Nathan Labenz: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yeah, and they're also fighting their tools right now. Like right now, I think that there are two things that are really blocking us from seeing a lot more good Gen. AI art or content or whatever you want to call it. And the first is that the technology is just not quite there yet. And that's like, it's getting better, but no one would actually choose to make a video by generating 5 to 10 seconds of it at a time and like crossing their fingers that the voice consistency between clip one and clip two is good enough that no one notices or deciding we're just not going to have voice in video. Like right now, there's all kinds of constraints. You have to generate something like 50 times sometimes to get it exactly the way that you want it. And so if you're making good Gen. AI stuff right now, it's because like you're super invested in the medium. and you want to fight your tools the entire time. And then I think the other reason we're not seeing a lot of it is because there's a lot of stigma right now for people with the kinds of taste and skills to be able to make good stuff. There's a lot of stigma for them to be using these tools and publishing and owning that they're using them. And so when you go on X or you go online, like wherever it is that you're consuming social media, a lot of the people that you're seeing using these tools are people who are earlier in their journey of knowing what good looks like visually. And so like it is bad. Like I think like the average person who's never studied, whether by study I mean in school or in just experience, if you've never studied film or you've never studied like photographic composition or whatever, like yeah, you're... you're going to need to spend some time in the medium before the stuff you make is actually like good. And you're not going to know why. You're going to be like, I know this isn't good. I don't know why. I don't have the vocabulary to say why. If you stick with it, might get better. It doesn't for everyone. But those are the two reasons. It's like right now we don't have the tastemakers really using it. And right now, They'd really have to fight the technology for it to feel good, for them to ever get in a flow state, for it to really feel fun for them. So you just have early adopters that are really digging into this stuff right now. That comment on vocabulary, I think, is a very apt one. I just said it's a little hard to put our fingers sometimes on why the creative team is so much better than me, but I think that is a huge part of it. So often, if I send our creative lead something that I'm working on, he'll give me like a few adjectives or an artist's name for inspiration, something like that, or even a, and in some cases it could be like an explicit direction for composition. And that really does usually take it up a pretty clear notch. So I think that's a great detail to highlight. I don't know if it was in the same e-mail or another one, but you described adding generative AI models to the descript product as a polarizing topic, and I guess a polarizing product move. And in that same e-mail, I think you were recruiting people to join a generative AI advisory committee. I've been broadly very impressed by the way with my interactions with, because we're on the API, you know, early adopter beta list. I think your team is like very plugged into what are people trying to do and how can we help them do it. So I've been very impressed by my interaction with the people that are building the product. Who signed up for this? What did they want to tell you? What are you hearing from people? And how has your sense of what is making it polarizing and how the sort of discourse around these tools is evolving since you formed that committee? Yeah, it has been. fascinating. First of all, there was a huge uptake in that invitation. We got way more people who signed up for it than we could convene in a reasonable way. Although I think I've talked to most folks who signed up for it now. And yeah, so why did I send this e-mail in the 1st place? Because when I became the CEO of Descripten, I had been the VP of product for several years before that, so I wasn't like brand new to the discourse, but we had just changed our pricing, which was a tough moment. We are a really popular product with a huge and loyal and vocal set of customers that we love dearly. And I'm glad that came through in the way that we've talked to you. We are obsessed with our customers. But we did need to change our pricing, which is always like a kind of moment. And we got a lot of feedback on it. And there was this one type of dual feedback that I thought was really interesting and I wanted to dig in on. And came up a bunch in some form of like, I wish you would stop spending time building AI features and use that time to invest in the core quality of the app. And I'm like, when you see feedback like that a number of times as you're raising prices or as you're changing prices, you should get real curious because there's a lot that could be in that. There are like some dual things. So the first is like, do we have a problem with core quality? And what do you mean by core quality? What is core quality to you? Are we talking about performance? Are we talking about reliability? Are we talking about like upload speed? Are we talking about playback speed? And interestingly, and so there were some really good things that came out of that. And I hope folks see that we've been kind of knocking through a bunch of quality things. But Then there was also a bunch of core quality being new features that in fact, to my mind, are AI features, right? And so one of the things that became really clear to me is that when we talk about AI features, different people really mean different things. things. So Descript is like an AI native product. We've been AI native since, like the whole idea of editing a video, like a transcript is actually an AI idea. The way that we implement green screen is like using an AI model, like a visual model. The way that we do studio sound, like that's an AI model that we created. We do like voice cloning, regenerate and overdub, like so you can change something that you've, oh, I recorded the wrong word. Let's just go back and change that and have it in my voice say the right thing. And now Idlib dubs. And We built that model and it's like, these are all AI products and many of the features they wanted us to improve are actually like AI features.…

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