Because the World Needs Another AI Episode

Transcript is auto-generated from the episode audio and lightly edited; it may contain small errors.

I am so tired of hearing about AI. I know we have to talk about it, I know it's important, but can we please stop with, oh, you're using AI, AI this, AI that — let's just control how much we say it in this episode, please. I mean, I'll do my best. I do have some titles, some options for this episode. I like the one we went with, but what are the others? "AI and Content Marketing," sponsored by Hype BM, trademark. And then, "Overhyped." My favorite one, I think, is "Your Content, But Make It Artificial." But I guess what we're going with is "Because the World Needs Another AI Episode," because it really does. If I hadn't read all these before, I'd be laughing so much more.

AI, really? Take one.

I think it's a good thing.

Or you are overhyped and you just need to calm down a little bit. What camp are you in?

Calm down. If I lean anywhere on the spectrum, I'm excited about it.

I think you're overhyped.

Yeah, but I guess our team will probably — they're laughing right now. I can't tell you how many times Paul has told me, look at what this is doing, look at what it's doing. And I'm just watching it like, yeah, but you're about to have to do something with it now, you're going to have to click, you're going to have to — I don't know. It's been pretty great lately.

Well, regardless of which camp you find yourself in — if you think AI is just not as good as it sounds, or if you're like, oh, this is going to change everything — we have a place for you, you're going to get something from our conversation today. Let's talk about what makes AI actually useful and what's just noise. But before we get to that, let's get to the big conversation you probably get asked at least once a week. So, is AI going to replace you? How do you feel about AI taking your job?

Paul: We do get a lot of that. I don't foresee, in the immediate future, AI taking that many creative jobs, if any. It's already taken some — I've lost clients before because they've decided to use AI, and I don't know how well they're able to do what I did for them. It's happening, there is disruption, I think, is the best way to say it. They're shifting, your job's going to look different. But in our field, and in a few things in particular, there are a lot of micro uses that it's incredibly good at right now, and it's getting better and better. There are a few unique cases — we do a lot of event coverage, and it's hard to imagine, I'm sure we'll get there as a society one day, but it's hard to imagine in the near future people being happy with an AI rendition of what they just experienced in real life. Real still matters, authentic still matters. But AI is incredibly useful in our field, and we use it frequently.

Well, let's talk about how it's disrupting and changing the creative industry. I feel like whatever we talk about is going to be dated in like a month.

Probably by the time we edit this. But for the sake of not just saying we use AI, let's talk about what we're actually doing with it, or how it's actually changing how the creative industry works right now.

Paul: I think the most obvious use case we've seen is it's just making everyone move a little faster. You can ideate, come up with ideas faster, you can organize faster, you can sort through some clutter and fluff faster. I know that's certainly how we've found it the most useful, and it can help you communicate. It can't replace anything by itself just yet, but I'm sure it will at some point — in the here and now, that's what I've noticed. That, and, I need a picture of something, I need an image of something — I can get pretty close to it right now with a prompt. And it's a great thing to include in a brief too, if you need to get it to someone who can actually put some art to it — you can apply design and edit it to make it look closer to what it needs to be. Just a good communication piece, good for ideation, good for communication.

I've noticed it's shifted the way I think about projects — it's kind of taken me out of the details a little bit more. I'm still in the details, but it helps me think of the bigger picture more often, and I feel like that's where I need to be. I think as a society, as consumers, the way creative agencies are changing because of AI is really because of how it's changing how we consume media. People expect it to just kind of fall in their lap more and more, and that's just what the future is going to be — they're going to be less willing to look or work for most things if it's that instant, which has to change the way you approach business, for sure.

People have said this many times, but it's true — it's changing our brains, we're not using creative muscles the way we used to, but I feel like at the same time it's forging different ones, or maybe just strengthening others we don't get to use as much. With our team, we talk about AI all the time — almost daily, at least weekly, a conversation about what tools we're using, how we're implementing them, what it's taking off our plates. And it's not replacing anybody's job, I think it's changing our roles a little bit. On our team, it's not replacing anyone's job, it's supercharging and enabling our team to do bigger and better and cooler things. We did set the expectation that it's expected for everyone on our team to use it, to know it, to get better with it, just because it's not going anywhere, and because our clients expect us to.

For the longest time it was kind of a dirty word — if you use it, don't admit to it, there was a lot of skepticism. But now we get briefs submitted that are completely AI, and it's a little bit like, hey, can we add a little bit of humanity to this? Just make sure we've actually put thought into it. And so the whole balancing act is going to be what everyone's trying to figure out over the next few years, I think. I do think a lot of businesses were skeptical at first about seeing creatives apply AI, even just using ChatGPT — people's expectations about AI usage are changing, and it's a spectrum too, just because of how fast things are moving. Our expectations are changing of what AI is capable of, and what really is quality — what's considered quality for AI changes quite a bit.

So there's a lot of misconceptions about AI, and I wrote down a list of some of these — AI helped me generate some of them, ChatGPT. I just want your instant reactions.

AI will finally make content creation effortless.

No, it doesn't — there is a day in the future where it's probably, but right now it's super dry stuff. It's great for ideation, but it still needs direction. If anything, it needs more creative direction. The kind of stuff you have to give a prompt to get a photo — you have to get into, okay, it needs to be a 35 millimeter lens shot on a day at this time of day, light coming from this angle, the background looks like this, this aperture — you have to get into all the nitty-gritty photography details, and then you have to style the model, go head to toe for what that's doing. So yes, it's able to do that for you, if you give it the right information and the right pose and the right text, and you're entering in two or three paragraphs of text from scratch to get there. So it's just turning us all into creative directors, essentially. It's the tool that on a typical photo shoot, you're telling your photographer, hey, we need a picture like this, and the photographer is decoding — okay, I'm going to get this lens, use this camera, shoot it at this angle, we're going to set the lighting this way. Your stylist is thinking through makeup, thinking through this, a casting director is finding the right model, the right person to work with, bringing the product to life, or whatever it is, all the way to the photo shoot. It's assisting with all those things, but it's also expecting you to take on the role of all those people to get the quality image. Otherwise you're just kind of shooting in the dark — anybody can pick up a camera and one out of ten thousand photos is going to be, oh, I'm going to print that, that looks great. But a talented photographer is going to be one out of every ten, one out of every five. So same idea — one out of every ten thousand prompts is going to be great, or you get really good at it, you get really good at the creative direction. And if you're that good at creative direction, you either have the time or the skill set, or you're working with the creatives already. Define effortless.

No one will notice it's AI. On a broad societal scale, I think we found that to be a little bit true — being fooled by fake news and whatnot. That's a good point. But if you're really looking for it, pixel-peeping, it's going to be pretty obvious. When you grow up with the technology, though, it's easier to identify a few things — I'm sure our kids are going to be able to spot this stuff better than we are.

Ethical use of AI is a whole other topic.

I don't need a content team anymore.

I think it kind of comes down to what we just talked about — you need essentially as big a team as you already had. If it was just you doing all those things and taking all the pictures, then you can probably get by a little faster with AI. We have people who come to us saying, hey, I have these ideas for emails and blog posts that have been generated by AI, I still need you to apply the human touch to it, humanize it some more. I think what it's really good at is noticing trends and patterns, because it's a machine — if it's looking at big enough data, and we use it like that, we'll pump in data and analytics, we use that frequently, and it looks at it, learns, spots the trends, and that helps us hone in. And then we're able to look at the human element of that and say, oh, this is why this was the hook that worked, this is the technique they used, this is what captured attention. But we use AI to filter through thousands of videos first to get to that information, that we can then analyze with experience and humanize to get to the next level.

That's a good one — that's definitely one of my favorite ways to use AI.

AI will make me more creative.

It amplifies, it kind of supercharges. If you're a really creative person, it gives you the juice to see those ideas come to life. If you're making lame stuff, you're either going to make lamer, or just more of your lame stuff — it's going to amplify what you're doing already.

I like that. And, AI is the strategy.

AI is a tool — you use it, you don't just use AI to say you're using AI. We want our team to be using AI, but not for the sake of using it, it's for the sake of making your life easier, doing your job better. It's a tool.

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So what actually excites you about the future of this? We're right in front of a virtual production wall, and there's a lot of AI applications we can use for it — it's a really cool effect. It's the opportunity in general. We were talking about this at lunch, funny enough, with the team here — it lowers the bar for entry, and that's been happening in a lot of areas. It's pros and cons. In the seventies, eighties, into the nineties, and before that, you had to know the right people — if you're a musician, you had to be really lucky, or really good, or just really know the right people to get your stuff out in the world, to get it recorded. Then people were able to start recording their own music on a computer in their bedroom, and that gave a lot of really talented people who would have never had a chance to shine an opportunity to get their stuff out in the world — but it also made it that much noisier, because it lowered the bar for entry. And that's what we're going to keep seeing — I'm not excited about the fact that everything's going to be noisier, it's going to require that much more effort, that much more intention, that much more consistency, that much more quality, to stand out from the noise.

I do think, and we've noticed this, it does make things more cost-effective, more content creation more cost-effective. We're about to do a shoot soon where we're going to essentially shoot in four different locations in one spot, with a virtual production wall, and the way we're able to use AI to create a new world in a few minutes is pretty incredible — and that's just going to get better and better. So we're not hauling a crew and equipment and securing permits from a dozen locations in our city, assuming it's all in the same city and it all works. I can shoot whatever we want, whenever we want, in a sound-controlled, air-conditioned room, and leave the equipment up, lock it, come back the next day and keep going. And that's just one example, there's so many ways.

I think I'm most excited about — when people ask me, do you think it's going to replace you, has it replaced you — I'm excited about the skill shift. I have a background in copywriting, and I don't miss it, because I've shifted the way that I work because of AI. It doesn't do all my writing for me, in fact, I think I've started to write more because of AI. I think I'm a better writer than you. But it has trained me to use different muscles — the creative muscles I used to use, I don't use them as much. You also have more time to write because you're not having to filter through a few hundred emails a day, AI does your filter for you, and you get to see the top 30 — oh, I need to respond to these — and it's not half your day, it's thirty minutes.

But I feel like even for our team, and teams in general, I think I'm just an optimist — I feel like it'll help people give the best that they have, and help people be better at being the people part of their job. Again, I think it amplifies — if you have good people around you, it amplifies the good and what they can do, their skill set, their creativity. If you have people that are a headache, I'm sure it's going to amplify that headache.

Well, takeaways from this — we couldn't not talk about AI, because it's important, it's here, and it's changing the way we work and the way we create. It's a tool, we use it to work better and to make work easier, to save our clients money — and it's not going away, so it's a priority, we need to learn it, we use it, it's kind of built into our culture here at Griffith Media. If anything, it's stretched the innovation part of it, because it moves so fast, we have to dedicate a little bit of time each week to stay up to date, read the news, try the new tools — a lot of them are flops, but you try, you learn, and the next week you try the new tool, and the next week you try the next new tool. That takes a skill set in itself, because you have to be so resilient, and you have to be willing to dedicate time to learn all the time, and I think that's a good skill to have, but it's not one that everyone wants to have — so there's your competitive edge for you, that's the new muscle you're flexing.

Maybe you've figured out which camp we're probably in — we're very excited about using these tools. But I would challenge you, as a business owner: if it's something you've been skeptical about, think about how it could really help your team do their job better and make better work. If it's something you're very excited about, and you're wondering how your team could use it more, I'd challenge you to think about the end goal — what do you want to use it for, it's a tool, how is it going to maybe cut costs, but how is it also going to help you make a better product?

But if you have thoughts about this concept, or questions, or something you've been thinking about in regards to AI and the creative industry, we'd love to hear from you. If this episode resonated with you, subscribe, leave a review. If you know somebody who would enjoy this kind of content, who enjoys talking about AI and the ways the creative industry is changing, share this episode with them, share the podcast — that helps us get the word out, it keeps this podcast going, because we know that you're interested, and it will help us serve more businesses in the creative industry, and in other industries as well. Thanks so much for listening to the Known For podcast, we'll see you next time.

Known For is a Griffith Media podcast, recorded on the volume wall at Big Screen Studios in Dallas, Texas. This episode was produced by the Griffith Media team. Find out more about our agency, how we can help your business grow through marketing, video and design at www.griffith.media. Or find out more about the studio at bigscreentx.com.