Big Technology Podcast - Is Generative AI Killing Creativity Or Enhancing It? — With Scott Belsky

Episode Date: December 20, 2023

Scott Belsky is the chief strategy officer and executive vice president of design and emerging products at Adobe. He joins Big Technology Podcast to examine the impact of generative AI on creativity. In this interview, we discuss whether AI homogenizes creativity or creates more possibilities. We talk about how Adobe is baking it into its products with generative fill. We also discuss creative attribution for images used to train generative AI models and how friction is actually good. Tune in for one of the most fascinating discussions on the podcast in 2023.

Let's talk about the future of creativity in the AI age with Adobe's chief strategy officer right after this. LinkedIn Presents. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. And today we're joined by Scott Belski. He's the chief strategy officer and executive vice president of design and emerging products at Adobe. And today, I'm so excited to have him on to talk about how AI is going to impact creativity, whether it will homogenize it, as well as a bunch of other fascinating subjects that Scott is looking at in the tech world. So glad to have you here, Scott. Welcome to the show.

Hey, Alex, thank you. Great to see you. You know, we've talked about this in the past, but when I was just starting out way back in the day, I think I was like working in my marketing job at the time in New York City. It must have been 2010, 2011. You gave this presentation while you were the CEO of Behance, kind of talking about the future of community and creativity. And it was, maybe it was in like some small office in New York City. And I remember kind of cramming in the back and being like at the end, like,

who is this guy? Because clearly you're able to see this stuff in just like a very clear and interesting way. And it's led you obviously to great places in your career. So it's very cool to be able to sit down and speak with you on the pod. I appreciate that. Thanks. Great. So let's talk about creativity.

Do you think we are more creative now than we were in the past? I mean, let me just set it up. It does seem like a lot of creativity is homogenized now. Everything kind of looks the same, same formats, same feel, same, you know, amount of creativity is driven by the data. Where do you see the trajectory of creativity today? Well, I'll make two points on this. First of all, I feel like creativity is the world's greatest recycling program.

You know, everything that we get as inputs generates stuff in our brains that then generates outputs. And so, of course, what we are exposed to influences what we put out in the world. And you do have to wonder, if we're all exposed to mass media and we're all getting the algorithmic, you know, whatever's popular and trending and memetic and everything else, does that actually create. more of a center of gravity around kind of the main narrative that maybe makes a lot of more like homogenized output, you know? I'd say that's a really interesting question and and perhaps, right? But of course, any great creative mind will tell you that they expose themselves to crazy things. They, you know, they go traveling. They, you know, they try to find the mistakes of the eye that, you know, that inspire new things. And that's, of course, where creativity comes from. So I don't, I don't

think that maybe there's like a there's a new a new you know the technology is sort of uh of of social feeds and stuff you know counter some of this but i still think that there's genuine you know human ingenuity that drives uh new areas of creativity however you ask this question around are we becoming more creative and uh and i happen to think that unfortunately humanity is typically you know peak creative at five years old because we feel like everything we put out there gets the smile of a teacher and the refrigerator positioning from our parents. And we get this, like, we have this incredible creative confidence because we feel like everything we make and draw is amazing. And then we slowly realize that there's people with

skills that we don't have. And then there's these people called critics that tell us they don't like what we did. And creative confidence kind of goes down quickly. Unless we counter it with design school, you know, and ability to draw and watching YouTube videos and whatever. And you have to wonder if a lot of the new technology, especially the generative AI technology, which I'm sure we'll talk about, if that's actually restoring creative confidence for a lot of humans past that age. Now, if you have an idea and you want to make a quick animated short, you can actually make it. You know, it's like, what an amazing bolstering of confidence that influences what we put out in the world. You said two things that seem to contradict. One is that

that creativity is this recycling machine, which does sound real, like we do just kind of riff on the things we've seen. And then you acknowledge that there's human ingenuity. How do those two balance each other? Better question. How do they exist in tandem? Right, right, right. You know, it's funny, when I advise product leaders on building new products, I always explain to them that a really successful breakthrough product is 95% familiar and 5% retraining. You know, if you try to do everything entirely new and new paradigms of user interfaces and new terminology and new icons, like the customer will just be totally discombobulated and they won't be able to use it. And so the trick is to make enough things that are familiar so that people engage

and then find the one or two things that are completely different and differentiating and like do those in the entirely new way that trains the customer to do something differently, but also distinguishes yourself in market. And in some weird way, I actually feel like creativity is somewhat similar because it's storytelling. At the end of the day, creativity that is effective is creativity that moves us. And we're not going to be influenced and emotionally engaged by creativity unless there's some degree of it that's familiar. So I actually happen to think that a lot of these things that we are picking up from the

world, you know, we are putting into the world work that we put out there. And then the question is like, what are you going to put in that's uniquely yours? And so that's actually the interesting debate right now about if I generate an image entirely just from my prompt. You know, is it my creation? Well, you know, if the prompt has a lot of ingenuity in it, sure. You know, but if you do even more with that asset after you make it, maybe even more so. I think these are some of the questions we're debating these days. Right.

And we're going to get into the generative AI discussion pretty deep in a few minutes. Everybody waiting for that. I promise you it's coming. I also wonder whether, you know, the technology that's expanded our ability to do things has in some way removed a constraint that required us to have better ideas at the source of creative. So, I mean, this is kind of cliche, but let's talk about it. Like you look at some of the ads from like the 60s or the 50s. They're trying to sell a car. And it's like, I mean, it's sort of the Don Draper days, right?

The beautiful picture of the car with like a little, you know, short story about what type of person drives it. I mean, that it was an ad that looked and, I mean, just sort of tugged at the heartstrings in a way that most advertisements don't today. Do you think we kind of, I mean, you know, I think I know your answer because you're working at a creativity technology company. But well, yeah, make the case then for why all this tech has been good, given that we've sort of, it seems like we've overcomplicated a lot of our art today. Well, I think there's this question around the democratization of creativity. And, you know, and as you know, I mean, any brand can create insatiable amounts of content now, whether it's blog posts or images or whatever else. And as a result, especially because of things like SEO and social media,

every one, every creator and every brand is flooding the zone as much as they possibly can. And so will that work? Or are we going to actually crave more meaning? and more emotional engagement as a result of this flooding of the zone. You know, I happen to believe that two things are happening in the world of creativity. We're simultaneously lowering the floor so more people can get in and create stuff that ordinarily couldn't. So you can make that animated short, even though you don't have animation skills, right? I can make a commercial without engaging a huge agency to do it.

We're lowering the floor. That's exciting. That's democratizing. but we're also raising the ceiling. So for those who are the Don Draper types and those who actually do have the skills, they're not saying stagnant either. Like, they're able to cover far more surface area of possibility to find better solutions. And when you ask an amazing creative director

or an amazing designer how they do their best work, it's always about time. Like, they need cycles of discovery. And they always say, like, if I just, I mean, yeah, if I'm given more budget and more time, I will come up with more ideas and I will little them down to a few better options that will ultimately yield a better solution. It's just a function of time. And so in that instance, like this AI technology as well as other efficiencies in the system,

you know, should yield more iconic, more emotionally engaging spots. Yeah, I do think, you know, going back to your point about generative AI, putting technology the hands of so many other people, I mean, the threads that I've seen on Twitter of people like dreaming up different images, whether it's like the president's looking like 70 rock stars or, you know, any matter of, you know, I don't know, just like cosmic imagery that that goes on there. It's incredible because it's kind of interesting. You would never assign a graphic designer to make this. It would be a complete waste of time. And it does seem like this gender of AIWave is really showing us something.

I wouldn't see otherwise. I was talking to just like a little quick example. I was talking to a friend of mine who works like a big fashion label. And his job is to come up with ideas for shoots, like, you know, for the, for the campaigns and what have you. And he said that he had this idea one morning of a, of like a race track with like racing cars. And for some reason, all the drivers of these really. antique old, beautiful cars were Japanese and they were wearing these scarves and they had leather

jackets and he had this like whole vivid image in his head. And so he went to one of these generative AI tools and just made an entire mood board of exactly what is in his head from like this, you know, morning dream sequence he had. And, you know, that became like a mood board that then they at work, like looked at and ultimately refined what became the photo shoot. And it's like, you know, what an amazing toolkit that allows him to hopefully have an even, you know, better executed vision. So that's the kind of thing that I think will actually elevate the types of content that's made. Yeah, it's so interesting. Like when Dolly came out, I looked at it and said, you know what this really is? It's a communication technology. Is that something you'd agree

with? Well, I do think that visual expression and storytelling is a very effective way of sending a message and, you know, what are memes? Like, memes are compression vehicles for knowledge and communication. It's one way for me to tell you something without having to explain it to you, right? And this technology, I mean, memes are creative. They're images, they're visual. So yeah, of course. You know, I think these are methods of communication. They just haven't been available. It was like a language that only certain people knew in society, like 1% or less actually knew how to draw and and graphically create something and you know what happens when that becomes everyone to some extent yeah definitely i mean for me like it's it's definitely

become like the main way that i will draw the story art for my newsletter and i was out of scale where it was just like i'm going to be the only if someone's making the art it was me like it was going to be like a photoshop sorry to use the expression but you know like you guys must like that. It's people using this stuff in creative ways or, or, you know, pulling in a free stock image. And I think it's just enhanced the ability of people to get what I'm trying to say in a way that wasn't happening before and just made the stories more pleasant to read. It's pretty cool. It's true. But, you know, we still need ideas, though. It's like, it's interesting. You know, you can only think, you're only as creative as like the prompt you can come up with also, right?

Totally. And, you know, sometimes when you're thinking of a sunset, like, yeah, you can prompt a sunset, a sunset. But if you explore sunsets captured by famous photographers on a stock website, you're actually probably going to find a better image than you can even generate yourself. So there's, you know, there's like that question of, you know, can we, you know, it's still imagination constraint equation. Right. And my mother-in-law is a graphic designer. And I showed her dolly when it first came out last year.

And she was instantly like, oh, I'm toast. And I was like, no, no, it's not what's going to happen. Like, actually, these professional skills are even more in demand, or you can now communicate with people who want an image better and tailor it to, you know, sort of fit with their imagination. But now, generative AI is also making its way into your products. So I'd love to hear a little bit more about the way that Firefly has been baked in to, and I guess there's creative assist being baked into Adobe products and how designers are starting to use generative fill and other generative tools to make their work better?

Well, we, when we, we did start this journey by putting some of these capabilities out on a standalone website, more like a playground for people to play with. And what we immediately found was that people were excited, but they wanted to do it in their workflows. It was like, okay, this is cool. No, novelty always precedes utility a little bit with new technology, and it's a good way to test, but, wow, like, if I could just do this when I'm doing this in Photoshop, or if I could do this and turn it into a vector, but then edit the endpoints in Illustrator or, you know,

and those are the types of things that we were hearing from almost all of our customers that were playing with this technology. And so then it became actually more of a interface and design innovation exercise. How do we bring some of these capabilities into the workflows that people use. And it's funny, like we have this product called Illustrator on iPad, which is actually not a hugely popular product, but it does, you know, it's Illustrator on iPad. And there was an innovation that the team came up with on that product years ago because we wanted to eliminate a lot of the Chrome, like the buttons and stuff because illustrators don't like that in their view. And so we came up with this kind of progressively disclosed bar, this action bar, where when

you're touching, it like gives you the options that are relevant for that moment, wherever you are in the workflow. And we leveraged that design pattern and we took it into Photoshop to expose the same idea that wherever you are, we can give you the generative actions that are relevant for where you are in your workflow. And that, you know, that one innovation like changed everything for us in Photoshop. Yeah. So what does that look like in Photoshop? So in Photoshop now, when you are touching an image in your editing process and you, you know, and it detects that you could actually expand this image. It just gives you the option of generative expand. You know, if you, if you have a selection of something, you put a mask or, you know, you circle something in Photoshop,

you then have the option of generative fill. And you can just prompt like, I want to put in balloons and then boom. Like, you know, you get balloons, you get many options of balloons. And we just launched this vector, generated vector capability and illustrator. And it's pretty amazing. I mean, you need a, you need a icon or you need a, you know, a pattern. or anything, and anywhere you are in your workflow, you just prompted and get it. And it's, you know, it's, it just spans the possibilities infinitely to some degree. That's pretty cool.

What are you hearing from designers? Like, is this something that's like immediately getting high adoption? Or is this, do you think it's going to take a little bit of time? Yeah. So the adoption is pretty immediate. And, um, and it's pretty, well, let me put it this way. The adoption, you know, within a few weeks of us launching these capabilities and each of these products is higher than probably any other feature we've ever brought into these products

in maybe 10 years. So certainly as long as I've been involved with anything at Adobe. So I think the customers have spoken in that regard. But I think it's still a question of like where else do we integrate it and how do people use it? But I've never met a creative professional that wants to take two hours to do something that they could achieve in two minutes or two seconds. No one wants to do things the long way. The question is, what are they going to do with a lot of their newfound time? Exactly. I mean, it's kind of basic, but the resizing alone is amazing.

Yeah. Like, if, I feel like designers must spend half their day taking that one image that was square, making it horizontal, making it vertical, making it poster size. And if you can use generative AI, I mean, you talked about expand, to expand images, to expand them, to contract them, to produce all those assets in a, snap of a finger, you're all of a sudden left with much happier designers would probably make the whole organization happier. Totally, because they don't want to be doing this mundane repetitive work. And when you give them that time back, you know what they're going to do instead?

They're going to like run more AB tests of different images as opposed to resizing the same images. They're going to start to explore other possibilities and, you know, and propose maybe better solutions. So I think that's the other thing that, you know, I've been involved with a lot of these conversations with companies that are asking this question of, oh, like, is this going to give me more efficiency in the creative team? And what does this mean in terms of do I have to hire less creatives? And, you know, and I always explain, like, first of all, engineers have gotten more productive for the last few decades. And guess what happens? Like, people keep hiring more engineers. Why? Because they get more ingenuity per person and they want more people because

they want to do more things. And it's, you know, unless you're a penny pitching in a private equity owned company, you are probably a company that actually wants to build more products, more features, more marketing campaigns across more platforms and more regions with more testing. And so when you get capacity back and actually get more out of each person on average, actually you end up wanting more people because you end up wanting to do more things to grow your business more. It's sort of like maybe just a natural human tendency of capitalism, if not just humanity overall. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about who owns these images. So it's kind of interesting, right? I'm just thinking through the path here. So someone makes an image. That image is used to train a model. Someone's making another image they use generative fill to enhance it. They own the image. Does the person who previously created that original image that was used to train the model own like one millionth of their image? what is your what's how do you think through this stuff at at adobe well a few things first of all

i'm not a lawyer as you know Alex I spend a lot of time with them these days but I'm not a lawyer myself and and and also the the the rules and the laws around some of this stuff are still in some areas either not fully evolved or TBD and it's also like different regions and the countries are are exploring this in different ways when we get into all the evolution of copyright law and everything else. Currently, there's also a difference between what we are doing and why we're doing it versus what we're legally required to do. I think we've been a little bit more creative, protective, because A, this is our customer base,

and B, we believe actually that this is the way the world's going to go, but some companies are taking a different approach and would disagree with what we're doing. When you make something through generative AI, there's a lot of legal thought that when you edit it in any way, it is yours at that point. And so that could be as simple as, you know, if you're in something and you're expanding an image that you took, it is your image. And it's because you actually generated a lot of it. Now, the question is, is it 50% of the pixels? Is it 99% of the pixels? And I think you pose this good question of, well, at what point is it?

an immaterial level of input or editing that you're making, you know, to be able to claim that you made this image. And I think that's, you know, that's a great, that's one of those like open questions right now. If you, you know, there's some folks that say that if you entirely generate an image just with a prompt and one of these tools that was trained on other people's content, it's not yours unless you edit it further. And that's, you know, again, though, I don't have like a legal position on that per se, but those are like the debates that are happening right now. Yeah. So you're writing on substack. Did you know there's a substack feature that allows you to toggle on and off whether models can train on your work for generative AI purposes? Have you seen that? Yeah, I just actually noticed that yesterday. Funny enough. Yeah. Okay. So what's your choice on that? It is wild. It's like, wow, this has become all of a sudden like, I mean, if you told me two years ago that I would like have an option in the newsletter tool that I'm using to let AI models try.

train on the work. I'd be like, what are you even talking about? But we're here. Well, I was like, first of all, I had some funny ideas, you know, before that feature was discovered, you know, I was thinking, you know, what would happen if I wrote in the end of my newsletter? And by the way, everything I just wrote is fake. And this is incorrect information. And then I put like a wink, you know, to the, you know, to the AI models that are training off of this. Like, would that then tell the model to actually ignore what I just wrote because it's fake? And, you know, is that like a way of me sort of protecting my content from being trained? Like, there's all these kind of mental games now I play.

And also, you know, do you, is this how paywalls are going to become super popular? Because there are certain things you write where you're just going to want them like not on the, not trained. And you want people to have to log in and be able to read it as humans. So there's all kinds of questions there. So what did you choose? I chose to allow training, but I also have a section at the end where I have, like, I share some more provocative thoughts and like things that I'm working on. And I put a very low paywall in front of that that I do, that I give the charity.

But I figured that was one way where I could just like make sure that that stuff, you know, can't be accessed by a bot. Yeah. Wait, do you think the bots can't access underneath the paywall? My understanding is that they're not able to scrape it. I hope so. I guess someone who's like paying manually feeds it to a bot, but I thought it was a safer approach. Yeah.

So I also chose to let it crawl. And at first I was like, no, no, no crawling. And then I was like, wait a second, if someone is talking to like a Bing or a chat GPT and they want to learn about technology and the bot is like pushing. big tech, big technology. I'm like, yeah, of course. It'll be the best advocate I could possibly find. Especially if attribution becomes commonplace. And you can see, you know, where something came from and you can follow up and learn more about it. Exactly. All right, let's take a quick break. Come back after this, talk about some of your writings and implications and a few other

questions about the generative AI business. We back right after this. We're here with Scott Belski, chief strategy officer, an executive vice president of design and emerging products at Adobe. See you, after the break. Hey everyone. Let me tell you about The Hustle Daily Show, a podcast filled with business, tech news, and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. More than two million professionals read The Hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative takes on business and tech news. Now they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily Show, where their team of writers break down the biggest business headlines in 15 minutes or less and explain why you should care about them. So, search for The Hustle Daily Show and your favorite podcast app.

like the one you're using right now. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Scott Belski. You can find his writings at Implications.com. And if you sign up for the paid product, you can read it unlike the bots. So I want to step up for you on the robots. So, Scott, you actually just got this new job, right? It's something that's relatively new that you're now working on emerging products. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, what those emerging products are?

Is this generative AI related? What makes you interested in that area of the creative field? Well, sure. I mean, I came back to Adobe six years ago in this chief product officer role where I was overseeing engineering product and design. And emerging products were part of that group. And that was, you know, that were a lot of the early explorations of some of the new tools we have today, like certainly started, you know, with some people.

most some folks in that group. And then about a year ago, I took on a kind of different mandate of stripping out a lot of the emerging products that are in that group, especially some of the AI first explorations that we're doing for the ink, like we call it the incubation zone of the company, as well as designed for the whole company, because at the end of the day, the interfaces, you know, these days,

the underlying APIs are really important, but it's how those APIs surface as capabilities in our products that, you know, in my opinion, at least, determines their fate as much as the models do. And then focusing on strategy and corporate development, which was a new thing for me. I mean, I think I've always been thinking about strategy, but it's kind of fun to have a learning curve around strategy for the whole company and how sort of creativity, marketing come together and that sort of thing. So it was, you know, it's a bit of a change of pace.

who in some ways, I missed the earlier days, frankly. Like, I miss kind of earlier stage product stuff. I was always an entrepreneur. And this was a way to kind of keep me engaged and bring on some new challenges. So speaking of new companies entrepreneurship, do you think that when it comes to this generative AI wave, we're going to see a bunch of new companies start to sprout and take advantage of it or is it going to be something that will be mostly confined to the big ones? Yeah, I think that there will certainly be some amazing new companies that spawn, whether

they're tackling workflows that don't actually have great software leaders that solve them yet. I mean, AI, what AI also does is it really drastically reduces the learning curve to use a product. And you can imagine a suite of tools that just replace entire clunky workflows with natural language. So I do also think, though, that really established workflows that just need to get better, you know, that is where incumbents have an advantage because they have the data, you know, that trains these models and they have the distribution. You know, they have the reach to the customer already. And customers don't like to change products unless they have to. So

there was an era of technology where on-premise or old clunky software was replaced by cloud software, right? And that was one of those moments where startups, you had to reinvent the stack from the ground up, and then you'd end up displacing a company that wasn't able to start in the cloud and was years and years behind. I think that the AI platform shift is a little bit different. It's not like you're going from local to cloud or from desktop to mobile. In this instance, you're actually in the workflows you're using every day. You just want to make them, you know, 50x faster, you know, and more intelligent. And so with these underlying capabilities that bring API, AI, wherever you need it, I think that's an, that's an opportunity

for incumbents, you know, to sort of, to innovate and to, you know, thrill their customers as opposed to lose them and have this life cycle of companies, you know, just replacing companies, replacing companies, replacing companies. But on this, on the small side, I'm also particularly bullish for small companies. Because small companies, you know, are going to start getting the advantages of big companies without having to grow and become bulky, you know, like big companies. So, for example, getting a huge data analysis department, you know, that used to be 50 plus people and, you know, data analysis cycles that inform marketing and whatever else. But once that's done by AI, you can have a small company that has the power of the data analysis function of a big company, being able to launch a business. and compete.

And, you know, same with marketing and content creation and, you know, a lot of these other functions that are going to be enabled by AI. So you'll see many, many more smaller companies have great businesses as a result of this technology. You'll see a lot of incumbents get stronger and be able to keep their customers as opposed to lose them in this new platform shift.

And then you'll see some new verticals, whether it's government technology or other things where AI just kind of streamlines and they're entirely different companies. Every time we talk about these ideas, the streamlining of workflows, the bringing in of a data department, the, you know, helping a graphic designer,

it always seems to indicate to me that this is going to be a enterprise thing first. And we talked about this over dinner a few weeks back, but is there anything, do you see anything in the consumer side that would make you excited? I mean, META just released these like 28 different AI chatbots. We'll see how,

that goes. But chat GPT, for instance, like had declining usage over the summer. So where do you see this going from a consumer end? Well, it's a really good question. A lot of consumer products, I think the dirty little secret is that they are made to address our insecurities. You know, when you think about, I remember meeting the musically team in Shanghai many years ago before they became part of TikTok and like reinvented, reimagined that product. And their insights were really around how with how to make the segments short enough and anchored by music and have us have templates such that we would feel comfortable performing in front of our friends without feeling insecure.

Like the idea of singing and putting a video of yourself singing on Instagram or Snapchat was like insane. Like none of us would feel secure enough and and brave enough, you know, to do that at scale and their crack in the code was to get people to start to do that. You know, Snapchat certainly appealed to our insecurity in having forever content by making it ephemeral content, right? And making sure that it disappeared so our parents wouldn't see it. Like a lot of these consumer products kind of attack an area of our consumer mindset where we're, you know, there's either vanity or insecurity or something at play there. And, you know, and I have mixed feelings.

obviously about that playbook. On the one hand, it might be effective as a way to make a product stick. On the other hand, it's exploiting something that maybe we should be dealing with in other ways than accumulating more likes so we feel better about ourselves. You know, it's so interesting because it's like, you know, if you read Eugene Ways post about how status as a service, and that's what all these social apps are delivering. And it's interesting because like status and insecurity are maybe two sides of the same coin. You need one because you have the other. Yeah. I mean, we all want to know we're important. We all want to, you know, when you look at the login stats of some of these social media products, you realize that people log in more after they post content. And so we think we're going to see our friends' content, but we're actually more frequently going to see who saw our content and what they said about it. Again, it's all driven by whether we're seeking status or we're just trying to, you know, appease our insecurities by. knowing that people like what we put into the world.

So you asked a question of how can AI, you know, build consumer products? My hope, and I'm an optimist, but my hope is that that somehow AI can be used to elevate consumer experiences so that we're not like being driven by insecurities, but we are actually being driven more by like genuine curiosities and expression of creativity. You know, imagine, for example, we'll just make up an app right now, right? Imagine an app where you are connected to nobody that is human. But every time you post content, hundreds of these deeply refined personalities of bots come and tell you how amazing it is and what they loved about it.

This is my favorite idea. I remembered sitting at this dinner hearing this from you and being like, this must be built. It is a great freaking idea. I was then and we were talking about it as just like, you know, fake personas on Instagram. But now I'm thinking, like, let's make it a whole new standalone product that is all about you sharing creative creativity without any qualms, about anyone ever saying anything bad about it. But the responses are insightful, delightful, and also encouraging, and also give you even ideas to make it better.

And it's like, oh, my, you know, and I like the name Peanut Gallery for it. Oh, my God. You know? Someone's going to build this thing. Yeah, this is definitely going to be a thing. Come to me. I'd love to invest. Yeah.

Oh, same here. I don't even invest because this is this is I mean it's definitely going to happen and why not you know it's a great idea I hope you can use AI for uh you know to to not only help us be more creative and build creative confidence but also you know feel more fulfilled in some ways yeah well it is interesting how like that you know that Nikita beer app was called gas where like people would sort of compliment each other it's like yeah wow there there maybe there is this sort of reaction in the social media that we have today where people are like, hey, if this can make me feel good

or this can make other people feel good, like maybe it's something worth trying. It became a number of not to make a minute. I mean, given the fact that most of the people that either love or hate what we're doing on Twitter are randos somewhere in the world that we have no connection to, why should we care more about what they think

than what some AI super intelligent bot thinks? It's true. The bot is probably more credible to have a view on what you're, saying and doing than some random person somewhere. I mean, not only that, like the bot, like, even if you had people weigh in proportionally, I mean, maybe I'm saying this because I'm like professional journalist and this is sort of how it works in my world.

But if people weighed in proportionally in terms of when they like something versus when they dislike something, it would totally change. Like, I'm sure that there are people that enjoy podcasts or enjoy newsletters and are just, and by the way, like, thank you for listening. and thank you for reading. Like, it's awesome that they're there. And they're just like, oh, that was good and go on. But if someone really hates something,

oh, they're like 100 times more likely to write in and talk about how it sucked. And these bots are just like actually could even be more reflective of what like the normal human experiences. It would be interesting also when we have our own personal agents that are advising us and protecting us on a daily basis about what email we should trust or not trust. If we see something on the news, they can tell us the counterpoint.

You know, when you have an agent that you can trust that can guide you through life, you know, certainly you can start making better decisions. Hopefully you're not as influenced by things that are, you know, bias and things like that. But maybe also the agent starts to advise us to show our appreciation. You know, imagine an agent being like, hey, did you like that podcast you heard from Alex earlier? Did you know that if you tweet him, he'll love it, you know, it's, I don't know, who knows? Maybe agents will make us better people. Well, even, like, you can see that the inside Gmail, right, if you write that you, you like take one of their auto replies, they're typically more polite than, you know, a normal person.

I'm just, well, maybe it's just me, but they're extremely polite. I'll just say that. It's like, oh, this is the AI pushing us in a good direction. I'm hopeful. Yeah. So, okay, so how does this may or may not be a separate idea, but I'm curious like how this, you know, there's these agents. Well, actually, let me, let me ask you one. follow up and then move on to the next part. How far away are we from that? Because, you know,

we've been talking about these smart agents forever. It seems like, okay, we have chat GPT and Bing and meta whatever's going on there. Like they just released these 28 bots in Messenger and WhatsApp and they seem to have, you know, assistive personalities. How far away do you think we are from like actually having these bots good enough to like them playing that role that we're imagining here? Are they there yet maybe? Yeah, there's. There's two things. I would say I'll just be, you know, I'll just try to be declarative and probably be wrong. But I would say that, you know, within two to three years, every brand that we come in touch with will know that there is a hyper-capable agent experience that's probably better than navigating a website, clicking, you know, men's versus women's versus, you know, 10 size 10 shoe.

I mean, you'll just converse and you'll have a far better experience. It's like going in and talking to a sales associate who might even remember you from the last time you were in the store. So I do think that that will be, you know, in the two to three year timeframe. I think in the, in the, you know, in the two to five year time frame, we will have a local agent, you know, on our devices that has access to every single thing, you know, going on on our devices, which, as you know, is like pretty much everything in our lives these days, calendar, Gmail, messages, whatever else.

It will have to probably run locally in the sense that we won't trust, A, that it's some random company. Like, we have to really have a relationship with that company and believe that they value our privacy. And number two is we probably want it to be locally stored as opposed to in the cloud because we don't want every piece of data about us, you know, anywhere else but with us. But when we have that, I think that's when we'll have a moment

where this agent starts to totally be our guide through life. And, you know, there's a lot of implications to that. You know, one of them that I, you know, I spoke about just recently was we might start trusting that agent more than any brand message that we get. You know, you always liked certain shoes because of their brand or you liked certain, you know, anything because of the brand. But if your agent knows everything about you and everything you've ever bought, done, thought, you know, whatever tells you, hey, Alex, actually, if you're a runner, like the shoes

that you really should be using are this, because I did research for you, and this is what I found. And by the way, don't be dissuaded by the brand. This is actually cheaper and it's better for your Achilles and for your this. At some point, you're going to be like, all right, like, I'll buy those. So that's a pretty disruptive thing if you think about it. Yeah, the question is, like, who makes it? Like, is, I mean, you talk, the way that you talked about it made me believe that you think Apple is the one that makes it if it's trusted and on the device. Like, well, I mean, you have like really one company that can do it and they are scrambling toward it is is that your guess well i think apple like really cleverly positioned obviously with how they value privacy

and you know are you not buying chips that are AI capable you know locally and whatever but the truth is is that google knows everything about me too you know um i mean i use gmail and and i have google calendar and and so um and i'd imagine that you know in a work environment Microsoft probably knows more about me than anyone else I work with at Adobe, right? Because it knows every single thing in my inbox, et cetera. So I do think that we will have to, so yes, those brands will probably play a key role and we will probably trust them because we'll realize that the benefits outweigh the costs of not. And also, they probably already have the data for us anyways. And then there's, but then there's a, there is a stack of tools that don't exist yet that, that I think will have to

augment with our own preferences, you know, and this is another thing I've been thinking a lot about is, you know, how does your agent experience booking a restaurant reservation, know your dietary restrictions, know what you're allergic to, you know, know that you're a vegetarian, or know that you need a wheelchair access or any of those sorts of things? Like, there needs to be some solution where an agent for a third party can talk to your agent and get information. And I'm not sure what facilitates that. Yeah, maybe some, like, info exchange created by, who knows, the founder of this social app that makes you feel good.

Last thing I want to talk to you about is this idea of friction. You know, we've talked a lot today about AI breaking friction down and how we need to have better customer service interactions. And we have just been a society that has optimized towards taking friction out of everything. And I mean, maybe I'm stealing your quote here, but like it's sort of made people soft and unable to deal with adversity. So floor is yours. I'm kind of curious, like, what you think about that, whether it's good, bad, whether there's a way out of it. Well, it's, you know, it's, this is something I've been thinking about and debating with friends

for years now because I find that everything we do in technology is intended to remove friction from work, from life, from getting from A to B, and whatever. And I find, personally, my life at least, that, you know, because I have the ability to book my travel and actually pick my exact seat and everything, you know, if I get to the plane and suddenly my seat's been changed, I'm like, oh, or, you know, I mean, or it's like, and sometimes I'm like, Scott, you're traveling in a metal thing across the world, you know, this is amazing, like, and you're worried about the fact that your seat got changed. change or whatever, you know, and I just wonder if the, if human fragility goes up as the

friction in our daily lives goes down and that we become actually even less tolerant of even the smaller things that might go wrong and what that means for humanity. And then sometimes when I look on social media and I see the amount of, you know, the short fuse to outrage that people have, whether it's against a brand or whether it's about something in the news or whatever, I can't help but wonder, is this one of the implications? And then the, you know, the visual that comes in my mind is that scene in Wally where, you know, in a world where everything is done by robots, you have these like, you know, people who just literally go around on these wheelchairs drinking slurpees all day and everything else is done for them. And they can't even

get up and do anything for themselves. So yeah, I think there's a question around, uh, how do we ensure that we remain, you know, we've sustained our tolerance for friction. And also, where do we preserve friction in our life yes i mean first of all i would say that you know i don't know if you're ready to make the assessment but i would that we definitely are becoming more fragile because of this designing friction out of our lives and then yeah i guess in one way um i would ask like what's the point of it all if that's what it's doing to us and then the second part is you said maybe we should keep some friction in our lives i mean where where are those why don't we on with those You know, the, listen, I mean, and this is more like philosophical, but when something does go wrong, you know, do you try to shield yourself or your kids, if you're a parent from that thing that went wrong? Or do you say, great, like, we need stuff in life that challenges us. Like, I'm going to, I'm going to sit with this. You know, when you show up and that reservation you made on Resi didn't actually connect and the restaurant says, I'm sorry, we don't have any record of that.

Do you go ballistic and say, oh, my gosh, how could technology let me down? Or are you like, you know what? I'm going to walk around the neighborhood. I'm going to discover a spot I didn't know. You know, and let's like, let's run with this. It's little things like that. And it's also, you know, and I think about this also as a parent all the time. You know, you're, you feel like you should protect your children from any sort of challenge.

And yet it's the challenges that make them who they are, right? And build character. So I just think there's that philosophical piece. And then from a product perspective, you know, I sometimes. believe that getting, you know, having a little bit more friction in the funnel actually gets more willing customers into your product. And I try to sometimes convince founders that they want willing and forgiving customers and their early cohorts, you know, of new users and that having folks go through a little bit of friction actually helps you get people that will evolve

your product and more thoughtfully. And so maybe that's a healthy thing, especially, you know, for certain products. Love that. Scott Belski, always great talk to you. Thanks for coming. Alex, thanks for having me.

All right, everybody. Thanks for listening. Thank you again, Scott. Thank you to Nick Gottany for handling the audio, LinkedIn for having me as part of your podcast network. And all you, the listeners, if you're a big technology reader,

proud to announce that Scott is part of the panel that we're putting together of folks that will once in a while react to breaking news as it goes on. So thank you to Scott for that. And thanks again to all of you. We'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast. Thanks.