OpenAISora2InsanityAIForHumans

Kevin Pereira: [00:00:00] Sora two has blown up the internet, and Sam Altman has blown up our studio. Welcome to.

Uh, Gavin, I'm sorry a spoiler. That did not actually happen. Just like I didn't have a romantic evening skate with a giant fish, nor did I vape dark chowder, nor did I get arrested for hawking free television sets. That is all your fault, Kevin, for making your cameo available on Sora. And, sorry Gavin, I'm now trending on Chinese sneaker talk.

Gavin Purcell: Kevin, we'll show you how the new cameo feature is. Changing the way you could interact with your friends and ai.

Kevin Pereira: We'll also cover the thorny IP issues such as Cartman, Pokemon, and all sorts of other, not exactly open AI owned intellectual property that people are doing well. All sorts of strange stuff with summer.

Sponge Bob: Dude, it's glowing. That's not normal, man. We might have cooked the crabby patty a little too far. Three

Kevin Pereira: best

Sponge Bob: friends run for your pins. My clarinets not

Kevin Pereira: built for cardio. Are

Gavin Purcell: [00:01:00] about to get deep fried

Kevin Pereira: plus. Hey Gavin. Yeah. Our little startup is out in the world, buddy. That's

Gavin Purcell: right. We are gonna tell you how and then came to be what you can do with it, and also how we made this very weird launch trailer way faster than anything else we've ever made with ai.

We're building and then the future. Of interactive entertainment. I'm sorry, are, are we in the clearly launch video? No. Kevin, this

Kevin Pereira: is the, and then launch video. Fun fact. We did not use Sora two, but we'll show you how we made it. And in the future we probably will use Sora two.

Gavin Purcell: All that. And more on I humans.

Kevin Pereira: What the, are those kittens, why are there

Sora 2 Singer: kittens? The

Kevin Pereira: ceiling's coming down. What's the sparks? This is insane. I think the show's over. Yeah. Best intro ever though. They are gonna take our jobs. Huh?

Gavin Purcell: Welcome everybody to AI for Humans, your Weekly Guide to the World of ai. And this week, Kevin, there is one story dominating everything and we are going to talk so much about it. Sora two is out. [00:02:00] This is open ai. Yes, it is crazy. It's so crazy. Cat. Once, well, we gotta get into so much about this. I can't even speak about it, but like it is, it is a transformative moment.

A kind of like when. VO three first came out, kind of like other moments. Uh, I would say, if anything, it's like four oh image gen. It has that much of an impact. Let us just first say what this is, what it's doing. Yeah. And then we will get into like what I believe are like serious cultural implications of what this can do and where it's going and how it's distributed.

But first, Kevin. Let us figure out the very basics. What are the very basics here?

Kevin Pereira: I don't know. Gavin. I'm watching a figure skater with a cat on her head. Dude spins on the ice. I, I, I can't pay attention to it. I know. Okay. Sora, people, OpenAI had their video, uh, their generative video model. Feels like forever ago.

Yes. They were first really to the scene with a model that had people going, wait a minute, this is very different. This feels amazing. Yes. And then they became an also ran for the longest [00:03:00] time where company after company we're releasing these models. Everybody's like, Hey Sora, what's going on? You don't do audio.

There's no character consistency. The physics, like the physical understanding of the world is completely off. I don't wanna say that they were written off because SOA had an active community, but I, I think it paled in comparison to the, let's say the vibes or the hype that pretty much every other company was getting Yes.

Runway, Google. Um, especially VO three, I'd say Especially VO O three. Yes. And when

Gavin Purcell: VO O three came out, there was an argument that like, oh, SOA has kind of gone on the back burner for open ai. They don't care. So yes, this is Sora two. And just to be clear, I, I looked up the date. First drop of Sora before anybody got to use it was February 14th, 2024.

So we are talking about 18 months ago. Wow. Now, when it came out into the world, Sora one was pretty disappointing versus what we saw in those clips, and I think that was kind of gets to what you're talking about. But here we are, Sora two. To your point, this is like VO three. When you get clips, you get sound on them and the sound can be pretty good.

[00:04:00] There's clips of people singing. There's really interesting clips of archival footage that we will get into that sound like

Kevin Pereira: archival footage. Gavin, there's fully licensed music that comes outta the machine even if you don't ask for it. What's up Stranger Things theme we'll get, we'll get into that is like a two.

The other thing you pointed

Gavin Purcell: out here is the physics. The physics are way better. Yeah. And this does speak to, um, if you look at the OpenAI, uh, um, live stream they did with Bill Peebles and, and other people who have worked on SOAR two, they have talked a long time about how this is another one of those world sims.

And it's the same sort of thing that VO three set up. And actually a really interesting thing does. A side note that VO three dropped last week was a paper about the idea that these world sims. Uh, and these video models might actually have emergent physics within them that they didn't program in. And this is another example of that.

So anyway, long story short, very good video generation, you get 10 seconds. The resolution on the clips that come out normally are pretty low res, but, but the, you know, I think it doesn't matter that much right now. I'm sure we will get options to do higher res. But Kev, the biggest thing here, and this [00:05:00] is kind of the secret sauce, I think, is this cameo feature.

Which we just have to talk about what this means and, and how it changes the idea of AI video.

Kevin Pereira: Yeah, so this is one again, if you're on the audio version of this podcast only, I implore you to check out the YouTube of this week's because it's very visual heavy. I'll do my best to describe things as we go, but, but listen to the

Gavin Purcell: whole thing also.

Don't give up right now. There's lots of good audio content for you if you're listening. So keep listening and then go watch the YouTube.

Kevin Pereira: Don't give up. Strive to complete this one. We know it can be a slog, but this is your audible ultra marathon. Get to the end. Um, we're like rucking for your ears. There.

It's twofold, right? So Sora, I, we cannot overstate how good the video model is, right? Yes. The diversity, it's very styles. State of the art. Em probably it's state of the art. State of the art. Yeah. You can emulate. It's clear that this thing was trained on everything from Yes. Twitch long video game plays to YouTube tutorials to eighties infomercials Yes.

To police, GoPro and, and body cam footage. Yes. [00:06:00] This thing can emulate. Pretty much every style you can throw at it. It does it with sound. It does it with voice, it does it with the music, just as Gavin mentioned. But the second thing is, as you said, this cameo feature, but it is a social network. Yes. And we have talked on the show as recently as, I think two weeks ago, Gavin we're like.

Nobody wants this. Nobody needs another social network network. Nobody wants it just an AI social network. But the difference maker is in fact, this cameo feature. So Sora two, if you have access to it right now at the, at the time of this recording, it's still invite only. So make sure you follow AI for humans.

Our uh. Our, uh, X handle because we'll be giving out an invite. I'm gonna give one out, Gavin. Oh, you are? Ooh. I don't, I don't presently have one to give out, but I'm gonna give one out, so you gotta follow for that, but, okay. Fair enough. It's invite only If you get in and you activate SOA two, you see a feed of just like a a, a TikTok ish or Instagram reel style feed of all these generated videos.

You can one tap remix to make your own version of that video, which is very powerful. It, it is increasing time to meme. So, so there's the remix, and then [00:07:00] very quickly there's cameo. Yeah. Which. We'll have a larger discussion on, but it allows you to basically make an avatar of yourself painlessly, I mean v effortlessly.

And then you can share it with the whole social network. And now, now you're playing with, uh, fire, as they would say when you load Sora. You may notice that when you go to create a video, it's auto suggests some cameos for you. These are other personalities, other real human beings that have given up their likeness or basically given you permission to toy with them.

When you create an avatar, you get a selfie from your camera. Basically, this is within the iOS app, and it will ask you to usually recite a series of numbers. Mm-hmm. Three numbers. Yeah. And then you'll look up, down, left to right. I'm not gonna recite numbers here just in case, and I'm not gonna do those head movements because you never know Gavin.

Sora 2 Singer: You never know. You never know.

Kevin Pereira: Um, but it near, instantly, I mean, maybe two minutes of processing time. So fast, so fast, uploads your footage to the cloud, verifies that you're you. It will also verify if you're wearing clothing. Gavin, don't ask how I know [00:08:00] this, but it does do that. And then when it's done, you have.

Full control over. Do you want your cameo, your personal avatar to just be for you, for your friends, or to the world at

Gavin Purcell: large? And because you and I are both sickos, I think the, my first choice was everyone. And I think the same thing for you, which we'll get into a second. The, the other thing I wanna mention there is, what is so genius about this feature in the app is that when you at somebody, it's literally like we're used to now on all social networks, when you add somebody in a generation of a video.

It's, it pulls that person's thing in now. Yes, I do wanna say Kev, like this feature we have seen in other places before, but it has always been a, a situation of like, you upload a photo and then you have to do all this other stuff. And also what's fascinating about this is by creating a cameo, you are giving your implicit permission to the people that you say can do this.

So they don't have to worry about the rights of what this. Person is. So that is why we are [00:09:00] seeing populations of way more footage of real people in this stuff than we ever have before. And like that is like mind blowingly smart, first of all, as a, as a idea for a, for a thing to put into a network like this.

Because it will bring people in, it will bring friends in, it will bring friend groups in. But also it really avoids some of the thorny issues about like. Personality and, and like whether or not they have the rights to use my footage. Because if you've done it, and again, we both have, and I think you and I are not like, you know, clearly there's privacy things that a lot of people will never wanna do this for, but once you've done it, it opens the door to allowing you to be part of this

Kevin Pereira: weird multiverse.

We had talked maybe a year and a half, probably two years ago on this podcast, about a weird future where yes, kids will be hanging around on a Roblox, discord, Disney, Comcast core server, because it'll all be one company and they'll say, well, what? What should we do tonight? And they'll hallucinate a journey together.

Yes. And ah, this is the character that I wanna play and [00:10:00] this is what I wanna play. And they will just. Like, like toys in a sandbox, jam things together. Yes. And make magic. And this is like the first feeling of that future that I'm having now as I scroll a feed and see others playing with me like I'm a doll in their dollhouse.

Gavin Purcell: Well, and I think, uh, speaking of that, there is actually somebody who made a video of you as a ventral I, I a ventriloquist dummy that I am holding, which we'll show here. I wanna say one thing that's really interesting to me about this. In fact, maybe Kev. Play this. I made this one pretty early. This was like one of my first cameo examples and it's not a perfect one, but play the one of me singing.

So this is me uploading my face and I prompted it with a, a pretty simple prompt, which you'll get when it comes across here.

Sora 2 Singer: Four. So two. So two. Darling, I'm calling to you. So two. So two, you are the one I can't do. They found me.

Gavin Purcell: So first of all,

Kevin Pereira: your ability to sing while you're not moving your mouth and you're looking away from the mic is unprecedented.

Gavin Purcell: But, so when you look at that video, there's all these things that we've talked [00:11:00] about before Laura's or we've talked about like, you know, uploading, uh, clinging has like an image gen upload, but like it, that part of it is very good, right? That part of the actual, looking at my face, the consistency. It wasn't a lot to do that, but because they've got all these different angles in my face, they can kind of figure out where it goes.

But then Kev, I wanna talk about the things that have happened with you because we teased this in the intro a little bit. Because you're more well known than I am and you have some pretty significant discords that you travel in where people like to, to mess around with you. You have become like a figure, not at the same level that Sam is, which we'll get to.

Sam Altman has become like the face of this, but you have become a figure in like Sora world. Tell us a little bit about how this felt and what it was like.

Kevin Pereira: Um, I'm still processing how it feels 'cause it's so new. I'm, I'm no stranger to even in my teen years, you know. And then I started at G four when I was like 18 and started getting MeMed there.

Like, I'm no stranger to like having. Photoshops released. Sure. Or fan fiction, you know, and I'm no stranger to having people like do [00:12:00] the, the darkest side of the internet things to me and with me, or because they have a gripe with me, whatever. Right. Yeah. I've, I've experienced that side. Yeah. This is a hyper acceleration of thus far.

99% the best side of it, right? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. But it's also early days and so that's why I'm kind of like reserving my judgment the last two nights I will say, like I've been in bed and, uh, April's next to me and I'm scrolling through what feels like a TV network. Of you, ma of me. Right. Made by others, and I will say lovingly crafted by others.

Yeah. And we can get to some of like my vape obsession, which is happening now. Sure. Um, my legal troubles, uh, the weird fan fiction of you and I, uh, yes. There's, there's some stuff going on there, but it is weird of like at night I'm scrolling this bizarre feed of things while others are playing with me.

And then I'm seeing like, oh, that person's on the platform now because suddenly I'm having ramen noodles. With [00:13:00] another Twitch streamer and, nope. Now I'm over here playing pickleball with this other person. It's like, as people are getting in and making their, their cameos, I'm starting to get mashed up with them.

Gavin Purcell: Did you, what I wanna know about is the Chinese stuff, like are there people in your network who speak Chinese or is that just like a completely random thing that like somehow people in China are now on and that and that they started making you do stuff in Chinese?

Kevin Pereira: Yeah. I'm still trying to figure that portion out because there's a lot of Polish car reviews, like a lot of them where I'm speaking in Polish and talking about the really BMW.

Yes.

There's a lot of Chinese tourism videos where I'm like hanging out with school children or I'm selling sneakers, or I'm walking through areas of China and doing like travel vlogs. They are by accounts that have like zero followers and zero public anything, but they're full Chinese prompts that are going in there.

And I think what happened is that, um. You know, despite most of the internet turning on me for various reasons over the years, there's still a cream team Discord out there, Gavin, which I [00:14:00] know we don't, we don't talk about too much, but these little Crees got a hold of my cameo and started using me in a bunch of stuff, and I think it might have popped me into.

An auto suggested place. Oh,

Gavin Purcell: interesting. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah. When you

Kevin Pereira: use the app by default, like initially I launch it with Sam Altman, which we'll talk about. Yeah. I, Justine was in there at least for me. Yeah. And that guy, Gabriel.

Gavin Purcell: Gabriel who's like everywhere. Gabriel is an opening AI researcher with the blonde hair.

If you've seen a guy who color hair, it's like, that's another guy.

Kevin Pereira: Yeah. So I think I might have popped, oh, interest, interesting. Something there, because I don't have like an insane amount of followers. But again. A weird thing. You can see all of the cameos that you're in, right? Yeah. And you can see the cameos that I meant by clicking.

I can also see all the, the draft cameos of me. Only I can see those. And I'm telling you, there is a lot of bizarre content being made like someone is using me to do, I think like a daily affirmation, TikTok, where I'm like just giving positivity. Someone else is using me to do recipe vlogging. And there's a lot of that that's unbelievable.

So it's like I'm being used and utilized in all these [00:15:00] ways. I'm getting. Zero pennies for it, which is interesting. I would love to know that's, yeah, we should, very quickly, a

Gavin Purcell: couple things here. We should talk about the idea that like, they do believe this is a business model place, right? Like, obviously TikTok is a massive business and scrolling is an easy place to put ads.

Um, so that's something to think about. The other thing I do wanna talk about before we go on from like, how this cameo is used is that. Sam Altman has now changed from just being like the face of OpenAI, which was one thing he is now like, uh, somebody referred to him as almost like MySpace Tom now, and that's kind of what it feels like.

Yeah. But he, he literally is the face of this thing. And what's interesting to me is. There's gonna be a lot of people who come into this and you'll open it up and like when you scroll through, like it does have an algorithm and now tries to figure out what you wanted, uh, what you want. But like, Sam shows up in a bunch of these, right?

Like, and, and you know, it's like so many of them. He said himself, he said, it is way less strange to watch a feed full of memes of yourself than I thought it would be. Not sure what to make of this, but play this one, this Gibby toilet one. This [00:16:00] one was by. Theo who blew up, and if you've noticed sc be a toilet, it's, you know, it's a guy, it's a kind of a computer graphics guy heading the toilet.

But play this right now and we'll just listen to it. Yeah. Let's listen to Sc Altman

Sam Altman: du Scda. I'm a CEO in a porcelain spa. Scoo Scda. Yes, yes, yes. That's me. Running AI from the back can stop Head above water. Flush that tune everybody bouncing Sam in the room.

Kevin Pereira: So that is So Go ahead. Go ahead Sam Altman, go ahead.

His head's sticking out of a toilet waterline to his Adam's apple singing a, a bopper about being a CEO in a toilet. And if you look at the prompts for these two, Gavin, we gotta talk. There's Yes, yes. I don't wanna detract from like the Sam being everywhere thing. Like some of the prompt, some of the best videos are just.

P this person in this scene, yes. No dialogue, no cuts, no anything else. It's just a, an empty prompt. And I think there is a lot of secret sauce happening with the prompt engineering behind the scenes. Yes, yes. Because it's detecting. Is this a Korean drama? Is this A-A-A-A-A 1990s infomercial? Is this a courtroom procedural?

[00:17:00] And it's probably refining and, and. Banging out scripts and shots and camera angles and just doing all of that for you behind the scenes because this song wasn't written, it was just Sam Altman as Ski Bitty toilet. Yeah. And out comes this meme,

Gavin Purcell: well we're gonna talk about this later, but there's, with the IP issues, but there are lots of like, it's actually funny a lot of the time, and that is another secret sauce here that like Meta's app clearly doesn't have like.

It, the actual AI understands something about how these videos have been made in the past and things that made them funny in certain ways. Um, I do also wanna mention really quickly, like, I made one with Sam, uh, which made me laugh, which was, uh, I, I kind of prompted it to create the dinosaurs scene from, uh, yes.

Jurassic Comic Park. Yeah. So play that one real quick and we can talk about why it's not always perfect, but it does, it is an interesting thing. What? Oh

my God. You're seeing this, right?

It's huge. It's a, it's a Sam Alman. They're everywhere. I can't believe it. Welcome to Sam Park. [00:18:00] So if you're, if you're just listening, what you're seeing here is a, a, a, it looks kind of like that scene.

I think of it as like the kind of like straight to video version of this scene. There's a jeep. There's a guy in a hat and there's a woman who's blonde, but they don't look that much like, uh, Sam Neil and Laura Dern. There's also a giant Sam Altman, like reaching up and grabbing a thing off a tree. So he looks like a massive a guy.

But what's interesting there is if you listen closely, it sounds a lot like the Jurassic Park theme song, that audio that's playing there. Sounds like the John Williams score from Jurassic Park. And like, is it, is it. Or is it just close to that

Kevin Pereira: and I don't know. That's a big question. Well, we know that licensed music is in this, we, it's very clear that it understands what that scene is in Jurassic Park.

Yeah. You know, is it shot for shot? Probably somewhere in there. Probably. Yeah. Is it being told to modify it slightly on the output? Yeah, you bet. But it doesn't stop it on, on other generations. Did you see the video that somebody shared

Gavin Purcell: of the scene from Cyberpunk? Oh, you just lost your headphone. [00:19:00]

Kevin Pereira: That wasn't real.

That was AI Gavin.

Gavin Purcell: So somebody shared a scene from Cyberpunk, the game cyberpunk, where it was able to directly recreate a side mission, which is not something that most people see. And there are a lot of people who were like, of course it can, it's just copying. But like, no, it actually isn't just copying.

And that's kind of a really fascinating thing. 'cause clearly it had trained on enough of cyberpunk to understand this weird side mission and recreate it almost exactly.

Kevin Pereira: What weird emulation farm do they have there? Yes, that is playing games, watching Netflix, Netflix, clicking on everything, using their own unique classifier to not only break down what is on the screen, how are things on the scene?

Mo how on, how are things on the screen moving? Describe the scene as a, uh, a director. Describe the soundtrack as an audio producer. Right. The amount of. Data and embeddings and whatever that they're grabbing from all of this content that they're, they're sucking into this machine is, look, it's, it's candidly, it's one of the reasons why anytime I post about this stuff, half the internet wants to demolish me, [00:20:00] right?

Yeah, of course. Yeah. And I dunno if you're seeing that, but like, here we are celebrating this whimsy and this toy, but the other side of this is. Is front and center, right? Yes. Which is, they are weapons free with ip. Yes. They are giving out generations. Like anything right now to prove that there is, I mean, clearly a, there's gonna be a business model here because if they turned it down and said it's a thousand dollars a month right now, you and I would have a, a bit of a negotiation back and forth on if we're gonna get it for AI for humans.

But I think we probably would. Probably. It is pretty

Gavin Purcell: amazing. Yes. Although the, what's making it special right now in part is how people are on it. So like the question would become, is like, if you limit it, we're gonna talk about all this stuff in a second. One of things, Kevin, I saw that was. Thing is that it renders HTML like a browser.

So you can actually put into this thing an HTML code and it will send you out a website. So to your point about it, doing weird stuff behind the scenes and, and really something technically interesting, I think we're not gonna know exactly how deep it goes for a while, is people figure

Kevin Pereira: it out. Someone prompted, go to chat GPT and write a haiku and it, it did video of the [00:21:00] screen of it going to chat GPT, and it actually gave an accurate haiku out of it.

So

Gavin Purcell: it's unbelievable.

Kevin Pereira: Here's the other thing too, like VO three, very incredible model, right? Yes. Like great, I, I will say. Hats off to OpenAI, like they shipped something that is very compelling and very amazing, and once again, frontier foundational, like amazing VO three, great model. There's, depending upon which pricing and which model and what speed you're using and at what quality, like it could cost up to $3 per generation, right?

Yeah. OpenAI is handing things like, like handing these things out right now. Like they're nothing. Yeah. And you can cue hundreds of them throughout the day. So are they bleeding out for this right now to get, to get market share or did they fi what, what did Ilya see? Did they figure something out behind the scenes that is allowing them to do this Gavin?

Way more compute, um, uh, uh, with way more optimized compute than any of the competitors that I

Gavin Purcell: read it. Rumor tweet, I'm not gonna, I don't even know where it [00:22:00] was from, but I definitely saw this yesterday, which says that somebody thought who was in the know, I'm not just making stuff that up, but that they were in the know that what they think might have happened is that OpenAI was able to train a much smaller model than what something like VO three is and be able to output this stuff.

So they found some way to optimize this video model to make it work. So I think, I think that makes a big difference. I wanna talk about the last thing here. That to me is kind of the secret weapon, which did exist in Soro one, but also was also kind of what made four oh image gen Interesting. Which is the ability to remix public output of what these things are.

Yeah, and this goes to talk about the social aspect of this rather than just the AI aspect of it. Because I think one thing that OpenAI understood well with, um, four oh image gen was that. You could use somebody else's thing to jump off from. Right. And we had a lot of fun. I remember we talked about this a while back.

We did those shots of like the nineties video game characters playing t their tv. Yeah. It becomes a meme. Right? It becomes a thing. They are doing the same thing with SOA and Kevin, I wanna see if you can bring up this cl, this link I put there. [00:23:00] People are taking, um, MLK and JFK archival footage. Yeah. And having them say different things in their speeches.

And just so you don't, if you don't know this, if you see one of these and there's little dots going to the right and left. Instead of swiping up, you could swipe right and left and you can see people taking the same video and you can then add a new prompt on it and have it do for different things. So maybe just play a few of these and, and we might have to cut around a couple of them, but, but bring up the audio and play.

A few of them

Sponge Bob: had a dream that you, you had your, you could, you do you want, you could do some, you, you want 'em to do you so much you could do anything. So that's the

Kevin Pereira: meme. So yeah, so that's the main one that, that really. Set Sora on fire. And then if you're on the app, you can just swipe left to right If you're on the website, there's a little remixes panel, remixes panel on the top right.

That will show you a little thumbnail there.

Gavin Purcell: Have you ever had a dream that you, um, you had your, you you could, you'll do you, you want, so that's JFK doing the same thing you want, you wanted to do you so

Sponge Bob: much you

Gavin Purcell: could

Sponge Bob: do anything. My brothers and sisters. It is my pleasure to [00:24:00] welcome a young man to share a word with you all.

Please give him your attention.

Gavin Purcell: I love BBWs

Sponge Bob: 67.

Gavin Purcell: I didn't know what it was gonna be. Gat. I'm clicking through it. How

Sponge Bob: wham should I need to TVA if I gonna run a server now? Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to welcome a friend who came a long way to be here today. Give a warm welcome to this young man. Thank you.

Oh,

Kevin Pereira: perfect. Popular streamer. X QC, farting. Yeah. Yeah. Along with MLK on. Stage. This is exactly what everybody wanted and needed.

Gavin Purcell: Yeah. So I was gonna say like there's definitely people in our audience who, who may or not find that offensive as a thing to take somebody like MLK or JFK and do these things with them.

But like, I just wanted to say like it also is useful in other places. There's a, there's a really interesting, I saw somebody do Oppenheimer in Minecraft. Yes. And I remixed it as Oppenheimer in anime and my output. Was fricking great and it's only 10 seconds, but like it took the same shots and it took the same audio and it recut it and it made it look like it.

I would watch Oppenheimer Anime, [00:25:00] but like that is just a really cool thing that only Sora does in this world. And I think that is maybe a huge part of its success because it's hard to make up something. Right. One of the things about TikTok, you and I have both made tiktoks and our TikTok is relatively successful.

Um. Getting in front of a camera, setting yourself up to do all this stuff is really not easy. And then to be successful, you have to kinda know, well, what's the hook? I'm gonna start it with, what's this? If you can jump off of somebody else's creation that they're already doing something that's kind of funny and you can add something to it.

It is the amazing thing about remix culture that the web was originally built on. And people will hate the fact that this is AI in part, but it is kind of living in that world where like everybody's kind of piling into the same sort of idea and that feels.

Kevin Pereira: Cool. I think that

Gavin Purcell: feels interesting.

Kevin Pereira: Someone who I, I, I don't know this person.

Uh, Daniel, uh, their, uh, Mo m Mo ran Am am Mo ran on, on X yesterday, I jammed out a commercial for, uh, tele, which is a dual [00:26:00] screen television that, uh, I'm an investor in. And, uh, I used SOA almost exclusively. I did some cleanup with Final Cut, and I used 11 labs for some sound effects and some audio, but I made.

A quick little commercial, right? Sure. Of me getting arrested because it's a free TV and I'm trying to explain it, blah, blah, blah. In my comments, someone, uh, someone named Remote Build basically said like, Hey, how do I get whatever code you use to unlock longer clips on soa? And I responded, oh, no, no. I, I edited that.

Like sometimes it still takes a human to do something. Yeah. They did a long thread on X, basically saying that, that was like kind of inspiring to them. They don't usually make content like this, but they were like, oh, what can I do? And he basically took the concept that I did where I'm like, on the hood of a car getting arrested, then I'm in an interrogation room, then I'm in prison, you know, then I'm before a judge.

But he applied it to. His business and he said, oh, cool. I ended up getting sidetracked with a few side quests, blah, blah, blah. He said, by the time I arrived at my nine to five [00:27:00] this morning, I'd put together something that grabbed three x the engagement of all prior attempts. Wow. And it's him good for raising awareness for his like remote building business or whatever.

So like to your point, that was, you know, that's, that's exactly the thing of, oh, I saw the thing. I'm gonna take it. I'm gonna try to make it mine. I'm gonna move on. And. I, I don't know if we wanna get into, like, look, there's a lot of people that are upset about things like, you know, water and power usage with ai.

There's a lot of people that are upset with like, all the training data that goes into this things. Yeah. There's a lot of people upset with that pipeline that I just described as someone seeing something, taking it, remixing it for themselves. I, I'm in this weird place where, and, and you are too, where it's, so you're sort of like.

Here's our, here's our avatars. Go ahead. Yeah, yeah. Do what you want. You might be in a, a weird Chinese ad for something that you don't wanna promote. Yeah. But like that, that comes with the territory. Yeah. You might have somebody take your idea and remix it and do something that you might not want with, want with it.

Like that also comes with the territory. You, you take the good with the bad. [00:28:00] Yeah. Ultimately, and this is something I was talking with April about today, like. You can whisper into a machine like this and it can recycle someone else's creative. Right. And give you back something in the style of breaking bad.

Sure. Someone still has to make the style. Yeah, of course. Someone still has to create the thing. Right. That is interesting enough that people want to glom onto it and go for it. And so I wonder is like, is that the. You know, am I just moving the goalposts? Am I, am I delusional here, right, or, or is there still going to be that need for the human in the loop that makes it interesting enough to define the style or maybe the ai.

Gavin Purcell: I think it will. And I think that the speed at which these things will rise and fall, when I say these things, I mean like the meme or the, or the trend is going to demand that people come up with interesting new stuff. I think it will just spread faster and farther and quicker because of this AI ability.

But it also is the flattening, right? Like we've talked about this show many times. It's like many people are gonna be able to do this. It is [00:29:00] very different than it used to be. Where yeah. A artist had to make something in a, in a filmmaker, had to make something or an influencer had to film a video. Now we are entering this world where like basically everybody can do it and it does change that.

Um, we have so much more to talk about, so two, but before Kev, we have to talk a little bit about the most important thing, which is you at home liking and subscribing to this YouTube channel. That's it, because that is the thing that keeps us as humans alive here doing the thing we do. Please also, if you leave a five star review for our, um, podcast on audio, do that as well.

As I've said before. If you leave a five star review, it will automatically tweet out from our Twitter handle, which we don't control anymore. The AI has taking that over. But most importantly, y'all, thank you so much for supporting our startup. We're gonna talk a little bit more about that later. Yes, thank you.

Um, it is open now, which we're gonna get into, but you can go to and then chat. And we do appreciate everybody that come in that came into our discord, which you can do. It's linked down below the show here. Ed, come give us feedback on that. But thank you so much everybody for supporting us across the way.

We do still have a Patreon and every [00:30:00] Patreon supporter. We still love you, and thank you so much for that. It's allowed us to kind of pay for these tools as we go forward. Kevin and I were talking beforehand, like this show as a, as an entity does not, does not, is not profitable. Like we spent a lot of time and a lot of money saying we, I just

Kevin Pereira: got three jet skis was.

Was that a misguided purchase? That not what you were

Gavin Purcell: supposed to do that was actually Sora. But it does, it is supported by you people at home either watching and liking or sending money to our patron. Yes. So thank you so much for that everybody, and thank

Kevin Pereira: you for that sweet algo juice. It's delicious Comment nectar, drop it and the comments so tasty.

Yeah. Gavin, we gotta talk about our rights. Other people's rights as well. Yes, yes, we do. Again, like we sort of just gave them away. What do you think the time to regret is on this, by the way? When do you think we pull our avatars or our cameos down?

Gavin Purcell: Well, I guess it will depend on what actually goes on with them.

I think. Probably we'll have to see. We'll have to see what happens this week. We'll see what happens this week. So the big thing here though is uh, that we wanna talk further about with sort two is the IP of this. All right? So [00:31:00] we alluded this earlier before, but if you haven't seen one of the things that's kind of happening, like it did with four Oh Image in, which was called, you know, the ification of the Internet, and there's this huge uproar about the fact that Studio Ghibli images were clearly used to train and then everybody created Ghibli like images.

Well now more than just train Kevin, there are full blown IP characters like Pikachu or SpongeBob or South Park characters, and you can generate them basically making clips from that show or doing things that they should not be doing. So I think just as a good example of this, I want to kind of play this clip.

If you can play this clip from Signal. Who, I don't know if he made this clip, but there's an actually really interesting string out of basically a South Park episode that somebody made. So you'll, let's listen to like, I dunno, 15, 20 seconds of this and you'll get a sec a sense of like how it progresses.

Kevin Pereira: Also, are we gonna get, and this is a sincere question. Oh, that's a good question. Are we gonna get I a takedown notice on YouTube for playing AI generated South Park, which, ooh. Actually, I'm not sure about that. [00:32:00]

Gavin Purcell: Yeah, no, you're right. So, no, you're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. So who knows if it would get flagged, but we're

Kevin Pereira: not gonna show it or, or play it.

But it's a minute. 59 seconds. Yeah. At least the clip right now as it exists, it's a string out of ten second Sora clips. Yes, but it's a full, it feels like a full South Park experience.

Gavin Purcell: So Carman first decides, doesn't wanna go to Canada, then he has to go to Canada, goes to Canada. Ends up getting a job at Tim Horton's, then becomes the manager of Tim Horton's.

And like every step along the way, it's not South Park. You can tell there's weird cuts and things like that and, and there's a few weird things, but like there are moments in there where you're like, oh, that does sound like something Cartman would say. And it does. And there are a couple laughs in there.

And I will say like, I'm not an easy AI laugh other than if it's something weird. This has clearly taken in not just the look of the thing, not just the voice of the thing, but some sense of how that character performs and how some sense of how that character talks. And I don't just mean, again, I'm not saying just voice.

I'm saying like the words that are coming out of that character's mouth. And this is what got everybody riled up right now, I feel like. Which, [00:33:00] which? Probably for a good reason.

Kevin Pereira: Of course. Yeah. Matt Baloney had a tweet as well, like, uh, no big deal. He, he said, I'm just making personalized videos on Sora with my favorite copyrighted characters owned by Disney and Amazon slash Netflix, featuring an identifiable actress who is definitely not getting paid for this.

And this video is Wednesday at the, uh, dining table sitting next to Peter Griffin doing a full scene. And you know, again, like. The prompt is pretty straightforward. Wednesday Adams eating dinner at a dinner table with Peter Griffin from Family Guy. And so Matt, if you don't know Matt,

Gavin Purcell: Matt writes a great newsletter at Puck, and he's kind of like directly tied into the kind of Hollywood scene.

Like these are people who, who he knows who he's talking to, he's talking to the executives at every Hollywood, uh, studio Plus The New York Times had a great article about this, um, from Mike Isaac, one of our favorite writers who talked about the idea that WME, the agency. Basically sent up a flare into the sky when they saw this happen and they said that everybody should pull their [00:34:00] rights to use this stuff.

And Kevin, I do wanna be clear, there was story in the Wall Street Journal before, so of two launch, where they did say that OpenAI had given I think a week's notice to, to companies to say like, if you don't want your ip, and some of you may have found. I couldn't, uh, Disney stuff is hard to get out. Like I couldn't get Darth Vader.

I couldn't get Mickey Mouse. Mm-hmm. There are certain companies that may have pulled themselves out. My question about the South Park thing, so really what I've seen, mostly I'll say IP wise, it's SpongeBob South Park and Pikachu and Mario. I've seen a lot of Nintendos a lot. N Big. N Big. So it's, what's interesting is Nintendo and Paramount, so Paramount owns both SpongeBob and South Park, and part of me is wondering, gosh, I wonder if.

If you're not following the Hollywood business very quickly, paramount just went through a deal where they got bought by, uh, the Ellisons. And I'm wondering if some way there's a, there's a choice that's being made to let that happen. And I would be really interested and even like Matt and Trey like might be interested in like, seeing what would happen even if they let that happen for a brief bit of time.

Just 'cause [00:35:00] they're weird kind of anarchist sometimes. Um, the SpongeBob one is stranger and, and Kev, I think the other thing that's really important to know here is like. None of these are approved uses. Right. And there's some weird stuff like we there, there's a clip of SpongeBob where they have recreated, half-baked, the Dave Chappelle movie where, you know, that's a bunch of stoners.

So like most of this stuff is not brand savvy. Um, I think it's, it's a weird place. But I do also think, as we've talked about before, this is likely going to be nerfed. So if you're trying to get these out. Tried to get them out

Kevin Pereira: now, probably now is the time. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's interesting that they went full opt out.

I mean, there's no shortage of, of discussions, Gavin, about how, you know, lawsuits are gonna fly, the hammer's gonna drop, like opting out is one thing, but they're gonna expect cash from this. Do you do. Do you think they just saw what was happening with Cling and Minimax and like, let's say just non-US models happening and said, we have to do this?

Or do you think they felt like right now, let's say this administration, [00:36:00] we're not too worried? Yeah. About, I don't know, regulation

Gavin Purcell: because I, I, I mean this is all leading up to the thing we've talked about in the show for maybe since the beginning of the show, which is like. Who has rights to do this stuff and what does it mean?

The big question was always like, well, if you trained on this stuff, then do you owe us money? And then it seemed like people, like James Cameron was saying, it's like, no, it's more about the output, right? If the output is something that has our things in it, then you owe us money. But this is kind of like weapons free in some ways except for the people that have opted out.

So my expectation is kind of like when four oh Image Gen came out is like, I remember when four oh Image Gen came out, I was able to create like a. GI Joe image with like a, a thing that was me in it. And then like two days later it was like, there's just no way to get that prompt through. So I expect something like that is gonna come through.

One thing that is different than was different about Sora one and image gen is you cannot generate celebrities. So you don't see a lot of celebrity photos like human visages or, or, or faces, yeah. Are blocked often. So what here, here's a funny thing, Kevin. [00:37:00] Will Smith, or let's take any other celebrity who's like, kind of like an interesting celebrity that does stuff.

I think this is a moment, and this actually goes to a point, I mentioned this in this week's newsletter, there was a big story about an AI character named Tilly Norwood. Yes. Who is an AI actress that's making this huge fuss in, out in Hollywood right now. Because like, you know, she's gonna, she's getting representation, maybe an agency, but what if

Kevin Pereira: it

Gavin Purcell: is a famous actor?

What's that? Well, you said she's getting fake representation. It's getting it's, but yeah. What if a famous actor or or somebody who's even like a semi-famous actor said, okay, guess what? I'm gonna upload my cameo. I honestly think if I were an agent, if somebody who's like, kind of like on the down slope.

Kevin Pereira: Go for it. What do you right now, the time, what do you think the conversations I have with WME are? Gavin,

Gavin Purcell: is that why you're in China? Is that It's going, Kevin, you

Kevin Pereira: haven't been relevant since arguably 20 fourteens. Really funny. Whatever you can do, go hawk Chinese engine factories, [00:38:00] get out there. There.

That's funny. And do TikTok dances in Mongolia. Go for it. Because Gavin, if I can become the next Tom of this Sora MySpace, right? Sure. Then I can say, Hey Sammy Altman. Fraction of a penny. Anytime someone uses my cameo, that's fine. You're gonna want the og. You're gonna want this. Yeah, of course.

Gavin Purcell: Says no one ever.

People want you, Kevin. They do. They're clearly making you. I was fishing Chinese people want you. Yes.

Kevin Pereira: I was fishing hard. Um, but while we were having this discussion, I went to Sora Gavin, I'm staring at the progress circle and it's coming in. Yeah. But you mentioned, uh. Fan of ours, friend of the show, James Cameron.

He said we should be paid on output. I'm curious, can I bond with an avatar character using my massive braid? And we're gonna find out soon if this will violate guidelines because I dunno if you Oh, interesting. Okay. Sometimes when you render something, it waits until the output to let you know Yes. That it might be a violation of something can do it.

Yeah. Which is, which is pretty interesting. It also, that is interesting. Checks if you, 'cause you can upload images to go along with [00:39:00] your generations. Yes. It will not allow you to upload imagery of people. There's checks for that. Yeah. And again, the clothing check when you're making an avatar. Surprise, surprise.

Gavin Purcell: So I wanna talk a little bit about the business behind this. So, uh, Dan Broing said that OpenAI has launched three natural ad units in the last few days. Pulse, uh, a topic card, which we talked briefly about this idea that like, it gives you this kind of daily update if you're a, if, if you're a, a pro subscriber, buy it in chat.

GPT, which we'll talk about in just a second here. And then SOA two sponsored videos in the feed. And he says that is up from just zero last week. So when we talk about the business here, chat, GPT needs to make money. We've talked about that for a while. They now have built that audience where they have, you know, 700 plus million users, I think a week, right?

And they have now this SOA thing that's blowing up. What they're gonna try to find is some ways to make money. And Sam was asked specifically about this on Twitter and he said, because he was replying, a lot of people are like, oh, you're just doing this AI slop thing to put out stuff. Um, and why Where's a GI, and Sam specifically said, [00:40:00] he said, I get the vibe here, but we mostly need the capital to build AI that can do for science.

And we are sure, and we're sure focused on a GI with almost all our research effort. It is also nice to show people new tech products along the way. So basically he's saying this sort of thing is going to pay for the stuff that will benefit humanity. That would be what most anybody would say when they're looking to make money.

But in this instance, like they had to figure out some way to make money, right? They, they had to figure out some way to get cash into the bank.

Kevin Pereira: Yeah. Um, I, I can see all of these things happening and I think we should touch really quickly on one, 'cause we glossed over three things, right? Yeah. Like there's this pulse product, which is sort of like a daily, here's what's going on, here's your updates.

Right. We saw it too. We've, we've yapped about for quite a while, but the buy in chat GPT Yeah, it is a pretty interesting one. And this is an integration right now with. Um, Shopify, which allows retailers to put their products directly within the chat experience. So when I go to chat GT and I say, Hey, find me the best, blah, [00:41:00] blah, blah, or do we have these Chinese sneakers that I love to sell now, Gavin, I love them.

Do they have an size nine and a half? Yeah, exactly. And out comes the Shopify store in app and you can tap and purchase. And so. You know, Elon has long proselytized, the X app to be the thing that rules it all. I, yeah, I do kind of see open AI crawling in that direction with, okay, now they've got a TikTok competitor that can be a lot of fun.

They have chat, GPT, they have Advanced voice, they have the daily thing to remind you of what's going on. You can code and make apps and share them, and now you can shop within the same app. Yeah, like I, I, I like that's a way to make some money. Well,

Gavin Purcell: and we've been saying this for a while, like the, the attention is all you need in terms of what it is.

Oh, did we get a result back here? You got your avatar result. Did it give you something? Okay. Text it to me and we'll look at it together on text it. We have to

Kevin Pereira: do this in real time. Hold on. Okay. I don't know how many pennies James Cameron is gonna get for. But, um, you know what, lemme just [00:42:00] play it. We're seen hair like this.

Oh my life.

Gavin Purcell: My god. It's, our cues are part of us. You ready? I'm ready. Whoa. I can feel every in. Do you understand me now?

Sora 2 Singer: Yeah.

Gavin Purcell: This, this is gonna get ner Just, just so we're explaining what we're seeing here. We are seeing suckling looks, it looks like a scene from the movie, which is crazy to me. Like this.

One thing that's interesting about Sora stuff is sometimes the quality be higher or lower. This is a very high quality clip and it's you. With a long, uh, hippie braid. Mm-hmm. But it's you human form. Yeah. And it's you standing next to the, I don't know what the name of the Navi woman was. Navi. Yeah. It's a Navi.

One of the Ns. One of the main Ns. But she's like one of the main characters. Yeah. And it's you touching your braids together and then the braid is in your mouth, so you're eating the braid. Sure. Is Gavin, I

Kevin Pereira: don't know how this, uh, uh, braiding stuff works. I mean, docking, I can wrap my head around that. But this, I'm just gonna suckle on the hair until I feel like I'm a blue person.

Gavin Purcell: Okay. Fair enough. Fair enough. That's enough. That's enough. That's enough. Let's make one final call, Kev. 'cause I do wanna have this. There's so many people talking about AI slop lately, and I actually wrote a whole newsletter about this, about a week and a half ago before SOAR [00:43:00] two. Do you think this is gonna make AI slop a problem?

Are we gonna, is it gonna get worse? Do you think AI slap at fir at first is a problem?

Kevin Pereira: Uh, no. I mean, what define problem? I feel like every generation loves to shake a fist at the previous generation's content. Right? There's nothing new there. Yes. Uh, is AI slop a problem? Depends on what perspective you look at it.

Is it re rewiring brains and frying them? Yeah, probably, I think it is. Right. But people made the same argument of MTV back in the day. Yes. Ah, okay. Uh, is it, is it taking away much needed, um, spotlight from human creators that rely on algorithms to get discovered? Yeah, it is. Yeah. Is it doing that because users are expressing an interest in that and they want to watch that and they're seeking it out and engaging with it.

Yeah. Uh, so yes, I, I mean, please. You, you, you, this is your expertise here. I, I enjoy ai slop. I think some of it's very funny. I also love nestling in to a long form something by a creator that I really, [00:44:00] really appreciate and support. So I, I, I think both things can be true.

Gavin Purcell: Yeah. I mean, this is exactly where I was gonna come from on it too, is like, it is a very complicated conversation.

One thing I keep coming back to is that. Computers are not making these things for us. Yes, they're making them easier, but humans are the ones making and watching them. So I, I think it's just an important thing to understand that like if this changes the way you think about media, if it changes the way you think about your work, all of that stuff is complicated and hard and.

It's not gonna go away. So I do think it's, and by the way, there will be rules, right? Like we said, I think there they're going to Nerf a lot of this stuff because honestly, I don't think they should be able to make these sorts of things with other creations or things that people own. I know there's differentiations there.

A lot of people in the world believe that like IP rights in general should go away. And we've had people in our comments say that before. I'm not sure that's the best thing for human creativity, because I believe that like if you create something, there is value there, but. This is the complicated world we are living in.

It is not that far off except for say, like times a thousand from what we looked at with like remix culture in the [00:45:00] nineties. Like I was old enough to live through. My favorite artists were like Beck, Beastie Boys, people from the nineties who actually, uh, girl Talks is another good example of people who take other music and put it together.

And a lot of that music got kind of killed in part because it got too expensive to make sample-based audio and it became a really expensive thing. So I don't know if I, it's just hard to know where it's gonna land, but it is not a new conversation. Like this idea, like your point about MTV is perfectly right.

Like, I think the same thing with video games. When I was a kid, like there were people who said video games were gonna, were gonna fry people's brains. They were gonna make to turn kids into like right. Demons and monsters, and I don't think that's the case. It clearly hasn't happened, so it's a complicated scenario, but this is the next stage of us having to kind of wrestle with it as a, as a culture.

This is a perfect transition, Kevin. Come on.

Yeah. Okay. Let's get into it. [00:46:00] Gavin, here's the transition, is that we have come out with something that is AI generated, but also very much relies on human creativity and it is called, and then you have heard us talking about us here for the last God, how everyone knows how many months at this point. And, and it's out in the world.

There's an early beta. You can play through a, a handful of these experiences. There'll be new ones coming out all the time. What it is, just very clearly, if you haven't heard us talk about it, it is an audio interactive, uh, product where you talk to characters using your voice and try to get them to do something.

Um, these characters are AI generated voices. But they are actually written by people. Meaning that people, like right now it's us, but we think eventually it could be other people as well.

Kevin Pereira: Mm-hmm. Are

Gavin Purcell: writing the scenarios and coming up with the characters and kind of setting them up, and then the AI brings them to life.

So, Kev, it's exciting to have this out in the world. We've been getting some great feedback on it. There's some cool things. Um, but I'm just happy that people are getting a chance to play it. And if you, if you're listening to this right now or [00:47:00] watching, go give it a shot. Um, after you finish watching this, don't, don't leave right now to go do it, but you can go to and then chat to try it.

Um, completely free. It's catalyst free you thought so far? I was gonna

Kevin Pereira: say it's completely free. You can use it in a browser, you can use it on your phone. You don't have to download anything. Uh, and then chat. Is the site something we have to make a habit of saying more Gavin? Yes, because it's gotta find it.

Um, but yeah, we, we launched Doc Masters Zed today, which was something that we beta tested with some of our earlier folks and, uh. Kudos to you by the way. And a huge thank you to the Hollywood Reporter for an amazing story that dropped today. It was about as generous as coverage can get. Um, uh, the author enjoyed the experiences, like actually spent time and, and I, I brought up doc masters ed because they managed to bribe doc Masters.

Yeah. I'm not gonna say how, but that was one of the intended paths that we put into that experience. 'cause we're like, oh, that'd be kind of fun. There's more than one way to beat the game, but we want it. We wanted to use the power of AI to let the player explore whatever path they want to get to the end goal.

And [00:48:00] they did something that I was hoping they would try, but in a way that I didn't expect that they would do. So I'm blown away by the response to it that people are taking to it, that they're enjoying it, that they're saying, oh, I love that. I wish I could do a. Insert thing here. Yeah, because that's exactly what we wanted to inspire with this.

We want to release these tools so that anybody else can make their own, you know, cozy simulator or Italian brain rot generator. I just realized, yeah, I mean, dogma Z's at the bottom of our site. We gotta move Z Up. He's beneath Rot bottle.

Gavin Purcell: He's the, he's the new, he's the new one. He's. Um, yeah. And again, I just think the important thing here that, uh, Kevin, we're gonna talk about our launch trailer too, which we made that, that did people enjoy it as well, which is not really as much about us as it is about us kind of using AI tools.

But the important thing to know about what we're doing here, and I think that we've thought a lot about over the last two years of making this, and the reason why the show's called AI for Humans is it is AI and humans together trying to do something. And I think in the same way, we just went all this time talking about Sora too, and like the human creativity that's coming out.

We cannot [00:49:00] forget that side of it. And like it's really important that the human aspect of it comes across. And I said in this article, but I'll say it again very quickly here. Your experience if you are listening, cannot be replicated by an ai. There's just no way that it will be able to be you. And this is, my wife is teaches writing.

It's the same thing she says. It's like when you're writing a book. You can try to copy another person's style or you can try to copy something 'cause you think it's gonna be successful, but ultimately you've gotta figure out what your version of that thing is. So that's what I'm hoping to bring to AI a little bit with, with, and then, and I think is possible.

But let's, let's transition and kick Kevin this launch trailer. So. Kevin and I had a weird idea to do a launch trailer. If you're not familiar in the startup world, there's all these kind of like launch trailers that have happened most famously, recently was the clearly launch trailer. We've talked about clearly on the show that they kind of like cheat at your life.

Uh, startup with ai, they had a trailer where like, you know, it was two characters sitting across from each other and one guy didn't know anything about the other woman. He was using a, a clearly like screen to do this, but they go viral, right? And this idea is like you have to have a startup trailer. And so Kevin and I came up with an idea, [00:50:00] which was basically what would it be like is if we kind of.

You know, Forrest Gumped ourself through a bunch of these trailers and as an idea, it's a funny idea, but also Kev, let's talk about how we did this, because I think people out there when they see this might be like. You guys must have spent a fortune on this. You must have spent, you know, three weeks, six weeks making this.

Yeah, we

Kevin Pereira: sure did. Tell a

Gavin Purcell: little bit about the details of what we did and, and what it looked like.

Kevin Pereira: So first of all, um, some kudos. Uh, Fiona Nova coming on board. Good friend of mine to direct. Um, our dear friend, Kevin Cappiello, amazing. Editor. Editor, amazing editor. I don't even like saying editor because he's a graphic.

He's really, really much.

Gavin Purcell: He's a part of the cra creative team. Really in a lot way,

Kevin Pereira: honestly. Yeah. Projects that we get to jam on with him are always on the next level because of him. So, massive shout out there. Um, um, Kodiak as well, coming on board to, so there's, there was, it was no shortage of people coming into play, which is the human element of this, right?

Yes. People coming together to make a thing. Um. In the past though, I'm gonna just say as candidly as possible, this shoot would've been impossible. Yeah. For the timeline that we had and the [00:51:00] resources or lack thereof that we had. Yeah. Full stop. And I, I have done videos like this where you're parodying, pop culture, whatever.

I know you did them with the Tonight Show. I did 'em every year for like Nintendo, uh, for other streaming efforts. Like you would have massive hair and makeup, you would have wardrobe, you'd have special sets and sound stages. You would have props. You would have, um, a whole VFX team. You would have all of these things.

Had we had those things, by the way, we could have made the video even better. Sure. But the reality is we had very limited time and very limited money. So the workflow was. Get our shot list together, right? These are the videos that we're going to parody. Um, these are the scenes we are going to comp ourselves into using AI tools and everything began with a driving image.

So we used a collection of tools like Seed Dream, like Runway Sora, uh, uh, or open AI image generation, nano Banana, Gemini, by Google. These are all just, you know, off the shellfish AI tools where we would. Grab a screen cap of the original video or the [00:52:00] original, um, event that we were parodying, and then we would say, swap us into it, right?

Yeah. And then maybe we do a little work. I would sometimes use Face fusion and swap my face in there. Uh, Kev Cap had his own, uh, routine for making these AI versions of us, but basically everything started with a driving frame. And then we said in this scene. Closeup of Kevin will be saying this closeup of Gavin will be saying that.

And then we went to tools like, um, WAN 2.2, which, uh mm-hmm just came out around the time of this, uh, or runway Act two, which is a program that lets you puppet, uh, the lips or the body movements and the arm movements of characters. And so we would just put those driving frames in there, drive them with ai, and then take that end result and put a little color correction, a little polish, some special effects on it.

But that was, that was it. I mean, it was you and I sitting in front of a, and Rex, uh, one of our co-founders sitting in front of a pop-up green screen at the A 16 Z offices. Yeah. Just saying the lines. Yes. And then applying it to the stills and we got like a, it, like, it's an AI [00:53:00] approximation of it. And I think sometimes the brokenness of the scenes is the joke.

Add to it. Yeah. A little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's pretty much it. There's a scene where I throw a silver ball against a cyber truck window and shatter it. That was just clinging? Yeah. I fed it. A starting image of me with this bad mustache on stage, so it would look like me, and I said, he throws the ball at the thing.

It took me like 15 generations. Eventually I got one that kind of worked. Like why? There's your, I have to say.

Gavin Purcell: Shout out to you because one of the things Kevin had to do on this was go through the generations, and we've said this a million times, Kevin and I have both through projects like this where you are a random slot machine version of what you're doing, you have to generate a lot of stuff to get the right out, the right stuff out.

So it is a lot of trial and error. But I will say like this, shoot as a someone who was a television producer for a long time, like if you put, if you had to bring this team together to make this thing and you had to put it all together, it would've, I think, conservatively cost. 10 times as much as it did, maybe, maybe not that much, five to seven times as much as it did from basically what we actually did with it.

Yeah, I would say, I would actually say 10 x. [00:54:00] Yeah. It, and what's what's crazy about that is, you know, again, to Kevin's point, we were able to do it in, in a short amount of time. The reason we are saying this is because. It just shows you how production, not just, um, AI production, not just generating stuff, but actual production can change.

And I think if any of you out there is listening to this or watching this and wants a more specific, like step-by-step detail of how we did this, I'm sure we're, we're, we'll be more than happy to figure out Sure. How to do this. Like in fact, maybe there's a, maybe there's a YouTube video when we have some time where we can make a, a step-by-step walk down of this.

But a big part of this, Kevin, I wanna say is. The shooting on green screen I think does make a difference if somebody's out there trying to figure out lip syncing. If, if you are a creator out there and you're like, how can I do these better? Or How did that look so much better? Mm-hmm. Having actual puppeted faces that you can actually shoot is a very valuable asset I think, for this process.

Right. I

Kevin Pereira: mean, just high, really high res, clean footage of your mouth, if that's what you're going for. Uh, or, or, or making sure that your starting position matches the still that you're going to pilot. Because sometimes [00:55:00] these apps when you, uh, have a starting still where you can't see the person's hands and suddenly you're expecting hands, they get disproportionate or wonky.

And if that's what you're going for, great. But, um. One thing that I thought was really interesting about this process is that yes, it worked, but I am very fortunate. I think you are too in this regard. We have experience with the other side. Yes. The traditional side of this production. Yes. And the most fun I had.

Um, I mean some, there was a lot of fun with seeing the results, don't get me wrong. And I'm really proud of what we put together. Again, considering the limitations, but the most fun I had, Gav was hanging out on set. Yeah. In the flesh. Yes. Yes. Coming up with things with other creatives. Right. And that's something that this pipeline doesn't really account for.

There was like one little, I did a dumb thing on the green screen where I tilted my head and smile, uh, and smiled awkwardly. Yeah. Uh, Kevin to his credit, took that and was like, oh, he put it in one of the roughs. So I applied it to the ai. It's really difficult to improv and Yeah, and at, yes, and a scene as you're going with this workflow.

So it's like the traditional workflow. We probably would've got slightly more [00:56:00] entertaining or funnier stuff, or there would've been a silly moment with the hair as I'm swapped as the woman in the clearly video. There probably would've moment with the hair dangling in my face, and this at the other week could have played with it.

You're not getting that with this other workflow? No. So as much as I, I can sing the praises of the efficiency and the, you know, again, the output for the resource constraint, there's a whole other world of this that I would miss so dearly if this were the only production style. Yes. So I think there's gonna be a world where both are going to exist and play nice and be good for the various reasons that they're good.

And, and I think that to your

Gavin Purcell: point, like. Creating with other people can be fun in person. So maybe there's even a world if you're an AI creator is like, I know there's a bunch of AI creator meetups, but like, yeah, see what it's like to make something with three people and jam on it together and like have each of you do stuff.

'cause I think that does make a big difference. And also that point of like. Shooting on the green screen. There were moments where you and I both gave us each other notes on like a funny thing to add onto. Yeah. And if you've ever been on a, a set, like a, a comedy set, like, it's like you'll pitch a joke and like somebody will take it [00:57:00] or they won't take it, or they'll then think of another joke and like that is part of what makes creation super fun.

So yeah, I think you're right. That's a good note to leave on here. Creation doesn't have to be the machines, it doesn't have to be just people, but there's a weird mix here where like both things together can be really good. So that is it for today, everybody. We'll see you all next week. Go check out and then and uh, Kevin, any, any parting words?

Kevin Pereira: And then not chat. And then chat. The wild women, the ripping in the,

Gavin Purcell: the wild women. What? Oh, alright. Bye everybody. We'll see Allall next. Do you know the hedonism clip? Yeah, I know that. Yeah. Okay.