a16z Podcast - AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng

Episode Date: November 9, 2022

Generative AI tools like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion have taken the world by storm in recent months, wowing the masses with their uncanny ability to produce images via text prompts. In this interview, we’ll chat with Karen Cheng about how she’s leveraged these tools among others, with a focus on how this new paradigm is reshaping the creator landscape. You’ll get to hear the behind the scenes of many of her viral works, including a video of her becoming a lawnmower, her AI-generated Cosmo magazine cover, her DALL-E fashion show, her transforming iconic art into 3D museums to explore, and much, much more. By the end of this episode, listeners should have a better understanding of the new tools at their fingertips (literally!), how AI can indeed enhance the creative process, and the second-order effects of these innovations, like how creators are paid.Since we’re just at the beginning of the AI era, this is just the beginning of our coverage as well.Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro02:59 - Karen’s journey to content creator06:32 - Creative unlocks for viral content09:28 - The changing social media landscape12:08 - Innovating with AI14:59 - Unique AI tools available today17:52 - How AI tools might differentiate21:04 - Cosmo’s first AI-generated magazine cover24:19 - Inpainting, outpainting, and the fungibility of artists31:54 - AI enhancing the creative process32:39 - The virality of optimism vs pessimism38:19 - Turning attention into business43:13 - IP and ownership in the age of AI46:18 - The downward pricing pressure of AI47:21 - Is generative AI still a gimmick?53:32 - The adaptiveness of humans58:26 - The importance of AI ethics Resources:Karen’s TED TalkKaren’s Instagram accountKaren’s websiteCosmo magazine cover and tutorialDALL-E fashion show and tutorialDALL-E outpainting announcementI spent $15 in DALL·E 2 credits creating this AI image Stay Updated: Find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.com/podcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithioPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

It's kind of interesting that for most of history, I feel like humans have prayed to God, you know, but now I see that, like, content creators, we pray to the algorithm. Hey, everyone. Welcome to the latest episode of the A6C podcast. This is your host, Steph Smith. And today's episode, I'm thrilled to bring on Karen Chang. Karen has been a creator for a long time, but she specifically has a knack for integrating technology into her creations. And you can only imagine with the rise of some of these AI tools like Dali, mid-jurning, and stable diffusion, what she's been able to achieve. Now, if you missed AI Summer and its impact on creators, you might have been sleeping under a rock, but you're not too late. It's truly just the beginning. In fact, I interviewed Karen back in September, and with every week, there was something that popped up where I thought, man, I wish I could have

asked her about this. And yet still, in this interview, we cover a lot of ground. We'll chat with Karen about how she originally found her niche, how she manages to grow her social following with a nod towards being additive instead of reductive. You'll also get to hear the behind the scenes of her many viral works, including a video of her becoming a lawnmower, yes, truly a lawnmower, her AI-generated Cosmo Magazine cover, the first ever, her dolly fashion show, her transforming iconic art into 3D museums that people can explore, and much, much more. And by the end of this episode, I think the audience will come away with some really key things, including an understanding of the new tools that are available that are literally at our fingertips, how AI can indeed enhance the creative

process, and maybe even some of the second order effects of these innovations, like how creators are paid or how they might work with these AIs. And I should note that since we're just at the beginning of this AI era, this is truly just the beginning of our coverage. So I hope you enjoy this episode. The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business tax or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. For more details, we see A16Z.com slash disclosures. I am absolutely thrilled today to have Karen Chang on the line.

Karen is a digital creator. taken social by storm. Seriously, she's all over my feeds. I can almost guarantee you've seen one of her videos. And she's done everything from high-five Mark Zuckerberg in the Metaverse. She's partnered with several A-List celebrities. She also was commissioned by Cosmo recently to create their first AI-generated magazine cover. So super cool. We'll be talking about that. And in particular, we'll be talking about her foray into AI, how she's using AI to be more creative, and how that relationship between humans and AI is evolving, how it enhances our creativity, or how it doesn't. We'll see. But Karen, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for that

amazing intro. I'm talking to you, Karen, in 2022, you have millions of followers across various social media platforms. But I want to flashback to Karen from 2013. So I'm going to preface this with, I was going down this YouTube rabbit hole. I was not researching for this episode. I happened to stumble upon a video with Paul Graham and Sam Altman from 2013 Y.C. Office Hour. You know where this is going. I can't believe you found that. That's kind of obscure. Yeah. So I'm watching this video. Someone else familiar pops into it. Ryan Peterson from Flexport is in this video. And I'm like, okay, flashback. And then someone else is in this video and it's you. And you're pitching this company, Give It 100, which is basically your startup at the time. And the startup,

was structured around people sharing their journey in learning skills, sharing their progress every single day for 100 days. You also then, I think around a year later, you did a TED talk where you kind of used that framework of 100 days to go and learn dance and you shared that and it was fascinating. People can look that up. We'll have it in the show notes. Okay. So this is a broad question, but how do you go from that? Right. 10 years ago almost, were you building the startup to where you are today. When did you, was there a point in time where you decided I want to start sharing this information online? I want to start being a creator. Okay. So yeah, this was back in my like failed startup days. And so I like really badly, very badly wanted to get into YC as like everyone

did. And managed to get on stage office hours. Spoiler alert did not get into YC was turned down, I think multiple times, was interviewed on stage. and answered their questions, that startup eventually failed like a year later. I think it was really tough on me at the time because up until then I had like, you know, good academic achievements in school. And it was my first, I think your first startup failure is your first definitive failure. It's like, there's no, it's like, you failed. There's no like. Like it's over. Exactly. Right. And so I sort of had to come to terms with that. but honestly going through that startup

I learned so much about video that I then applied to doing my own stuff and actually I got this really interesting feedback when I was trying to get business from my startup and I was talking to someone I was trying to like get them to invest in my company and they were like we're not interested in this company like they could see that it wasn't a scalable business

but they were like but we actually just wanted to hire you to make some videos. And I was like, I don't want to do that. But then actually, it turned out, you know, the years later, I'm like, yeah, that person was actually right. And I think it just took, it took me trying every single career. I tried working for a huge company. I've tried working at a startup.

I tried being a founder of my own startup. I tried running an agency. I've tried everything. And I've come to the realization that for me, actually, like, being an influencer is the best thing for me, which is crazy because I always swore I would never be an influencer. Well, I know exactly what you mean because I also create things on the side. And for the longest time, people would associate me with certain things. They'd be like, Steph, you're like the writing girl. And I was like, no, please, please, please. I'm not the writing girl. That is not how I picture myself. But ultimately, sometimes you just have to lean into what other people see in you. And so you started creating these videos. You've been doing it for years. I think you originally uploaded your first musically in like 2017. And even in 2019, I think I saw you say in a video, you had around 10,000 followers on Instagram.

So that might seem like a lot to some people, but compared to today, where you're just smashing it, you have over a million followers, everything you create almost goes viral. Was there a specific unlock where you found along that journey that, like, you noticed something that really worked or you honed in on something that people really wanted? Yes, absolutely there was. So for a very long time, I struggled to grow my following. First, I resisted. First, I was like, well, I don't even need to grow my following.

So I was just making like viral one-off videos. That was back in the days when you can make things go viral in a completely different way, that doesn't work anymore. So back in like 2012, up until around 2016, you could make videos go viral just by coming up with something clever that would be a good headline, cold emailing like 300 reporters, getting them to write about it. And then it would almost guarantee to go viral. That does not work anymore because Facebook ate all the reporter's jobs. and now videos don't spread the reporters, they spread through algorithms. And so it is actually so, so competitive now.

It's so much more competitive now than it was like 10 years ago. It is much harder to make a viral, a video just go viral. And so the way to do it now is you kind of have to build a following. And so it's not so much about making everything go viral, but it's more about building an established follower base so that your baseline of the number of people who see your videos or your work just steadily gets higher. And I really struggled to grow my following.

I remember when I first tried growing my Instagram following, I was like, why is this so hard? You know, I would get things to go viral and it would be very hard to get any followers out of it. The unlock for me was actually sharing my behind the scenes. And that was it. Before I would just show these cool shots, and I'd be like, look at this cool shot, you know,

and then maybe I would describe how I did in the caption. I'm like, nothing, crickets. If I showed the same shot, the exact same shot, but showed the behind the scenes with it, all of a sudden, it was going viral. And I've done that over. I've done that so many times now that I am confident that that was the defining thing. There are lots of other things that I learned along the way to grow my followers,

but if there was one thing, it would be that. That's really interesting because a lot of people participate in these online worlds. A lot of people are creators. And a lot of the stuff is very similar. So sometimes all it takes is like one iteration, one adjustment in what you're doing. you're still sharing the same kinds of videos, but then just giving that behind the scenes look is completely changing the game for you. I also want to just quickly get your take on something you mentioned, which is that social media is not the same, right? Like we use the same term from

10 years ago, but even if you think about social as like a word, social media is not really social anymore in a way. It's kind of gone from the social graph where you followed your friends and your family. And then now it's an interest graph where you follow just things. that this algorithm is serving you. Have there been any other changes that you've noticed in terms of just like birds-eye view how social has changed that really matter to creators? Like, is there a way that a lot of creators

are thinking about this art incorrectly? I think it's gotten a lot more competitive. I think people are a lot more aware of the downsides of social media now. So we're no longer in like the honeymoon phase of it for sure, you know? It's kind of interesting that for most of history, I feel like humans have prayed to God, you know. But now I see that like content creators, we pray to the algorithm.

It's almost like a superstition. It's like, what does the algorithm think? My video is not doing well because of the algorithm. It's like, how can I optimize my video for the algorithm? And it's like we're no longer, it's like we're almost no longer designing ourselves for human taste, but we're designing ourselves for like the algorithm. And I do think there are quite a few downsides to doing that. And there are good reasons to resist that as well.

Yeah, yeah. I think you're right about that. And I think increasingly those algorithms are becoming black boxes where you think, you know, one variable is going to make your videos or your work go viral and then you play into that. But you don't really know, right? Like you're not there seeing the different levers that control the algorithm.

And so it really can consume you. Yeah, the black box is actually what it makes it feel like a cult or a religion because it's like you don't know. It's like a mystical force. Yes, exactly. And even some people who work at these companies say that they don't know exactly what plays or not so much what plays into the algorithm, but the output of it. One of the ways that you've stood out is at least recently playing around with AI, right?

I think you're one of the few creators that I've seen that has really mastered the art of partnership with AI as it relates to social. And there will be many more, of course. But how did you start getting into that? What led you towards those kind of creations? I was really just feeling quite stuck in my work. I felt like I was doing basically like almost all one million of my followers are from the same video. I mean, it's a few videos, but it's the same kind of video. It's my low budget. Can I guess which one it is? Yeah. Go for it. Is it the phone, Matrix one? Yeah, it's like the low budget camera tricks. So there was one video actually where I attached like a phone to a ceiling fan

and then made that into like a Matrix polo time effect. And I got 300,000 followers from that one video. So every time I got a surgeon followers, it was the same thing. I would attach a phone to some household object, find some hack to do a camera trick with it. And people are following me for that. And I was just like, I'm out of household objects. I'm out of ideas. I just felt like I was running out of ideas

and I was like, I have to find new tools, new toys to play with. And in the meantime, I was starting to see some of like the really insane AI stuff coming out in white papers. But it was all like two-minute papers, like research videos of researchers like shooting whatever they had in their bedroom. And of course, they're so focused on the research,

it's not their job to think about the storytelling or the cynics. of it. And I was like, huh, that's interesting. I don't think anyone is actually doing that yet. So I could try doing that. And so I started experimenting with like, well, let's take the research from white papers and make it a social media friendly video. And I started doing that at the beginning of this year. And it was just so fun. It was, it was, I think I'm like a very novelty seeking personality and like my greatest motivation is can I try to do something that haven't quite been done before. And yeah, sure, like, probably someone has done it, but can I find my own, like, original twist on it? And so the fact that these white papers, no one was really

using this technology, no one was really using in creative ways. So I could be like, wow, I really am the first to do something with this. That was very exciting for me. Whereas, trying to come up with, like, the latest iPhone transition, all the ideas are taken. It is very, very hard to think of something clever or new with an iPhone. camera trick, TikTok transition, very, very, very hard. But with the AI stuff, it's like, this is just free for all right now. Yeah. And I know that a lot of these tools are becoming more democratized, more available. But there was, I think, a little bit of a technical gap too, right, in order for you to actually start playing with these AIs relative to the average creator. Is that

right? Yes, there is. And I'm not that technical. I took a coding class once in college, but I prefer not to get into that myself. So I actually work with really talented programmers who help me run it or they'll teach me to set it up. So that's why I think when Dolly came out, I was like, oh, this is requiring no technical ability. Like this is, if you can do a Google image search, you can use Dolly. And so that was really interesting for me. Yeah. And I want to talk about those like second, third order effects of having that fully democratized. But you mentioned Dolly. I've also seen you use a ton of other tools. So I'm curious to hear from you, like, what are some of the other tools that maybe others haven't heard of or that you're playing around with?

Or maybe like, Dolly is the first AI tool that you use. But I think you also use other ones to like clean up a video or to like iterate on the creation from Dolly. So can you share maybe some of the tools that you're playing around with? Yes. So there are a few with the image generation ones, which are really popular right now, there's Dolly, there's Midger. journey, there's stable diffusion, there's disco diffusion. I think if you're actually watching the video version of this podcast, by the way, we'll have like visuals. Yes, we'll bring all of them up. Yeah. And so those are really popular right now. I also think there are other ones that are,

they require more technical knowledge, but they enable more techniques that are less mainstream, and so therefore more unique if you can pull them off. So one of them is Dane. Dane is really simple. All it does is it applies artificial slow motion to your video. But I thought it could be used in really interesting, creative ways by actually shooting like a custom stop motion video for the purpose of it being interpolated to create these impossible movements. And you'll just, I can't describe.

I think I saw one of yours. It was like you as a lawnmower or something, right? Like lying on the ground and then you basically get dragged across. And is that using Dane? Right, exactly. So if you're just listening to this, imagine like a stop motion of someone on the ground planking basically and then just like slithering across the ground in stop motion, right? But then with Dane, you can make it perfectly smooth. And so it

looks like I'm literally being dragged on the ground by like an invisible string or something. But actually that was just a stop motion video that we used AI to smooth out. And so I did that with James Perlman. So he helped me out with smoothing everything out. Other tools are Nerf. So Nerf has gotten pretty popular. Nerf is a way to use any camera like your phone to scan a scene and then all of a sudden you have this beautiful 3D like scan of it. And what's interesting about it is it's different than photogrammetry because it can handle like light. It's basically constructing like a particle light field. And so when you look at things from different angles, the light changes. And so that's why it can handle mirrors, whereas like traditional photogrammetry can't. Then,

There are other tools, too, that we've played with. I recently discovered E.B. Synth, which I actually learned is not an AI tool, but I use that to basically figure out how to make Dolly work for video. So Dolly is photo only, but using EBSSynth, I was able to make Dolly work for video. Very cool. And we'll talk about this later, but you ended up doing like an AI fashion show, right? Yes. With the combination of many of these tools. I want to hear from you, though, a lot of these tools are quite nascent.

We're going to see a lot more of them come to market. How do you see them all playing together? Because let's just use the text to image generators. So you have Dolly, you have stable diffusion, you have Mid Journey. There will be many more. A lot of them are similar, but also what I'm imagining, if we like extrapolate many years, like how will they differentiate? How will you as a creator or how will consumers decide, I'm going to use Dolly or I'm going

to use stable diffusion? Will they be different business models or how do you think that's going to evolve? I can speak from the creator side, maybe more from the business side, but I think right now, AI, in the mass media, there's sort of this misconception or perception that AI is just this like all-powerful thing that's going to replace humans. But I think a more interesting way to think of it is that they are tools. And each one is a specific tool for a specific purpose,

just like I would have like a calculator or a compass or something else. Where you get interesting things is where you combine the tools, right? So for example, you can generate an image in Dali and then you can use Capcut, which is like an app on your phone that will literally turn any image into like a 3D image. Then there's another problem which is Dali and Mid Journey. I think all of these image synthesizers have, which is that they don't do human faces very well. there will be like artifacts and the eyes they'll just look kind of droopy or a little messed up

well guess how you can fix them you can run them through FaceTune the app that all influencers use and that'll fix it and so actually FaceTune can fix it to that degree because I've seen some of the outputs from Dali as an example and they're really kind of It'll fix them to be flawless

I mean it depends on the image but I have seen it do it flawlessly okay you know it's it gets harder and harder to reach perfection right so you could be the AI researcher trying like really really hard to get that last 1% or like a creator who should be like I'm just going to run this through face tune yeah yeah yeah I also wonder whether some of these tools become more specialized because these text to image generators are quite broad right they're being trained on like all of the internet and they're being used for use cases of like literally again all of the internet and because there's going to be so many of them I do

wonder whether they become specialized, like maybe some of them become specialized for just hyper-realistic human photography and other ones become really specialized for really like generative illustrations or something like that. Do you think that might happen or do you think they'll continue to stay really broad? You know, different companies will have different strengths and then they'll continue to be able to differentiate by sort of specializing in that. But I do imagine that some of these companies are going to buy other companies. And then so they'll have more verticals, kind of like how Meta bought

like WhatsApp and Instagram. I see that happening with AI tools too. Right. Yeah. So like if we use meta as an example, they basically tried to own messaging. And so you might see like a similar phenomena with AI tools. Let's jump into a really

cool example of how you deployed AI, which is something I mentioned before. You got commissioned by Cosmo magazine to create their first AI generated magazine cover. We'll throw it up on the screen. It looks awesome. And you've also done, as you talked about, a behind the scenes explainer. But for those who are not familiar with this project of yours, can you share a little bit more about how it went down? Yes. So this was kind of shortly after

Dali was released, the people Open AI gave me a call. And they were like, hey, we have this really cool potential opportunity where Cosmo wants to make the first ever AI generated magazine cover. And they were like, and we want you to generate it. I'm like, that's great. crazy. And so I mean, my first reaction was like worried, I guess. Like I hope I can do a good job because I can't emphasize enough how much like the human is needed in this process, you know? You can't actually have a fully AI generated magazine cover because you have to give a prompt. And I guess you could theoretically ask like an AI to generate the prompt, but still the human needs to give some input, right? And so for our process, actually, we went through

so many different rounds of iterations. And eventually we landed on a creative direction of a woman astronaut. And this was actually, I thought, a really clever workaround by Open AI to not show a human face. Because at that time, human faces were not allowed in Delhi. And we also were like, well, what race is this one going to be, too? We didn't want to make a race statement. And so by making it a woman astronaut, it could be any ethnicity as well. So they had that huge direction. And then they showed me a reference image that was generated in Dali. And I was like, damn, this is so good. I don't know that I can even top this image. And I was just like, I don't know that I can make a better image than this. So I spent hours trying to make a better image than that. And I could not.

And I was like, like, they hired me to do this. I obviously have to do a better job. what they quickly threw together. So I just kept going for like a few more hours. And then eventually I like, I was like, okay, I kept on troubleshooting it. I was like, okay, I want this woman to walk with swagger. I kept on saying like walking confidently, walking proudly, like walking energetically. And none of those problems working out. And then eventually I was like walk with swagger and then boom.

Then I got the hip thrust. And then the other thing I was thinking of was there's an influencer tip that's popular on social media for taking photos. The hack is that you bring the camera to the ground and shoot from the ground up to make it look really dramatic. And I was like, oh, let me try that. So then I was like, how about wide angle shot from below? And then boom, it made it way more dramatic. And then the image that I got actually, its face was sort of messed up. So then I did in painting and stuff to like fix the face. And and then I did in painting to like extend the boots. So I did quite a bit of fixing up of the original image. If you look at the original image, it was quite a bit of a diamond in the rough. If you look at my behind the scenes video, there was a significant amount of human work to make it happen. Yeah. And we'll share that. When you say in painting, just for people who aren't familiar, you're literally, you're still using AI for that, right? But you're basically selecting a portion of the outputted image. You're saying, okay, I like a lot of this, but I don't like this area. So like, can you, can you in paint? Can you replace that specific region? In painting is like magic Photoshop. Like if Photoshop worked magically, that's what it would be. So imagine there's like a photo and let's say, you don't like what you're wearing or you don't like the person's background or you don't like anything about it, you erase that, you type in what you want, and then boom, you get three

options. Which is so incredible. And that's what you also used partially for your fashion show. So again, we'll talk about that later. But I want to get a sense of, you talked about the fact that humans need to be involved and that it took several iterations. Like how many iterations are we talking in this spectrum or this route to the final image? It will depend a lot from artists. artists. You know, I think some people, they'll share their first prompt, and that's interesting. Some people will spend maybe five to ten prompts. And then for some people where they're really trying to achieve a very specific result for a specific project, I mean, we'll be in there for like hours and hours running like dozens or hundreds of prompts. And in the early days of Dali,

it was unlimited and free. So it was a little easier to do back then. Yeah. And I think it's, I don't know if they, I think they may have changed their business model recently or their pricing. But I saw an article that this woman was basically creating like a llama dunking a basketball. So we'll pull that up too. But I think that one took a hundred iterations. And I think it was like around $13 with that pricing. So it gives you an idea. And as you said, it'll depend.

But I think the maybe more interesting question is how fungible was Karen in that process? And I don't want to dismiss you. But if you gave average. Joe, the same project and the same tool. Do you think they would come up with anything comparable? I think a lot of people would have been able to make a really good Cosmo cover. The people who would have done it best are people who have a good artistic eye, have the kind of the patience and the motivation to keep going and keep refining on the prompt

and who can describe what they see in their head. And so a lot of these people are not necessarily traditional artists. You know, I think a lot of people could have made a really, really good result. There's actually an example that I have that we can show on screen. I, a while ago, wanted to expand the girl with a pearl earring. So you may have seen one thing that you can do that was actually just announced is you can expand paintings in Dali. And so you can basically take a famous painting and then imagine what was all around it.

So you can take like the Mona Lisa and imagine like, Where was she? You can take the girl with a pearl earring, imagine everything that was around her. And so I made a video a while back where I imagined her like in a library and she was holding a book. And I was like, I want her to be like an educated woman, you know. And so I made that. And then I actually am working with a project with Open AI actually right now. It's one that they commissioned. It's not out yet, but it will probably be out by the time this podcast releases. So if you go on my Instagram on Karen X-Chang, you'll be able to go. and see this filter.

We made this Instagram filter where we expanded these famous paintings and you can actually go inside through them and see these famous paintings. And I looked at my girl, The Pearl Earing, and I was like, this can be done better. And so I hired August Camp,

who is the person who taught me about this method, and she has spent way more time in Dolly than I have. She's so artistic and talented. I hired her to do this pearl earring. And when she showed me hers, I was just like, moved to tears almost, like jaw drop. I was like, that is what you made. And so I felt like she was irreplaceable in this. I mean, I could have hired 10 different artists to do this pearl earring and gotten 10 very different results. And what I like about this example is that everyone is starting with the same source image.

And so it almost establishes like a little bit of like a control for it. And so I think this is the perfect case study for like, hey, different humans get very different results with AI. Yeah. It's a tool, as you said. But the reason I asked if you were fungible is because I just, I really wonder how this progresses in terms of we know it's going to be somewhat of a democratizing force because now a bunch of people who like couldn't paint or couldn't do Photoshop in certain ways can now do

it and create all of this art or these outputs. But I do wonder, then, does that make a lot of people really successful or a lot of people really capable? Or does it still surface the very, very best to the top, right? Where there's a different filter and now the filter is prompt engineering versus painting or drawing or singing or whatever it might have been in the past. So do you think that's still the case where you're still going to see these like outliers who are just so much better than the rest? Or do you think it'll be more of a level playing field than what we're seeing before? Okay. So I think that what this is going to do, what AI art is going to do is it's going to significantly lower the barrier to entry to become an artist. To be an artist right now,

you have to have a lot of time, a lot of training. Sometimes the monetary financial need means to be able to do that or the willingness to be like a starving artist to do it or it's a hobby on the side. There's definitely a barrier to being an artist. And now it's like everyone can do it. I almost liken these image synthesizers like Dali or Mid Journey to like a Peter Pan. But instead of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, it takes the artistic skill of artists and it's like gives it to everyone. Like here you go. You know? And so I do think that a lot more people are going to be empowered to be artistic or to be artists because they didn't necessarily have the patients to go learn oil painting, but they actually do have the talent to be able to describe

what's in their imagination and continue to refine until they get the result they want. So a lot of people are going to be empowered to be artists. There will still be the standouts and the extraordinary people because they're going to be the ones who are finding different or creative or innovative ways to do it. As much innovation as there is, there's always going to be the ability to combine things in new ways or, you know, find the latest. So I definitely think that there's going to be a lot more artists, a lot of unhappy artists, a lot of happy artists, and also still standout artists. Yeah, I mean, it's almost just reshaping the like skill ecosystem. And some people who have invested in skills for many decades, if they were just like

an A plus oil painter, unfortunately, for the, them, that skill is somewhat being replaced by this technology. And it reminds me a little bit of, you know, if we use like Uber as an example, like some of those taxi drivers had invested in their taxi license for many, many years. And so there's kind of a parallel there. Doesn't mean it's bad or good, but it is just a fact that these AIs are like, as you said, almost cherry picking skills and dropping them on the rest of the population. And it's this great experiment to see what comes out of that. I also kind of want to hear from you, as you worked with these AIs, was there any aha moments? Or did you feel like it was truly a back-in-forth process? Or did you feel like it was

unidirectional? And let me explain what I mean by that. If it was unidirectional, you're basically giving the AI prompts. You're seeing what comes back and you're like, no, no, that's not what I want. You have a vision. But if it's more bidirectional, did you get a sense of like, gave it a prompt? You got something back and you go, whoa, I didn't even think of that, but I like that. So was it more unidirectional or was it more bidirectional? It's 100% the second one. It does feel like a collaboration. And so you oftentimes get things you don't expect. And you're like, oh, I didn't think of that. Let me go down that rabbit hole now more. That reminds me of something I want to discuss with you, which we've actually talked about before in a call we had, which is the perception

of AI. So there's almost two framings, and I know this is overly simplistic, but on one side, there's human versus AI or human versus machine. It's like an age-old trope. And then there's another which is human plus AI, right? Which is more optimistic. It's like, whoa, like what can we do with this partnership? And you've told me that you feel almost a responsibility to portray this technology, these tools in a certain way, maybe even, you know, I don't want to put words in your mouth,

but more of this optimistic versus pessimistic doomsday lens. So can you just speak to why you feel that? that responsibility or almost how you think AI should be portrayed or how you want to portray it. I've had to unlearn a lot of my bad habits in terms of like I am a trained viral video creator and so in many ways I'm trained very similar to the way a reporter would be, which means that I'm rewarded for making clickbait headlines. And so when all this AI stuff came out, My first instinct was like, oh, let me make a bunch of human versus AI. Like, let's have the AI do something and the human do something and let's have judges critique and say which one's better.

That was my first instinct to do that. And then I realized, like, well, what is that just going to do? That's just going to, it's just going to freak people out, you know? And I do think there are reasons to be worried about AI. I think there are very many legitimate ones. and it will negatively impact some people more than others. But AI is a technology. It can be used for good.

It can be used for bad. And I think it clicks that like every gravitational force for the media is going to push towards the bad, because that is what's going to get more clicks and engagements and views. And what's not the natural gravitational force is to actually think of ways to use AI for good. And so I was also in this turning point in my career where I just spent two years optimizing for growing followers

and I finally just sort of let go of that. And I was like, what would it look like if I stopped trying to grow my followers? What would it look like if I actively stopped trying and just made like what I wanted to make? I was like, well, since I no longer care about growing my followers, which was very freeing for me, I was like, well, I actually don't have to do this clickbait thing.

I actually don't have to try to get the most views by doing this controversial AI stuff. I actually can just make like whole, wholesome, positive, find creative uses of it. Because if it's a technology that can be used for good or for a bad, like, why not? You know, it's more rewarding for me to make it for good. Even if it's less viral, oh, well, it doesn't matter.

Have you found that things have been less viral when you go that more optimistic route? I think on a one-off basis, each thing is less viral. There are many pieces where I was like, if I had written the headline in a more controversial way, it would have gone bigger. But I definitely think long term, it's a better strategy for me to consistently put out positive stuff. So people associate that with the content of putting out. Yeah, because I was just curious. I mean, you mentioned news as an example. Pessimism cells, right? Clickbait cells. It captures your attention. Fear is like a very natural human emotion. But I do wonder if, to your point, more optimistic creations endure, right?

So, like, people follow you because they're like, Karen is this inspiring person. She's learned all these technologies. She's creative. So they view you as truly this creator that they more so want to be like instead of, I think, pessimism sometimes is quite surface level, right? It does capture your attention, but you're not inching to go back to hear from that creator. Right? It's very, like, transient.

Yes, I think that's a great insight. It's like you can make something go viral, but it's a one-off, and people aren't necessarily going to be inspired to continue to hear from you. Or you can continue to put out positive content, and each piece of positive content isn't going to get as many views, but you will kind of form a more long-term relationship in people's minds. And there was actually this really incredible quote that I saw a while ago, and it actually changed a lot of how I think about things,

as a content creator, doing social media. And I don't remember who said it, but the quote is, seek respect, not attention. It lasts longer. And I was like, wow, because I was on this hamster wheel of chasing likes and views.

And as anyone who has made a viral video knows, it's over so quick. You can have a million views one day and then it completely dies down by the next. And so people get on this hamster wheel, of addiction, of continuing to turn out content to try to get viral videos. And I was on that hamster wheel for years and just being like, when does this end? Like, why am I doing this? Why am I continue? You know, and it's, it doesn't feel good. It's addicting. And then I saw that quote.

And I was like, oh, if I actually just put more effort into making more memorable good content, I don't have to put out content as often. And yeah, I would much rather have the respect of a few people who I respect rather than the shallow attention of millions who forget about it by the next day. On that point, if we even remove the feel good, I feel respected, et cetera, part of it, it's also good business. And what I mean by that is a lot of people view attention as the end goal. Like, I want a million followers. I want this number of people to pay attention to me. But ultimately, you need to convert that attention if you want this to be a long-term game, it's to find clients or to sell a course or to start a rolling fund, right? There's many like

versions of turning attention into business or commerce. But that second part of conversion does not work if you're just doing these like viral things. And I operate more on Twitter, but as an example of this, something I've been pretty outspoken about is these tweet threads, which are just so overdone and so templated. They work. But they're just really, really surface level. And ultimately, what I find is I see a lot of creators feed into that. And they're like, okay, I'm going to go all in on this thing that I don't believe in. I don't feel good about, et cetera. But it's going to bring me hundreds of thousands of followers.

But then again, coming back to the point, it's like, well, try converting those followers into something that generates you money or that is long lasting. And it's very hard, right? Because those followers don't actually love your content. They don't buy into you. They just happen to be like, oh, okay, another thread. It's almost like a habit for them to engage with that. kind of work. I'm so glad you said that because I feel the same way. And ultimately, this is my

job. The millions of followers are useless to me if I can't make a penny off of it. Like, I'm not going to put in all this effort. It's my job, right? I need to make money out of it. And I remember that I used to feel really bitter when I would see these TikTok videos blow up and get millions and millions of views. And they would be the most inane things. Like, for example, I'll give you an example of a TikTok video that can go really viral. It's a video where someone's like, try to get the number of hearts and the number of comments to be the same. It gets like tens of millions of views because it's a very smart engagement bait, right? It's a very clever engagement bait. And I'll be mad at that. And you know, there's other examples that are less clever. There's just straight up garbage on TikTok

that is getting millions and millions of views. And that is so, demotivating for creators, VFX creators, artists who are putting like hundreds of hours into their craft to make something look really beautiful. And then it completely flops and doesn't get very many views on social media. And I used to be so bitter about that. And then someone told me and then I learned over time that this was actually very much true is that the people who are putting out low effort content all the time getting millions of views, they're not the ones getting hired by major respected brands, you know, they're not actually getting great opportunities off of their follower account. Whereas I know people who make incredible content, they only

have like 20,000 followers. They're making bank, you know? Exactly. I just have to say, I resonate with what you said so much there as a creator myself. Again, I operate more with Twitter, but same thing. I'll see these threads and I'm like, oh my God, what is going on? are people liking and retweeting this and why is this one account blown up? It's really low quality compared to some other accounts that I follow where I'm like, this is gold. This is gold. Why is no one paying attention? But yes, I think it's not productive to focus on that because ultimately the people who are putting the best stuff out there are the ones who, if we take the whole value chain, right, like the whole process and consider that it's a business, those are the

successful quote-unquote businesses. People put so much value on the number of likes and the number of views because it is the only number we can really see and judge ourselves by. And so it's like, we've been trained since kindergarten to put value in the number judgment. You know, when you get like a 97 on a test. Wow, that's so good. You get like a 60. That's a D. That's bad. And so we are so trained to take that feedback of numbers as the truth. And, And then social media comes along and you get lots of views versus a little. It's so easy to say, well, a video was great because it got tons of views and it's not because it got very little views. And it took me years to learn that that is, it is such a bad metric, but it's the only objective one we have.

I know, I know. But it's hard sometimes, as we talked about, it's hard to check out of that ecosystem to be like, oh, I'm actually going to focus on the things that I want to put out there, the things that I'm proud of instead of feeding it. into, as you said, what some people might argue is an objective metric of like, this is what people want. So you also have to accept that. You have to go against so many natural human instincts. Yes. I want to talk about another topic, which I've seen everywhere. It's coming up in basically every conversation I have around creators, around AI. And it's the idea of IP, right? So we talked about being hired for things, but also owning your creations is something that's mattered a lot for not just independent creators, but if you think about all the way up, films, entertainment, like,

what matters is who owns the IP. And AI introduces a very, very interesting filter on this. Honestly, I don't know who, if anyone has the answers, but what I want to walk through is, where is the value along the AI creation process? So there's the information that the AI is trained on, which you could argue the output wouldn't exist without that. So maybe that's where the IP is. There's also the argument that the creators of the AI tools, right, Open AI, Mid-Journey, etc., well, the outputs also wouldn't exist if the AI tool didn't exist. And then, of course, there's the prompt, which you could also argue,

if someone doesn't enter a very, very specific prompt, the output also does not exist. And I've even seen a company yesterday that was selling prompts, because it is valuable to have the right prompts. I've bought a prompt before. There you go. So there's probably going to be a whole economy around this. So I want to hear from you. Obviously, there's maybe no right or wrong answer.

But how do you think about that? Like where is the IP and how on earth will we think about that as creators moving forward? Yeah, I don't know. I actually, I've thought about this, but I don't have the answers. I'm not a lawyer. I know that also, like, lawyers don't even have the answers. Congress doesn't have an answer for this yet. It's all so new.

And I think it does, yeah, I don't know. Well, let me rephrase the question to something that I think you can comment on, which is how creators get paid, how creators charge. So something that we talked about before was that for your projects, whether it was with Cosmo or we were actually talking about a project. You said that you felt like it was really, important that those projects were paid for. That might sound obvious, but as we talked about before, AI in certain cases might not cost that much. It might cost like $2 to run the prompts you're looking

for. But some of those projects historically, like I don't know how much Cosmo would typically pay for a magazine cover, but it's not $2. Right. So how do you think about the way that you charge as a creator in this new ecosystem? Yeah. When I work with clients, I'll literally say And I'm like, hey, even if you don't hire me, and sometimes it doesn't work out. And so I'm like, hey, you know, my schedule doesn't work out for this project. But whoever you hire, please pay them. Please allocate this budget. Because we're at like a moment in history that's very vulnerable where certain standards can

be established. And I would like to see the standard establish that if you hire a human to use an AI as a tool, then you pay the human. Do you think that holds up, though? And I ask that because I think like many industries, the very best of the best, if there really is like a 1% or like a 10x prompt engineer, they will get paid very well. We've seen that happen in many fields. But then you also see when things get democratized, like it's very hard for those price economics to not change, right?

Because you imagine, for example, that at the beginning, maybe certain craters are, you know, holding their ground. They're saying, we must be paid X. But then you're going to have insert crater here that is like, actually I'll take half of that. Or maybe I'll take a hundred of that price. I think that's a really good point. I think there is incredible downward pressure. And so what's probably going to end up happening, unfortunately, is that there will be the more well-known people who can still charge higher rates. But then for the vast majority of people, like there's such insane downwards pressure on it. And I do worry about that for creators. And I don't really know how that is all going to play out. Yeah. It's really hard to predict. But

Yeah, I wonder how some of these fields change. I mean, I want to hear from you because you've started to work with some of these companies. At this point in 2022, is AI, or at least the tools that people are using, are they seen as more gimmicks? Or do you see companies like really investing in this and saying, oh, actually, we are going to replace our photographer with AI? Or, you know, to use Cosmo as an example, was working with you, just something where they could put their flag in the ground and say, hey, we're innovative. we're working with AI, or do you see them actually going and like doing every fifth cover with AI? How are companies thinking about this? In 2022, it is most certainly a gimmick and a headline grabber. It is like, let's be innovative. Let's be first. Let's be on top of this. I would imagine

in 2023, the answer to that will be probably be different. People will actually start using it as their workflow because it makes sense and not as a headline grabber. Really interesting. I saw that there was someone, a reporter who used a mid-journey art for his article, I think about Alex Jones, and then he went viral in a bad way in that he got like majorly attacked on Twitter for using mid-journey art for a magazine article. He was attacked because he didn't hire a human artist instead. It was, I think the Atlantic, correct me if I'm wrong. I think what people didn't have context was, was that the department he was in, the image that he would have used instead would have been like a Getty images or like some stock photo. It wouldn't

have been like a official commission, right? So that was what he was replacing, but he still got attacked for it. So I think, you know, the first few, the arrows attack the leaders, right? So I think the first few people who are going to start using AI are going to get back but it's going to get less and less and less until it's accepted. I honestly discussing some of these downsides is very uncomfortable for me because I don't know what's going to happen and I do think that it could be bad for a lot of people and I personally do try to stay optimistic and try to see the optimistic side, but there's no denying that like it is going to be bad for a lot of people and it is going to be good for a lot of people.

It is a game-changing technology. I've heard some people say that it is like the technology of our generation in terms of how it shapes things. I also heard Sam Altman say, which I thought was like an interesting frame. A lot of people will talk about, and we even did this at the beginning of our call, they'll be like, when is this going to change things fundamentally? He didn't give, at least in the interview, I saw a definitive timeline because I think no one can predict that. Probably smart. I shouldn't have given any numbers either. No, no, no, no. But we were just having fun. But I think he was just having fun. But I think he was. his framing was really interesting, which is that he believes that, again, it's, it's like the game-changing innovation. And if you look at humans in the spectrum of time that we've been on this earth, if we're talking five years or we're talking 50 years, that is still just like a drop in the hat, right? It's such a short period of time where it's almost inevitable. I think many people in this space will say that AI within 50 years is just like going to really, really fundamentally shape or change our world. And so, again, like, coming back to his point, it was like, if it's in five months, five years, 50 years, in the spectrum or the span of human

civilization, it's nothing, right? And it doesn't seem like nothing within our lifetimes. But, yeah, I mean, coming back to the idea of it helping people, it hurting other people, how do you think about what creators should be focused on? Should they be focused on learning prompt engineering, should they be focused on a field that they think won't be touched by AI if that exists? Like, what are you doing as a creator to say, you know what? I don't want to be left behind. So I'm going to be learning X, Y, and Z. Well, I don't think the answer is focused on prompt engineering because I wouldn't be surprised if in a very short amount of time, AI gets extremely good at prompt engineering. And so those people are less, you know, relevant. In fact, I was actually

just talking to someone who was using GPT3 to write prompts to run through stable diffusion. So I would say that the best thing to do is not to learn specific skill, because that's going to change. Probably by the time this podcast comes out, you know, I think the best thing is to adopt a mindset that you have to always be learning and to accept that the model that humans had for much of humanity, which is that you could kind of choose a career and then have that career for life, that's gone. We are at the last dying, grasping breaths of those days. I think the sooner you can accept and embrace the mindset that the world is always changing. The skills you have to learn always need to change. The better off you'll be. I don't know if we've

lived in a time that's been so exponential where these technologies are changing. But humans have adapted. So we'll see how we adapt. I mean, some interesting examples. You pointed me towards an article from Nathan Bashas, where he talked about even simple things like the introduction of unsplash completely changed how companies stand out with their design because all of a sudden, stock photography, like hyper-realistic pictures, became widely available. And so then you saw what I think people call Memphis design come up. And you saw all these like very similar. looking illustrations. And so I do wonder if there's some version of that, right, where like we have access to unlimited 2D art, so maybe 3D art is important just as an example, but then of course

AI will eat that. So I don't know. I think it's interesting to kind of think through how humans might evolve, or do you think that this stuff is just moving so quickly? I think humans are remarkably adaptable. And so we will adapt. I do think that all ready, the world is moving much faster than human evolution can keep up with. So, for example, we weren't really evolved to sit in office chairs all day. We weren't evolved to hear the comments of thousands of people on social media. We were evolved for like 30-person tribes, right? And so you see all of these mental health and physical health problems that we have. A lot of those are because human evolution hasn't caught up to how much culture has changed. And so I say two things.

One, humans are remarkably adaptable. But two, there is a limit to how much humans can actually evolve from like, you know, a Charles Darwinian evolutionary perspective to keep up with some of this stuff. So we are entering a completely unknown time. I'm just, I'm trying to stay positive and try to highlight as much of the positivity as possible. But, yeah, there is a lot of uncertainty. It is such a sea change. And to your point, like even as two people who believe fundamentally that technology is good, or at least I don't want to put words in your mouth, that's something I believe.

It is sometimes hard to just, like, fathom what the hell we do and who's going to be disrupted and it's impossible to say that there aren't negative externalities. Yeah, I would say I think technology is neither good nor bad. I think I like to view it as neutral. It's like the neutral canvas. And so I find that to be the most empowering because if it's neutral, then we have the ability to influence it in which direction. I've heard other people use it's like a mirror, right? It mirrors back to humans. Ultimately, certain things that maybe are below the surface sometimes. Yeah, that's good. I like that. Taking a little bit more of an optimistic lens, I've seen AI used in a ton of different ways. Like, I saw something recently, which was like an AI that helped write Excel formulas, which I thought was quirky and neat. I also saw one that like takes legal jargon and simplifies it for the end user. Curious to know from you, do you have a wish list?

Are there things that AI has not touched it where you're like, man, I would really love this. And while you think about it, I'll just quickly share one. super simple, but we're doing these podcast recordings with video. And every so often, I would just love to re-say something, right? And things like Descript allow you to re-say something with audio very easily. But I want that with video. Because if we're airing the video versions of these, I want to just be able to be like, remove my filler words and, you know, fix up my performance. But obviously, it'll look ridiculous. If the video portion isn't equivalent, So that's my little wish list for anyone at OpenAI or otherwise to do.

I know they're probably coming out with video at some point, but to sync the two. What I have wanted for AI is video tools for creators that are AI power. That's why I've been doing so much hacking trying to get like these image tools to work for video because it's not quite there yet, but I keep on like trying to make it work. Once it does though, I don't even know what's going to happen. So I'm almost like, be careful what you wish for, you know? yeah i mean it's coming right right it's it's for sure coming it's hard for me to say a wish list i guess because i'm just trying to keep up with what's already coming out oh totally something we

talked about before we jumped on which is like a neat little idea just to get the wheels spinning for any listeners as we were talking about audio a i have you actually seen any AI ASMR oh no i've never heard of that no no i haven't either but i was just You know, what would be interesting with ASMR is like if they could connect to your senses and measure your response to it. Oh, yeah. And then in real time, like, adjust ASMR, update it to your sensory response. Oh, I like that.

Startup idea. I mean, people are already playing around with audio AI. And so obviously, I haven't seen the ASMR stuff, but I feel like that that's coming soon. And I've heard other people talk about this. the realm of video as an example where you're, let's say, in a movie, and this is, you know, a little further away, but based on your prompts, it goes another direction, right? And so it's almost like personalized content to the consumer based on their needs or their prompts. And so that's an interesting. I have an answer for your question. Here's my wish list for AI. My wish list is

actually for all humans to take the ethics of it very seriously. And what I mean by that is like, my wish list is that everyone working on AI be held to a standard to be using it for positive forces rather than negative. And that we somehow develop an insane amount of cultural pressure that anyone who's not using for positive sources is like not ostracizes from society, but penalized in a way that it is severely dissentivized. How do you think about what is good and bad, though, in that context? Okay, so, I mean, it's very hard to be the arbiter of that, but for example, like, deception is bad, right? So when you're altering things, you need to disclose what you alter and how. Do you think that we will need to somehow label things as AI generated or human generated? Because, you know, a simple example, you brought up deception.

but people do these deep fakes, right, of people without their consent. They're not quite there yet, but they're very close to be. Right. Well, have you seen the Tom Cruise ones? They're actually fully the Tom Cruise deep fakes. I can't tell. I think most people can't tell. Okay. So we're already there. It's not even a future. We're already there on edge cases and we'll pretty soon be there for mass cases. I think that will be developed. I think it will be necessary and it will happen. And I think it will be very similar to like nutrition facts. like it's a universal standard that we have nutrition facts. And so there will need to be some sort of system that like shows, you know, this is a video,

this was produced in this way. I've heard people talk about this. And I might be wrong because I've just, you know, just listening to another podcast, but it likely would have to be at the hardware level, as in run by Apple or Google, etc. Because if it's not at the device level, that's like really easy to hack or to abuse, right? And so it literally would have to be like, okay, this AI is running on this machine, and this machine is plugged into stable diffusion or whatever, insert AI here, and the output in the metadata.

And it would have to be a case where you could not remove it, has that information. It would have to be at the hardware level. And I think it will be first adapted in really high-stakes scenarios where the veracity of something is extremely important. So, for example, in like political messaging, maybe they'll have like a very, very specific kind of camera or hardware where it cannot be altered. So for certain types of like really important messaging where it's really important that it not be faked, whereas like, you know, someone's social media influencer video, it doesn't matter if something was like adjusted or tweaked, you know.

So there's like standards or that's part of the regulation that in certain fields you must use certain hardware or at least you must use like a suite of hardware that that plugs into these. I mean, regulation will catch up, but I actually think it will be somewhat self-regulated in the sense that some people will have the need to show that what they do is true and not altered. And then there will be companies that pop up that say, okay, this is the technology, it does that, and then there will be people who then buy that technology and use it of their own free will and accord, not because of regulatory requirements. Because it'll take a while for the regulation to catch up. Yeah, but I do wonder, in that case, like, yes, the good actors will use.

use the technology that has that functionality, but then bad actors likely won't, right, unless there's regulation. That's why I say that, like, somehow I want my wish list is for the culture to change because humans are a self-enforcing society. You know, we are very naturally tribal and we behave well largely because that's what's expected of us from other humans. It's not like someone's watching us at every single moment, but we still in general want to behave well. And a lot of that is the cues that you're getting from culture. And so I would love to see a culture developed where, hey, as humans, as part of being a good human, we use technology responsibly and ethically. I don't know how that's going to happen. That's why it's

my wish list. I love going down these rabbit holes because it does just get the wheel spinning. I'm like, man, there's so much to figure out. And when you're dealing with an exponential technology, policy, regulation, IP, a lot of this stuff takes time, right? And so I also wonder whether we create regulation or policy, let's say, in 2023, and then by 2025, it's already completely different. I actually think culture can change a lot faster than regulation, much, much, much faster. And I'll give you an example.

The fastest I've ever seen culture change. was the handshake during COVID. How many thousands of years or hundreds of years has the handshake been the golden standard? And then all of a sudden, like socially unacceptable. So many things became socially unacceptable almost overnight because of COVID. And I was like, wow, human culture can change like that.

And then now that the pandemic is better, then like we're back to doing it again. So I do think that we're going to need a lot of cultural forces to kind of sprint ahead of regulation. because the regulation will take time. Yeah. Well, I have no idea how this will progress. It's been fascinating to hear how you think it might progress.

As someone who has played around with these tools, and we'll be sharing a lot of your projects as we talk about them throughout this episode. But I want to end with something really fun, which is that you've worked with tons of creators. Creators that people know, creators that people don't know. Do you have a wish list, or is there one creator that you would just love to partner with? I love throwing this stuff out into the ether because you never know who might make this happen. You know, it's interesting because in the past, I would have had a dream client or a dream something.

But I've actually learned over time that it's not about which celebrity you can get or which brand you can get. But it's, for me, I've learned it's actually about doing my best ideas, my best work. And so the way I do things is I try to matchmake my ideas to a client who will accept them unaltered, essentially, or with the least alteration. possible. So I actually won't answer that question or nothing actually comes to mind because it's mostly about like making the ideas that I want to make. I love that. At least for me, when I was younger, it used to be like, I want to work with these people or I want these companies to hire me. And I think you're right. There is like an evolution like we talked about before where you're almost transcending attention. And you've gotten to a place where actually your focus is how do I make

something really? Yes. It's almost like the master's hierarchy of needs. And it's like, oh, I'm actually just, I'm actually focused on, like, doing the ideas that I want to do. Whereas in the past, like, I know 10 years ago I would have been like, I want to dance in a Coca-Cola commercial. Like, I'm good. I don't need to do that now. And then, like, even two years ago, I was like, I really, really, really, really want to make a commercial for the Apple iPhone.

And now I'm like, I'm good. Like, I don't actually need to do that anymore. So, so, yeah, I don't have one because it's actually about the idea. And it actually is so cheesy. It sounds so cheesy, but it actually is about enjoying making the idea. Well, that's a wonderful place. end things off. So Karen, thank you so much for talking with us today. This was so fun to just think through the optimistic, the pessimistic, the pessimistic, the dystopian, utopian futures that we might

live in. But at the end of the day, I think one of the biggest takeaways for me is that AI is a tool and that tool is being democratized. So that in itself, I think, is exciting for many people to be able to participate in that future. Yeah, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Thank you for these great questions. Thanks for listening to the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, or tell a friend. We also recently launched on YouTube at YouTube.com slash A16Z underscore video, where you'll find exclusive video content. We'll see you next time.