Laura Burkhauser: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, no doubt in my mind that good quality stuff can be produced with the new Gen. AI tools. My creative teammates at Waymark are like just clearly head and shoulders above me in terms of their ability to do that. And it's a little bit hard sometimes to put our finger on exactly why they're so much better, but I think it's pretty undeniable that there is still like a significant skill gradient in terms of what people can do. And they've also put in the time to a much greater extent than I have even still. And you know, I say that as an early adopter and enthusiast of just about everything AI. 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?…

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