The a16z Show - Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela

Episode Date: March 30, 2023

You’ve probably heard of ‘Lil Miquela. The 19 year-old Brazilian-American influencer has millions of followers and has partnered with the likes of Samsung and Prada. But despite capturing the hearts of many, she’s not real. But you probably haven’t heard her origin story. In this episode we take a trip back to 2016, to a world that looked much different to today, together with two of Miquela’s creators – Trevor McFedries and Isaac Bratzel – cofounder and Chief Design and Innovation Officer of Brud at the time.We learn what inspired the experiment and what early signs indicated that Miquela was not just a novel idea. In a world where spinning up an influencer, we learn what it took to capture mindshare, the pushback they’ve received, what a “scalable influencer” means, and what they think is to come. Resources:‘Lil Miquela on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lilmiquela/‘Lil Miquela on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWeHb_SrtJbrT8VD-_QQpRAFind Trevor on Twitter: https://twitter.com/whatdotcd?lang=enFind Isaac on Twitter: https://twitter.com/izykbenjaminFind Brud on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brud.fyiIsaac’s new avatar company: https://www.avataros.com/ Timestamps:00:00 - Introduction02:18 - The key insight04:05 - A new breed of influencers06:25 - Miquela’s aesthetic09:30 - Early signs of success13:01 - Narrative and fan engagement16:45 - The technology18:14 - Expanding past Miquela22:34 - Traction and generative AI26:45 - A new reality31:55 - Early pushback33:38 - Misunderstanding reality36:23 - Fear of new technologies37:47 - New technological unlocks41:13 - Scalable influencersStay Updated: Find a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow 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. Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please 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. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

She was like, you keep saying scalable celebrity, but like, what does that look like? You've probably heard of Lil Mikaela, also known as Mikaela Sousa, a 19-year-old Brazilian American influencer with millions of followers online. She's partnered with the likes of Samsung and Prada, but she's also not real. But here's the thing. Mikaela is not alone. You might have also heard of the other digital influencers out there, whether it be Knox Frost, Emma, or even Olympia-Hanians, doll, Quaikwe.

Well, in today's conversation, we get an inside look into the origin story behind Loma Kayla, a virtual trailblazer created in 2016 by Bread. And we do so with Trevor McFedries and Isaac Bradsell. Trevor was a co-founder and creative genius behind Brad, while Isaac was the chief design and innovation officer, so he was actually in charge of creating the avatar and running the design and tech teams. So we get to hear firsthand what inspired this experiment. And also, what early signs were showing that Michaela was not just a novel idea, but a character

that people were really resonating with, even writing fan fiction about. And in an era where it's easier than ever to spin up a character, where does it all go? When an influencer can truly look however you want it to look, how do you decide? How do you create a narrative that resonates? How do you get past the uncanny valley? And what are the ethics of all this? We cover all this and more, and I'm truly so excited to have you listen to this conversation. As a reminder, 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 A16c.com slash disclosures. It's 2016, and I just want to paint a picture for the listeners. Britain just voted to leave the EU. Rihanna just released work. Open AI and TikTok were literally just just. founded, like their absolute infancy stages, we're in a very different world. And somehow, Trevor, you had this insight, this inkling, that a virtual influencer like Lil' Michaela should

be created. So what was the key insight at that time? The reality was, like much like you mentioned, we were living in this kind of heightened political moment, like post-Trump, post-Brexit, and me just being terminally online had kind of spent these different evolutions from like Web 1 to Web 2 into like Web 3 or the present and seeing these different media moments and the narratives they could create and how that could shape the ideologies and belief systems of young people, especially. And being in the States was hyper aware of like what happened on 4chan and what was happening on social and meme magic and what it meant to create narratives that could, you know, capture heart and minds and how effective those could be and the double-edged sword that presented.

And kind of in parallel, I had fallen in love with this data set around a show called Will and Grace that I love. That said that like Willing Grace was largely responsible for gay marriage in the U.S. That like public polling was tied to the ratings of that show. And so it seemed like there was an emergent new media, social, you know, visual platforms that could be used for telling fictional stories. And that was really the dream. It was like, if you were going to build a modern Disney or Marvel now, you probably wouldn't

want to start in comic books or in theaters. You'd want to start where the eyeballs are, which was really on social. And so that was a vision. It was like, can we create Disney on social? Can we tell stories that are as in. engaging as a Kardashian or Jake Paul, but kind of imbue these ideologies that make for a more tolerant, empathetic world. And that was kind of like the impetus for all this madness. Yeah, I love that you mentioned some of these other characters or influencers that we see in TV shows.

People have shown that they have an affinity to not just humans, but characters in TV shows and these illustrated characters. But was there some sort of insight that you saw where, to me, I don't know if we saw very many virtual influencers that looked like humans. What was the inside of like, well, Michaela is fake, but she also looks super real. She was like almost like a new breed. You know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, they were like zero.

And that's largely why like Isaac is in the picture. I mean, like no one was doing photorealistic, like bipedal human characters. There's this concept of the uncanny valley that there is this kind of middle ground between what an actual human likes and what like a, cartoonish looking like hello kitty human looks like where it looks too human but not human enough and you get freaked out it's like a polar express girl is often excited in this stuff but as a result you didn't really see anyone doing any of that stuff and you know there were things happening in asia hattoni miku you know we're standing on the shoulders of giants like miku but we were interested in i think doing something a on social and that was already going to be challenging a lot of

norms, there was still this perception that social media was for non-fiction. You're telling a fictional narrative inside of that space and I'd be doing it with a character. And if we could minimize as much of the novelty as possible and keep as much of it familiar as possible, I thought we had a better chance of succeeding. And I thought it would be really easy. I was like, yeah, we can just make a virtual human, no good deal. In six years later, you know, trying to figure it out still. But Isaac really was like really the key in getting that figured out. Yeah, so Isaac, Let's hear from you. You get this idea from Trevor. You're like, okay, let's just make this virtual human. And you have to make this a reality. Talking about that design and actually making this real, what were your first steps? And like, what are all the little things that maybe sound simplistic, but maybe we're actually really hard. Yeah, I mean, I think it's always really hard. But I think we got lucky in a lot of ways in terms of Michaela's design. One is we had a CEO and Trevor who actually dove into some of like he found Das 3D and these softwares and kind of like started making that.

design. So when I came in, it's really just like taking that, like looking at what's working already and saying like, okay, now let's triple charge that. Let's make this able to be look realistic. Let's make it able to be animated and all these other things, right? So I think for us, it was a little bit of like having a really good sense from Trevor and from some of the cultural savants we had on the bread team that really understand internet culture and kind of like how to connect with the audience that they were targeting, right? And, you know, luckily we found something that obviously resonated with a whole lot of people. Yeah. And it really did resonate. And I've heard Trevor, you talk about, again, all of these little decisions that you had to make about

exactly what she looked like. I mean, when we're influencers online as ourselves, like, you only have the face that you're born with. But when you're starting new with a virtual influencer, you literally can make that influencer look like anything. And that's amazing because you have this clean slate. But it also is like, yeah, does she have freckles or not? Like, how long's her hair? What race is she? How old is she? What are her beliefs? And so given, Trevor used the term terminally online. How did you use your background? I mean, you also worked at Spotify, you've like toured with Katie Perry. Like you have this cultural understanding of what people like. And how did that feed into ultimately what you built into this character? Yeah, it's an interesting

question because when you're doing things like this, it's so open-ended. The other idea is like, Michaela didn't need to be a fixed aesthetic or character. It could be this kind of like shape shifter ever evolving in the narrative, McKeelah's 19 forever. And so there were decisions like, I wanted to create constraints because as a creative person, I like having constraints. I think it kind of like breeds really like interesting ideas. But you know, some of the kind of early things, I had worked in like making music as an artist and as a producer for a very long time. And it was like pretty clear to me that there were these like underserved, really passionate audiences in Latin America. And so if you ever look at some like pop stars, Instagram, 10% of the comments

are come to Brazil, come to Brazil, come to Brazil. Oh, really? And so, you know, so in the narrative, I definitely wanted to like engage, you know, young people, especially people that's popular. Portuguese. And so Michaela was programmed to be like half Brazilian, half Spanish, right? And the idea that we could engage kids that I think were underserved by influencers who were kind of looking towards Europe and Western Europe especially. Beyond that, I think like, you know, the age thing, I'm a big fan of pop culture. And I think generally have seen this motif where people engage with media that it's like five to seven years older than them. So like, you know, Hannah Montana is running around high school, but it's like kids that were like middle school younger watching that program.

And so Michaela being 19 was quite intentional because I really felt like, you know, in a post-PG-13 America, like movie ratings really neutered middle ground of cinema and television where I used to have these kind of like John Hughes films who's like coming of age tales that really talked about issues like people were facing and didn't talk down to them. So one thing we always talked about earlier on was like we wanted to tell stories at like eye level. We didn't want to talk down to kids. We wanted to address them like they were adults. and they had complicated lives.

And they're aware of the turmoil in the world. They're well aware of like impending climate change. They're well aware of like economic strife. Like pandemics. Like these issues affect everyone. It's not just, you know, cliche, saved by the bell motifs. Like we can go deeper. And then beyond that, like we just made assumptions about what narratives would work

and how we could kind of imbue these ideas of tolerance of like otherness. And then you just try things. You know, I think people were probably like, wow, how did you know that she'd be so revered in fashion and like, I had no idea that didn't, you know, we want her to look cool and all of a sudden fashion raised their hands. Yeah, I mean, I want to talk about the narrative that you built out because it seems really critical to the success of Loma Kayla. But also, you mentioned you were surprised by things. Like, what were some of those early signs where you're like, oh, wow, we've got something here? For me, I get kind of like theory-brained and I'm like

talking about these like concepts and ideas that I'm really excited about. And often they not apply in the real world, but I talk a lot about this idea of like paraphiction, this idea of like telling fictional stories and spacious reserved for nonfiction and the big one being like professional wrestling, WWE, whatever it is. Yeah. This idea that you're watching people in a ring where you watch sports take place, boxing, other things, and people are getting hit with chairs and they're really getting hit, but you're told that it's fake. And, you know, in like, in a kind of an infinite scroll world where, you know, nothing makes you take pause. These things, that kind of disrupt these patterns that you're familiar with, like make you pause and say

what's going on. And so much of what we were doing was really trying to create these paraphictional moments where you're like, wait a minute, Michaela's at Coachella. Is that really Coachella? Wait a minute. Like a brand is talking about her being at Coachella, and that led's credibility to the idea. And so the moments that I think that, you know, for me to jump out, obviously it was like Shane Dawson, when Shane Dawson made this YouTube video that included Mikaela in these conspiracy theories about what she could be. Like that adds this other kind of like meta narrative layer to it, right, that it then kind of like compounds like the reality of it all.

And so that stuff was like really special to me and quite fun and quite cool. And Isaac, do you have memories of things that will you jump out? Yeah, I 100% agree. The Shane Dosselin was really cool. And I think it was any time there was a thing that kind of made it real to me. Because for me, the thing that I was always worried about when I got there was like, is this just a reactionary thing? Like people see Michaela.

and on Instagram they have a reaction, right? But when you could see fans really engage and like so somebody would respond to Michaela and then there would be a whole bunch of fans that would come to her defense and like explain the whole story and the Shane Dawson video and they tracked on all this stuff

but you could see how much people really care and there were fans that knew more about the backstory than I did at certain points but I was like, oh man, this is really deep. And then yeah, the Coachella moment was huge for me because it was like a technological thing and I was like, well, this is really real. Like we're not just doing still images

in magazines and stuff. Like we're going to go in real time and try to interview musicians. for Coachella. That was around the same time as the Calvin Klein ad. Yeah, like rehashing the trauma of those moments where we're just like working around the clock, trying to do things that take, you know, 100-person teams years and just a few weeks or months. It was totally mental. I remember a couple of Halloween's where there were all these fans dressed as Michaela. And one of the things we talked a lot about when we were designing the character

was maintaining this Halloween costume, right? Like if you were going to be Michaela for Halloween, are there identifiers that people would know who you wear, and the space buns, the freckles, like certain things like that were things that we try not to deviate from too much. I think that was one of the brilliant insights Trev had early on. It's like recognizable like instantly. Because if we change it too much, right, you lose that kind of like instant recognizability. So, Michaela, just like sticking with the space funds, you know, having the preckles, like these just really recognizable features. So I think that was really brilliant, honestly. Yeah, I think I've heard you talk about this, Trevor, but it was this right balance between somebody that almost anyone could resonate with. Like,

people aren't even sure, like, exactly where she's from. But then at the same time, these iconic aspects where you're like, oh, I haven't seen that before. So it's like a nice balance in her look. You mentioned fan fiction. It's always fascinating to hear that like fans almost give the character a life of its own. It sounds like this was the case. Tell me more about this narrative that you guys ended up building over years. And also, whether any of this fan involvement, did that actually help you guys curve that narrative or just that narrative? It seems like it's easier than ever for someone to create one of these virtual influencers. And given that that, that may be the case that there's going to be this flood of them. How important is building a narrative

in getting this traction, having people really resonate with a character like this? I mean, it's all extremely hard, but I think narrative is unthinkably hard, right? You know, there's all kinds of books you can read about why you shouldn't build narrative different media businesses because it's like building a fashion business. Like you have to keep things interesting forever. Like you can only keep lost interesting for so long. Like the Sopranos runs out of steam or maybe not. kind of perfect. But I think, you know, one of the ways we tried to solve for it, or I thought about it, was like integrating Michaela into the real world. This is funny, like, thinking about a lot of these concepts, but like one of the things we had talked about a lot was inverting the traditional

media pyramid where traditionally you kind of started with this like longer form asset, like a Star Wars. And then you kind of iterate in like a Star Wars video game, comic book, all the way, it's like a light saber you could buy a target. And so you have this pyramid that moves from like big, expensive, long form asset into this like smaller thing. We want to, invert that and start with just like a character, still image, and then work up that stack into like longer form television and film. And the dream was to actually expand upon that like television and film. Like one of the reasons I love the Kardashians and their narrative universe is that it's infinitely deep because they're human beings. You know, you can work through all of Kim's father,

Robert Kardashian's OJ case into like his family tree into like Armenian conflict. You can go as far back as you'd like. So by integrating Michaela into our world, by having her work for bread or firebread, or have these like real world boyfriends and other things, like fans could go super deep. And then they can start to speculate and they can riff and they can actually connect dots that we wouldn't see all the times. And so the other part of that was we really tried to build, you know, a technology organization just guides as a media organization. So we had like data science teams every week bringing back what worked and what didn't, building taxonomies on images and videos, trying to understand and figure out what motis connect and why and how things are kind of working

backwards. Isaac, you were part of the team that actually helped this come to life. Like, okay, Michaela's apparently now dating this one person. Like, how do we actually execute on that and should we change it? And I think at one point, Michaela was dating a real life person too, right? So there's all these, like, dynamics. And yeah, tell me more about like operationally, how do you make that happen? Yeah, I mean, early days, we were really really. really small and it was crazy fun with trying to do things that were just like way beyond what a team of that size and experience level is like you know should be trying to do but i do think you know trevor's earlier point like this really quick feedback loop when you're starting off

you have the ability to like do this quick thing and get that reaction immediately and like you said steer that character in her narrative to the fans that are engaging right which then informs what you're going to do when you start to do about more medium and long form stuff and i thought that was really cool thing that i learned from brud is kind of this reverse chairman that Trevor talks about It's like if you start with the movie, you're kind of like, here's a script, we're going to take a shot and see if it lands or right. And if everything hits perfectly, then maybe you go from there. But this is almost like, let's introduce this character super early and the lowest form possible and see what resonates and what it's and kind of build the story out of the fan engagement, which is just like kind of this radical idea. At least it wasn't at the time.

I had never really seen that. So using that then to inform the longer form content and kind of like having this pretty good idea that, okay, this is going to work now. so now we can go and try to create a five-minute music video out of a real-time character, which is its own whole challenge. I mean, seriously, how do you create that? I guess today the technology is getting better, but these music videos, I think she's on Spotify. Like, what technologies are you actually using to accomplish all this? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of different ones.

I think there's a huge, I would say, an order of magnitude difference between, like, the still images on Instagram and doing actual long-form animated content, right? That's stuff that's typically reserved for really high-budget films and, you know, triple-A video games for like a hyper-realistic digital human to be doing that stuff. So that was really challenging. I mean, I think we broke a lot of ground there and the technology was coming along. So we were able to do it somewhat. But like we're now in a phase where it's starting to become,

I think even referring to this stuff that it's starting to become more and more realistic for smaller studios to be able to do that. But it was still a blocker. You know, I think what we were really hoping to do was somewhat blocked by the ability to like create really expensive like long-form content of animated digital humans that's really expensive. So if we want to make more characters and create more content and do all these things, you know, you get stuck in a certain platform when you build out this technology piece.

It's really hard. You can't just like go to HBO and Euphoria and be like, yeah, sure, here's Michaela, put her in your film. It's not easy like that. It's expensive and time consuming. And anytime we had those kind of opportunities, we had to weigh the opportunity cost of diverting our whole team towards doing that thing and, like, dropping Michaela's internal narrative. And I think that was kind of one of those big learnings for like, okay, in order to see all this thing, we really would have to have a big, big investment to, like, get over this bottleneck at this point in time. So did you end up getting over that bottleneck?

Because I think you did end up launching a few other influencers, Bermuda, Blocko. How did you decide, okay, yes, we are going to expand this past Michaela. We are going to take on some of these really cool opportunities and invest in doing these longer form video narratives. And so what were the next steps past that early traction? Yeah, it's funny. I'm thinking back to kind of like original pitch stuff. And, you know, I think initially it wasn't clear investors. how this could be an venture-sized bet.

But the bet to me was always, okay, there's a coming computing shift. I called it spatial computing. I guess it's probably best now, like the metaverse or whatever else. And it seemed like all of the people that were building for the metaverse, we're building kind of universes and expecting people just to show up if you believe they will come. And I always thought that, like, a character would pull you into emergent platform. So, like, you know, Pikachu is the reason you get Pokemon Go. You don't want to just walk around your yard, scanning stuff.

You want to follow Pikachu somewhere. And so, like, if we kind of build a connected tissue between, you know, Web 2 and this emergent spatial computing thing, we'd be way out in front. And I think looking back on it now, that things we kind of got backwards was I was like, okay, billions flowing into VR and autonomous vehicles. And we're going to have this huge shift that's going to allow, you know, generative media to come really quickly. And then once we can do that really quickly, a lot of values are going to shift to this, like, special computing world and be able to build digital economies. And I think COVID accelerated digital economies before we actually had these tools to do generative media at the pace we'd like. And so we had to make decisions about where we could be efficient and how we could build models that could port really well. Anyone can kind of do a digital human that looks good and a one's still image.

But like speaking, you know, building really compelling facial rigs that can be driven effectively, super tough. Isaac's really good at it. It's insane. But, you know, Blocko was like, what if we just cover his mouth all the time? It's like simple things like that. He's always wearing a mask. He's always covering his face. It adds a little bit of mystery, as some narrative,

as a constraint to the creative people, but it allowed us to create stuff more efficiently. So it's like little things like that. Feet are hard. They often are floating. Let's not show feet. You know what I mean? Like hair is crazy difficult.

So Rocco is bald. You know, Michaela's hair is pretty much fixed except for a couple of cheap things that move. Like, let's really limit things that could cause a lot of problems and trying to figure it out from there. That is fascinating. Because I mean, with just like the generative AI stuff today, it's like the trope is like the hands. You know, everyone's like, oh, don't look at the hands.

I always had the hands. And so, Isaac, are there other things where you're like, people who have not ventured down this rabbit hole who have not built this don't know is actually surprisingly hard? Yeah, there's so many things. I think one of the things that anytime we're outside of a technology, we have this idea that computers, you can do one plus one equals two and computers are always going to do that thing. And there's nothing farther from the truth when you get into this stuff. everything breaks, everything crashes. This is why you have big studio models to get these high-end

budgets that just go crazy expensive because at the end of the day, you have to get pixel perfect to fit into this film, to fit into this universe, like exactly right. And it's just the only way to do that is throw time and money and people at the problem. And what we were trying to do is like, do that the low scale possible. And I think it was kind of like, we're doing

this on social media. We can get to 90% quality, right? And people are not going to care if like this one flyaway of her hair is like slightly not quite right, right? So we're like, how can we just like eliminate 90% of the cost in the time and get 90% of the quality, right? Because it's kind of that power law inverse. Yeah, it's just so complex and so hard.

And even today, I think one of the things we're going to run into a lot is this idea of like, oh, anybody can do this now with AI tools and everything else. And to me, it feels a little bit like suggesting that because Ableton is like $5 now, anybody can go be a superstar musician because they have this technology. And like technically speaking and like having the skill set to do it. it's not true. And then definitely narrative and culturally and having the ability to like connect with fans that way, it's definitely not true. You know, the technology piece is going to be so enabling. And my hope is that it will really help people that have that ability and that desire to connect

and tell these stories. I really like, I resonate so strongly with Trevor's kind of vision of storytelling being transformative. And I think that that's so true today more than ever. I think if we were five years later with Nica, we would have been able to do things that would have been much bigger and even broader because I think a lot of the bottlenecks are going to be removed very soon. Yeah. I love that. You said that, that, you know, the technology is a democratizing force, but I can also see how people will look to Lil Makela and be like, oh, I couldn't do this six years ago, but I can do it today. And so on that topic, are there any, I guess, any wisdom from your like six years of doing this

and building this and seeing what works, what doesn't work, how much harder it really is to get traction, to get people to care about something that you would almost like tell those people, not so much to drive them away from this idea, but to understand what it really takes. There's kind of no easy way to say this, but like it's democratizing force and all this technology lowering barriers as people participants.

And so effectively, if you're creating media on TikTok, right, like you're not even competing for attention in your following or your social graph. Like you're competing against the globe. You need to have something more compelling than tens of millions of people that are generating stuff. And so it's super hard.

You know, one of the things I tried to do is like understand where you have advantages and where you have an edge. So for us, it was music, right? You know, maybe you have 10,000 people are releasing music on Spotify this Friday. Can we be in the top 100? Yeah, I think knowing where you're really gifted and where you can outcompete others because it's hyper competitive for sure. Isaac, on the technology side, I just want to ask you super quickly

because you're building a company here that enables some of this, right? And from my understanding, your company is not taking the like full generative AI. approach, right, where you just go into something like mid-journey and spin-up and new image. So how are you thinking about that, the different ways these new technologies are coming together? Sure, yeah. I mean, I think right now, I think that there's understandably a lot of excitement about mid-journey and really tools that I call pixel pushing at the end of the day. If you're doing 2D morphing of images, then I feel like in a more immersive world, so use the dirty M-word Metaverse or spatial competing work like that's a 3D-immersive world.

when you create 3D avatars or 3D things and 3D worlds, like they are fully immersive and they're able to now be interoperable within a more virtual world. And that's what I think is coming, not necessarily the metaverse in terms of like what we might think of it now, but just this world that's going to come more and more out of gaming where things are going to be more three-dimensional. And working in 3D for like a decade,

you start to understand like how much we underestimate what another dimension means when you're adding it to something, like especially technological. We don't think exponentially. We think additively. So we're like, oh yeah, you have that third dimension. and it's like, yeah, just another layer. And it's not, it's completely a whole order of magnitude shift.

I also really like what Trevor said earlier about rather than building like this metaverse worlds and focusing on that, but like focusing on that character and the narrative and having them be that connected tissue, I really view that as one of the ways that really some of this stuff can start to land, which is if we can create like avatars that are scalable, like digital humans and digital people that can actually connect with fans in a real way and have that be the way that ushers them through this kind of more virtual world and create more of a human connective layer, that's what I think would be really, really cool. Because I think a lot of times, you know, if you look at what's going on now with a lot of

the virtual world stuff, it just feels very impersonal. So I don't think that this is not including some of the generative AI tools. The generaided eye tools in the sub you see image space right now is very two-dimensional. And I don't think that's actually going to be the solution. I think what it's going to be is when those tools are able to really generate and include into like a three-dimensional world, which is something that we will be focused on. Right. So you're basically saying like a, lot of these tools right now are in 2D. You think that there's so much more fidelity in 3D, but then there's also things on top of that, right? Like voice and the ability to animate the 3D

character. But I guess as we do see more of these virtual characters, these people, we're not, as people say, not real people. How do you guys think this actually just changes our relationship with creators or influencers, I should say? And let me tee this up. Today, most people don't have the incentives to create a virtual influencer of themselves because, again, they didn't have access to the technology. It wasn't good enough. But as more of these characters come online, like, why would I want to put myself out there? Because I can be like a more beautiful version. I can change my voice. I can basically become exactly what I want to be. And I'm not constrained by like the physical nature of what I was born with. I also can't be canceled. Right. Like there's

these dynamics to, again, like this clean slate. Do you guys see that being the case? We're with enough time that is the reality where most things that we see online are not, quote, unquote, real. And then also, how does that change our relationship with the things that we see online? I mean, I think we could argue about real and reality. I invented it right. But like, I look at my Instagram feed, and it's a lot of like scripted pranks or things that are, you know, making people believe that are real. It's, you know, people that have been highly altered. It's situation and context that are presented as real like sitting on a private jet when you don't actually own that jet. And so I think the sliding scale of reality will probably continue to move

and the direction has been heading in. But beyond that, you know, the thing that I'm most excited about is this kind of race to the bottom and a lot of media. Like a bottom's going to hit far quicker because of AI. It's going to be really easy to be good at things. Good at making music. Good at making visual art. Good at. you know, creating content, it's going to be really hard to be excellent. And because, you know, models effectively are backwards looking and, you know, data kind of gets more data. I mean, you're going to have some like nasty feedback loops, not entirely just similar from like what happened to Netflix, where they kind of woke up. And one day everyone realized that every show was a chef's

table for a different industry. And they were like, wait, I like this format. And clearly the algorithm said it works, but I don't feel like I've gained any nutrients from this. I've just kind of been satiated and I'm looking for nutrients. And so I think we're going to have this thing where we have this kind of like rapid assent where things feel better on the service. People are looking for substance. And that's what we'll kind of separate the kind of two Michelin Star chefs from these kind of like very average. And that's when I think the really folks are going to rise to the top that can augment this technology with unique skill sets. Do you think that maybe sometimes people misunderstand or misaligned substance with what we just talk about like really?

reality because I could see how people over time will be like, okay, my response to this, everything feels fake. I want things that are truly in like meat space. And that's what they look for. But to your point, just because it's in meat space doesn't mean it's real and has substance, right? And so it can be just as manufactured and less creative than actually something that is technically virtual, but has this like dimension to it, has this depth, this creativity to it. Yeah, it's a question that's having been imposed for a very long time. I think even since the emergence of contemporary art, right? You have this constant dialogue where it's like mom and dad walk into the museum and they're like,

what are these scribbles? A three-year-old could do that. You know what I mean? And then they walk in front of this like photo real landscape painting and they're like, now that, that's something I would pay for because they associate the ability to kind of like take an image from, you know, someone's eye and translate it onto a page with like craft and skill. and I think people are constantly doing the same, right? There aren't really good ways of understanding what is good and what is bad.

It's so subjective that people are looking for concrete measures. And authenticity is one that's been tossed around quite a bit. And I think people look for things that resonate as authentic and often associate them with like they're playing an instrument. They have a craft. And I think the reality is some of the most authentic things in the world in me are like K-pop where it's entirely scripted and fictional. But it's presented in a super authentic way.

way, it's saying like, hey, this is going to be so entertaining. We've plucked the most beautiful kids from Korean middle schools, give them the best choreographers and the best songs, and I've taught them to speak like Justin Timberlake, like, you're going to love it. And there's no deception there. And I think that, like, young people resonate with that. I think it's harder for adults who've been kind of primed on these ways of understanding contemporary art. And I think as technology evolves in ways of kind of like changing those rules evolve, they feel very uncomfortable and fall back on the kind of like frameworks that I understand. Yeah, and actually these virtual influencers, I think, are biggest in Korea and parts of Asia, which is interesting.

It's maybe a cultural thing. Maybe it's an age thing. So yeah, I like that you use the word deception because we're all being deceived in ways in terms of what's being put in front of us. But, like, we do fall back on these easy mechanics of like, is it real or is it not? Yeah, 100%. I think we talked about this early days abroad. Nobody's going to like see a movie of Mickey Mouse for the early days and be like, oh, this isn't real. how dare you guys try to present this is real, right? It's just too clear. Yeah. And when those lines start to get blurred, at least for those of us who like are used to something different, we have a lot of hangouts or reactions to things or like misunderstandings of what they are. And to me, it all comes back to storytelling is one of the most important things that we have as humans and the way we connect with

others and the way that we evolve emotionally and all these other things. I think it's just one of the most unique things about us as animals that differentiates from anything else, right? And I think that enhancing our ability to tell those stories, especially with the world that I see coming, right? This more virtual world, this more inclusive, this three-dimensional spatial computing metaverse, whatever you call it. I view having digital humans be able to be able to tell those stories as an essential piece of that, right? And I want to help make that look a certain way and feel a certain way and allow people

to tell stories in this new way. So when you think about that way, all this other stuff feels like noise, right? Well, yeah, I'm actually curious from both of you, over the numerous years you've been doing this. what pushback did you see early on? And also, have you seen any of that pushback change? Like these ideas around ethics, what's real, what's not? Should you be doing this? I mean, yeah, so many. That was part of like the premise, though, is that like we were going to be first to the door and catch all the arrows. Like, we were going to like make all the mistakes quite publicly. But I think the really lovely part about that is that we get to kind of like set the tone for how these things are understood going forward.

It was pretty clear that people were going to leverage generative media, virtual influencer, virtual characters to shape our reality. It's too tempting not to. And so how do we go in and kind of like set some boundaries and some ways of behaving, such a people follow our path and kind of make things that are maybe more noble and righteous and other things that could have been done? That said, some really obvious things. I think people were really concerned about virtual characters and people having accounts, right?

Like, it seems quite silly now. Well, they're like, wait a minute, how can this, like, fake person have a verified account? At some point, you had to kind of extend that into, like, wait a minute, what is Coca-Cola, if not a fiction? And why do they have a blue check mark? And so there were interesting things in, like, startup land, like, what was it, like, Startup L Jackson or, like, all these Twitter accounts that were, like, parodies. And so a lot of those things feel quite passe now.

There are interesting conversations that I think are happening around AI, NFTs that feel very familiar to what we did where it's like, this is new and scary and I don't like it. So I'm going to be upset about it, even though I'm like uninformed about it. And so I think that's going to be persistent forever as overton window shifts. But a lot of things that we did feel quite passe right now where it was like a blue check mark next to your answer. Like, yeah, that's fine. That's totally okay. Trevor, what are some of those examples today? You mentioned like AI and NFTs where you see that parallel where back then it seemed strange, this idea of a blue check mark. What do you think, you know, in five to ten years, we'll look back on. Well, and I think the idea that, like,

digital goods have value, right? I can totally understand why it seems silly. The right-click, save-ass thing makes a ton of sense until you think about, okay, if I have a wallet that's following me wherever I go on the internet and effectively becomes the way I play status games, it may be really important for me to have a digital asset that shows that I was there or a part of this thing because it leads to IRL love or jobs or wealth or whatever it is. And so I think it's probably going to be quite silly that we thought for a moment that, like, digital goods wouldn't have value, much the same way, I'm sure it was really silly to see luxury watches sold. You're like, what do you mean? I think it's the same thing my watch does.

Why would you ever pay a markup for it? And it's like, well, because I get a handshake of the country club that I wouldn't get otherwise. Beyond that, I think with the AI stuff, people try to dunk on like the fingers thing or the eyes or like the hair looking wonky. And I don't think they recognize how quickly those things will get resolved, much the same way for us. us early on, you know, they'd be like, wait a minute, this shadow is not real. Oftentimes it was like totally real and we matched it entirely. But also, one of the thing we had to do early on was like add additional shadow to things. Or things like, do things to make people believe what they were seeing was real?

Because the reality of the image wasn't real enough. As bizarre as that sound, you have to kind of like embellish. That's interesting. What are some examples of that, Isaac? Like once you look at an image and you're trying to find what's fake, like you think everything's fake, right? And how many times the things that people called out were actually a photographic element? Like they were real and people were convinced like, oh, this is the thing. And the things that were CT, they were totally fine.

And I would say it was like 50-50. Like half the time, like the things they complained about were an actual element that was from a photograph. Have you guys started doing that? Like whenever I see a picture on Twitter, someone will literally be just like taking a picture of their lunch or their house. And I'm like trying to figure out if it's generated by AI. I'm like, this isn't real, and it's totally a real picture. Yeah, I mean, I've been doing that for years. You know, like, I've been in VFX, right?

So, CG movies and, like, people are always asking. And I can always tell because, like, the first thing you're actually doing is, is there any reason for them to use CDI, right? So, like, the first test that I can do that nobody else can do is, like, of course that's not CGI. And that would cost, like, $8 million extra dollars and there's no reason to do it. So there's no chance that it's CGA, right? But then there's a lot of other little tricks, like,

once you get really familiar with the technology that you can see that maybe isn't. So one of the things that's actually hard for me is to try and understand, what is the regular person seeing here? Like, what is scaring them because it looks this way and what feels off? That's kind of hard to step in and out of. I think the same thing for AI now. I think artists especially have a really strong

disorder reaction to it. There's a whole art community, 3D art community that's really anti-AI because they have this fearful reaction that's happened every time any new technology's ever happened. That doesn't mean that I'm dismissing any of their concerns. It's this fearful reaction that my job's going to be taken away or this other thing that I don't like is going to happen, et cetera.

So I think we're seeing that very strongly with AI right now. Yeah. And are you basically saying that you think in years this will not be the case? Like what do you think happens to let's just use those like 3D animators? For example, what do you think either changes in their perspective or changes about the world? Well, I think right now what I'm thinking is that look, the idea that you're going to like reject this and then it's just going to stop in this tracks is just the most wishful thinking I can never imagine. Right. So the thing to do is try to like identify the parts.

of it that you don't agree with and try to figure out how can they make that better, right? So if it's rights to artists' images that they created the artwork and they should get fractional like compensation or you should be able to like out of being having a magistrate, these are all very bad things. So again, I'm not like, you know, dismissing any of them. It's just that there's a lot of people who are going to react so negatively. It's like, no, no to AI, like cancel all this stuff. And it's like, that's not going to happen. Even if that was the right move, if you were right about that, it's not a realistic option. So, you know, what's the positive thing we can do here to try to make this better. Well, on that note of positivity, I mean, the technology is advancing

in many different ways. And so I'd love to hear both of your perspectives on how not just AI, but technology advancing as a whole may actually change our ability to create these virtual influencers. For example, might these influencers actually be able to engage with their audiences more? Like use AI to actually be the one responding. You like train an AI model based on this character and they actually become like not a sentient being but someone that's actually able to engage. That's one example. You could also imagine a decentralized influencer where basically not only is their worth distributed amongst the bunch of people, but actually like what they do, their narrative might be influenced by the people who have some sort of ownership over them.

So Trevor, why don't we start with you and just like any ideas on how technology actually advances empowers our ability to create these characters? I mean, I could do this for years, we could just riff. But I mean, obviously the decentralized one is something that we're very excited about and we're trying to build it dapper. You know, one thing I think about a lot is like why culture is not viewed as intellectual property. And, you know, you could almost see influencers as kind of like these like rent-seeking middlemen that have like the aesthetics that allow them to like do a dance that was popularized

by some six-year-old girl in the hood and capture a lot of the value that should have flowed back that person, right? So I think the really challenging part with, like, culture and why it's, it's not intellectual property and why it's often, you know, caught in this crosshairs as being either like cultural appropriation or, like, unlicensable is that attribution is really hard and, like, remitting payments to the people that you identify as being a part of a culture or being owed for, you know, using that representation. And I think, you know, digital payments, like, blockchains, right? And I think that tools that allow you to, like, quickly identify someone where they exist culturally. And so to me,

idea that like, you know, as a black person, you could identify a community and say, like, look, all of this ratchet happening here has created value that we can like repatriate to your community. I think that's really compelling, you know, for generations of people that watch Elvis walk off the shit or the Rolling Stones or whatever else. Like it's sort of like TikTok, you dances and emotes. Like I would love to see like technology enable stuff like that. And so there's all kinds of stuff I could riff about. But like things like that for me are kind of exciting and maybe on the frontier. Totally. Isaac, what about you? Yeah. I mean, I think to me, me, there's three elements that I'm really excited about. And these are all amounts that are like of

the metaverse. To me, what the metaverse really is. And it's persistence, right? So a character, a digital character, which to me is, it's a brand. It's a living story. It's persistent. It doesn't exist in one single world anymore, right? So you don't have Drake from last of us existing just in a video game that people are after them that one situation and then that's it. Like it starts to be able to go in any other medium instantly, right? So this persistence, that character actually has a history, story of life, and that's there. It's synchronous, meaning you can actually interact with it. So that's kind of something you just mentioned there where maybe you can go and talk to making great, that's the simple thing. But I think there's a lot more interesting implementations of that

and find these interoperable. And that means like these kind of like what I said persistence, these walls that create barriers between different mediums and different things, they kind of go away. Like technologies and enabler and like a democratizing force. And I think what it's going to allow is for really compelling characters and brands and stories to be able to be told and really unique and new ways that in five years we're going to look back today and be like, it seems obvious, but it doesn't feel obvious to a lot of people right now. Yeah, something that's coming to mind, you mentioned synchronicity, but like the reason that celebrities can't interface with every one of their fans today is because, like, they are in meat space. Like, they only have so much time.

They need to sleep. They can only engage with so many of their fans. But actually technology can change that, right? And that could be for the human celebrity who now just like has leverage through technology, but it also especially can be used for these virtual influencers. The idea of being parisocial maybe doesn't exist at some point because actually you're not just listening to people talk. You can actually like after a podcast go have this virtual conversation with the podcast toast. I don't know if I'm like extrapolating too far, but that just like dawned on me where I'm like, oh, actually the limitation existed before because we didn't have technology. The first person I heard say like trying to like make this celebrity scalable is like from Trevor originally. We ran into

problems with Michaela just because we were so early, right? Like the expensive cost of creating animated content at this time was like that wasn't really scalable, but I think we're getting to a point pretty quickly where it is. As we kind of thought about scalability and kind of what makes that experience exciting, you know, like is creating some type of scarcity important for making that thing valuable? It's like to be defined, right? I think the variable rewards component of social, that kind of like brain hack of a slot machine brain hack is what makes a lot of social experience is sticky.

and so the idea that you could just message Emma Chamberlain and she responds right away or pop over your screen might devalue what Emma Chamberlain means to you. And this is all stuff that people are going to have to work through. And so it's going to be really interesting. Maybe an interesting question that I didn't have planned, but since we went down this rabbit hole, do you guys think that at some point we will have a virtual influencer that a religion is built around? Yeah.

I mean, I never thought about it, but now that you mentioned it, I'm like, is it possible that with enough time goes by that's not going to happen? I don't know. It seems like at some point, yeah. I will say like problematic part of the pod potentially, but our first employee, I brought was a woman named Savannah, Picani, and I remember we were talking and she was like, you keep saying scalable celebrity, but like, what does that look like? And I was like, Christ? Like, that's what it looks like to be, you know, like these narratives that have like, shaped our reality because this figure has been able to touch people all over the world and shaped way they behave. Some would argue that there are people in our current lives,

Kardashians, whomever, that have near like demigod power. And I had to imagine that at some point you'll have some thing that matches some of those traditionals, some of those trad gods. I mean, it's kind of mind bending. We talked about like the sliding spectrums, it's like human to computer generated, but then it's also, what is the sliding scale between listening to everything someone says to religion? On that note, sometimes I come away from podcasts with, oh, I know more about this subject. And I do feel like I know more about this subject, but I also was like, oh gosh, my brain is spinning. Like, I don't know where any of this is going. But yeah, Trevor, Isaac, thank you so much for going through all this with us for

being early movers in this space and setting the tone, sending boundaries, experimenting. And yeah, thanks for spending this time with me. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, don't forget to subscribe. 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.