Laura Burkhauser: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, interesting. That's real, that's, I think, again, very interesting. interesting and useful frame. This has been great. I guess my last question to kind of tie it back to the beginning and also try to zoom out a little bit, is it going to be possible to avoid a future of infinite slop? It seems like right now one barrier to infinite slop is that the models are kind of expensive. So that's, you've got to have like some reach or you've got to have some reason to believe that you're going to get paid back in order to spend all the credits. Maybe in the future, we have some sort of universal basic income or new social contract that sort of reduces the need for people to kind of push slop to try to earn whatever pennies per view or whatever the case may be. But if pricing is dropping over time, and that future may or may not, that new social contract may or may not arrive in a timely fashion, how do you think, what is the future of content? Is it going to be infinite generation? And what is it going to look like on the consumption side, like are we going to be lost in slop? Or is there, do you have a vision where we can sort of, even if it's infinite generation on the consumption side, maybe we can somehow rise above that reality? I'd love to kind of hear how you think the future content equilibrium shakes out in an aspirational way. Yeah, I don't think that, so whenever people ask me about this question, they tend to be people in tech or they tend to be economists. And with a ton of respect to people in tech and people who are economists, I just don't think that, like, what we're missing about content is like content is a little bit businessy, and certainly a lot of the people who use Descript are using it in businessy ways, but it's a little bit art too, right? Like it's a little bit artistic expression, creative expression, and creative storytelling. And whenever you're kind of like playing in that field, I think it's like, that isn't as clearly driven by like free market nihilism as other areas of the world. And so I'm not talking about descript now. I'm kind of like playfully thinking about video or film as a medium. But when something's about artistic expression, art, I think, tends to have a way of reacting to the technology of the day, to the culture of the day in ways that surprise us. I think about like the invention of the camera and how that changed painting, the medium of painting forever. And people were just not interested in photorealistic painting after the invention of the camera. And so like, I bring that up to say that like art always reacts to technological advances in ways that surprise us. I think like, and then you might be like, yeah, art, but we're talking about content, but it's like, artistic expression kind of content will change first. And there will be people who do very creative things in this moment that are unexpected and surprise us and raise the quality bar. And then there will be businesses that see that and say like, I want a little hunk of that. It's like the Miranda Priestly, is that like the Devil Wears Prada, where she's like, this designer over here decided that this cerulean blue that was in their spring collection and then you buy it in a bargain bin at Marshall's. And that's the way that content works too. You'll have people that are like interesting, exciting, truly creative, have an aesthetic eye that are going to do interesting and exciting things, both with this technology and in response and defiance to this technology and to this moment in culture. And that will inspire all of the then marketing people to steal from that aesthetic and that response. And so like, I don't, It is easy to look into the future and see our nightmares. And people pitch me on things like, there won't even be human creators anymore. What's going to happen is you're going to stare into your phone and there will be a seed idea of a video. And then based on where your eyeballs go, it'll generate more and more video in a way that makes you never want to look away. And I'm like, oh, like in Infinite Jest, like David Foster Wallace basically told us this would all happen in the 90s. And it's like, maybe that'll happen. It's easy to look into the future and see our nightmares, especially in a world of skeptics. vid Foster Wallace basically told us this would all happen in the 90s. And it's like, maybe that'll happen. It's easy to look into the future and see our nightmares, especially in a world of skeptics. as technology as the one that we're in right now. But I'm actually really excited to see what artists and creative people do with this technology and in response to it. And I think that there will be really exciting things that come out of it and that those are the things that will win in like in the marketplace. Yeah, even in a world of slop.…

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