Laura Burkhauser: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Thanks for being here. I'm excited for this conversation. As longtime listeners know, we are Descript customers and use Descript to help produce the podcast. And this is actually the second CEO of Descript episode on the Cognitive Revolution, although the person holding the seat has changed. And so you're new in the role. I look back at a couple of emails that you sent, one that I think you said kind of right after taking over, and you wrote something I think will be a really great jumping off point for us, which was, the script isn't a slot machine and we don't want it to be. So how do we keep building generative AI features without surrendering to the slop, or is it impossible? That's, I think, going to be a defining question, honestly, of like how people, even in the big picture, like spend their time over the next few years. So I want to just start off with the kind of, at least first question that comes to mind for me. What is slop? How do you know it when you see it? Yeah, I might, and I might define it differently than other people. So to me, I think about slop as being a form of content arbitrage. So there's like a, it's when you can identify a temporary, almost like inefficiency in the market or opportunity in the market to create content that is likely to give you a return on your investment. And in this case, it's like that you can pump the system with a lot of content that is extremely cheap for you to make, that might not get a ton of engagement or might not get like a ton of subscribers, but gets you enough revenue or engagement from that content, that it ends up being net positive for you. And so there are people that can identify these kinds of slop arbitrage moments and really take advantage of it. But the two key elements to me of slop are the incentive is money in some way, ultimately, and it is happening at scale. I think there's a lot of bad art out there. And I would say like, generally, I'm pro bad art. Like, I think bad art is a really important stage that one must go through to get to good art or good content. I don't know if you can remember the first few things you put on the internet, Nathan, but my guess is that you're like, You would cringe if you looked at them now, knowing how sophisticated you've become in your creations. And so I guess like to me, there's a difference between slop, which is like, I'm trying to pump, I'm trying to juice the algorithm. I'm trying to pump YouTube full of a bunch of avatar meditation videos in this moment when it hasn't caught on so that I can get some ad revenue real quick. And like, maybe I should be like a meditation guru on YouTube. I'm gonna create this avatar. And you know, like that's a different thing. And then the result may be the same, but I don't think that's slop. That's just someone's bad. That's just someone's bad idea. Yeah, interesting. So if you're feeding the algorithmic hogs, you are producing slop. I do wonder though, and by the way, if the comment section is to be believed, I'm still in the bad art phase of my own personal development. We'll see if that ever comes in. That art is important. one thing I will say about AI is it is allowing me to create stuff that I don't think is terrible, at least, and that I enjoy the process of creating in ways that I just never would have had any opportunity to do before. And so for now, I'm ignoring the haters in the comments who are almost uniformly opposed to my new AI-generated YouTube preview art, but I just figure, I'm having fun doing it and I kind of like the look of it. So for now, we'll keep going. Maybe it'll evolve and I'll finally click.…

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