar style for their thing.

Fiona: style, then you're, then you're playing. Yeah. Then there's a difference there. And then there is something where you could play around with, but even just this, like in the beginning, it was too slow. The shots were too still. I'm looking at the one with the mosaics underwater. , this one's cool, especially that first one out of the three Something about the first one the way she's moving Really can come off as like real What really looks real that underwater one the the the whale with the tentacles.

Kevin: right? Yeah, because it's grabbing the, the rays of light beaming through the

Fiona: Yeah, that looks

Kevin: scattering around. 

Fiona: That looks real the

Kevin: it's weird, right? 

Fiona: These clips, for example, you show a child, right? And this, is a baby who is growing up in the world of things like this.

Fiona: This will become normal to them. It's just because we've seen real bunnies and [01:16:00] we know how a bunny walks. We can clock it if these kids who are growing up who are born in this era and they see that consistently I mean that bunny's real.

Fiona: That's a real bunny to them because they that's all they know this is probably should be a good plan for us to do now is like AI can completely take over the children's TV market, okay? Or children media market. And, and like, because I, I'm already looking on Netflix and I see things that I'm like, That's not a real show. That was just, that was made for no, for no, like, It's, it's the worst Blender

Gavin: Cocomelon. It's Cocomelon, right?

Fiona: but there's another one that I saw, which again, I was like, This is This is not three body problem. And also that's an amazing book. Have you read that?

Gavin: I have. It's great. And I've been watching the show. I'm almost done with the season. the book's better, but the show's not bad. The 

Fiona: Yeah, the show's not bad. I obviously didn't think, you know, I'm that type of person. It's not going to be better than the book, but the book is [01:17:00] really good.

Fiona: I really

Gavin: The book is very good.

Fiona: Anyways, 

Kevin: But you saw some kid stuff and it made you go, Oh, the machines 

Fiona: fa it's like, yeah, I'm like, yeah, of course I'm going to do it. On YouTube there's these, uh, sensory videos and it's just a bunch of fruit jumping to music And you 

Gavin: sounds 

Fiona: on for a baby And they just

Gavin: That is frightening,

Fiona: yeah, that's that's AI.

Fiona: if we want to really, I think AI is a great platform for like kids shows right now. I think that's where they're, they're

Gavin: We're going to ruin the youth. We'll ruin the youth and as

Gavin: adults we don't have 

Fiona: happening. That's what's happening. Who wants to draw fruit jumping up like this for 20 minutes?

Fiona: No one wants to do that. They're just going to have AI do that. So,

Gavin: Well, Fiona, this was awesome. Where can people find you online? To give you a job or to find your work? What

Fiona: Uh,

Gavin: place to go find 

Fiona: please give me a job. They can find me on social media, like with Fiona Nova, like on Twitter and Instagram, please like my stuff, please. You know, you might not [01:18:00] know me, but just say how much you love me on under my posts. So, you know, I get hired sometimes and if there is a job available, you know, I'm open.

Fiona: I I'm not saying I'll take it, but I'm open. To

Gavin: Do you want to shout out a video that people could go watch? Like, what's a good example of one of the videos you've made?

Kevin: about the trailer for your short?

Fiona: Oh, that's a good that's a good one because hideo kojima Retweeted it

Gavin: What?

Fiona: and then

Gavin: That is incredible.

Kevin: followed her and then commented on only photos of just Fiona.

Fiona: Wait didn't comment dm'd

Kevin: DM'd, that's right.

Gavin: I'm a huge Kojima fan, so that's

Fiona: yeah So, um, yeah, you can watch my new teaser trailer for the new short film I made I also have another short film on youtube. Yeah, that's fun. But yeah, thanks guys for having me. Love you guys 

Gavin: All right, everybody, that's another show. Please go like and subscribe to our YouTube channel. Please [01:19:00] leave us a five star review at Apple Podcasts and do all the things and always ask us questions. I think Kevin and I have been thinking about we should have a mailbag episode soon where we like answer user questions.

Gavin: I heard a couple podcasts I love that do that. So that might be a fun thing to try as a section of one of our

Kevin: the notion of, like, in this day and age, on an AI podcast, we still have a

Gavin: We do a mailbag.

Kevin: with messages. Cause Benny the Mailman's gonna come on by and fill our little message stockings with your questions. Yeah, that's a good idea. Let's do that. We should give out the email address, which, by the way, is available.

Kevin: In our newsletter, if you go to AI4Humans. show, that's our official website, which will get a new coat of paint very soon. You can go there, you can sign up for the Daily Drip, and you can get the email, , link there and send us whatever you want. We'll answer your questions.

Gavin: That's right. So everybody, thank you. Have a great week. If there's something that comes up in the world of AI, you know, we'll always cover it and we will see you next Thursday. Bye everybody.

Kevin: subscribe!