Creative Next: AI Automation at Work

AI is being used by music groups, such as our guest this episode Claire Evans, a member of the band YACHT. Their latest album, Chain Tripping, leveraged machine learning solutions for the music, lyrics, and more.

Artists are making the most of machine learning, using the technology both in the creation of their art and as a cultural touchpoint for expression, exploration, and commentary. While the Internet and more modern emerging technologies have long had a negative impact on musicians and others who create using audio, Claire Evans and her band YACHT - Young Americans Challenging High Technology - are at the vanguard of discovering how these technologies will impact art and music in the future.

Memorable Quotes

“Since we only really learn by doing things and making things, we figured that the most efficient way for us to get a sort of bodily understanding of what the hell AI is and what it's doing and what it means for artists and for all of us was to try to make something with it.”

“I think when we first started this project, we naively thought we could just kind of hand our back catalog to some algorithm, and the algorithm would analyze that and spit out new songs that would be new YACHT songs. And the project, the art, would be about committing to that, whatever it was. As soon as we started working on this, we realized that we're not there yet, thank God. Algorithms can't just spit out pop songs. If they could, the airwaves would be full of them.”

“If you listen to the record it sounds like an interesting experimental rock or pop record. It doesn't sound like generative, you know, plausible nonsense. It sounds like songs, and that's because there was very much a human in the loop. We used the machine learning model to facilitate the process of generating source material, and then from that source material we built songs the way that we would always build songs as humans in a studio playing music.”

“I was projecting my own meaning onto words that I didn't write. And trying to sort of cobble together some kind of meaning to the songs that made it possible for me to sort of perform and convey them with my voice. And so, it's oddly democratizing, because now the fans, the listeners, and the band, are all trying to figure out what it all means at the same time. And we were going to have as many interpretations of what it means as there are people to listen to it.”

“It also has no consideration of the body, right. It doesn't ‘know’ what it feels like to play any of these melodies on the guitar or on the keyboard. If it's physically challenging to do. All it knows is the MIDI data that it's been fed in the training process. So, a lot of these melodies sounded odd, but simple enough to play. But then when we sat down to actually play them, we found that they were extremely challenging, because they forced us to acknowledge the embodied habits that we bring with us as players into the studio.”

“I like to think of some of these machine learning models being like a camera of their individual disciplines. I mean, a text-generating model that's able to make perfect texts. Maybe that just becomes the camera of writing. And we have to completely step outside of our comfort zone to reinvent what writing means in the 21st century. And what an exciting proposition that is for an artist.”

“There's also something really interesting about the reflective quality of AI as it works today. I mean, you build a machine learning model by feeding it lots of information, trading data. And in the context of music that information is historic. It's the history of music. It's a corpus of millions of notes, or a corpus of millions of words, of song lyrics from musicians and artists that we love. Or ourselves. So this idea that we could use an emerging technology not only learn to understand it, but also maybe learn something about ourselves in the process.”

“Maybe in ten years we won't even be making music for people anymore. Maybe we'll just be making music for other AI's to listen to.”

“Probably we'll get to a place, where machine learning models in some combination are able to generate any song that sounds like a song a human wrote. Or a novel that reads like a novel a human wrote.”

“In two or three years, who knows exactly when, we will be at a place where text generating models are able to generate texts that is effectively indistinguishable from human written texts. Arguably we're there already.”

“I think we're in a really interesting moment right now, where some of these tools are just now becoming kind of artist-friendly enough to even be useful or usable to people who don't have hardcore technical backgrounds. And, I think we're going to see an efflorescence of really interesting creative material emerge out of that. And the more sort of democratic these tools get, the more unpredictable it will be.”

“The future doesn't feel vast. The future doesn't feel infinite to me. Like on an individual personal level. The past feels infinite to me. I think that's one of the things that I find kind of comforting about machine learning is, as it's structured, it's not about the future. It's not something that scorches the past and makes something new. It's something that depends on the past.”

“I think in a few years, we will all be nostalgic for the times in which the AI models were not completely perfect. And it will be kind of like the analog of AI. Like, people will be putting on affectations of wonky AI in the same way that artists now record on tape or we have this fetish for vinyl; where we use iPhone camera filters that look like old VHS video.”

“We were really interested in this idea that you could take ‘meaningless material’ and give it meaning through performance.”

“It feels more true to who we are than anything we've ever made, even though this new weird variable is in the mix.”

“The personal computer represented a great deal of freedom for independent artists. Not just in terms of how music is produced but also how music is distributed, and all of the other things that touch that. Like, you know, artwork and messaging and video and text and communication and all of the things which bands have to think about and do, computers simplified that a great deal.”

Who You'll Hear

Dirk Knemeyer, Social Futurist and Producer of Creative Next (@dknemeyer)

Jonathan Follett, Writer, Electronic Musician, Emerging Tech Researcher and Producer of Creative Next (@jonfollett)

Claire Evans, Author and Musician (@TheUniverse)

Join The Conversation

Website & Newsletter: www.creativenext.org

Twitter: @GoCreativeNext

Facebook: /GoCreativeNext

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Sponsors

GoInvo, A design practice dedicated to innovation in healthcare whose clients are as varied as AstraZeneca, 3M Health Information Services, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. www.goinvo.com 

Design Museum Foundation, A new kind of museum, they believe design can change the world. They’re online, nomadic, and focused on making design accessible to everyone. Their mission: bring the transformative power of design everywhere. You can learn about their exhibitions, events, magazine, and more. www.designmuseumfoundation.org

BIF, As a purpose-driven firm, BIF is committed to bringing design strategy where it is needed most - health care, education, and public service to create value for our most vulnerable populations. www.bif.is 

Musical composition is one of the earliest examples of human art and creativity. Today, new and original music is increasingly being composed by AI. Drew Silverstein, Co-Founder and CEO of Amper Music, joins the show.

Automation of sound and music, in the form of licensing stock and pre-existing recordings, is a decades-old trend that became ubiquitous with the rise of the internet. Now, thanks to machine learning and artificial intelligence, the creation of original music is increasingly being automated. Drew Silverstein, one of the pioneers at the forefront of this trend, joins the Creative Next team to explore these technologies and the trends and impacts they have on work in general and musicians in particular.

Memorable Quotes

“As our technology evolves, we see AI dramatically decreasing the cost of accomplishing certain tasks and dramatically decreasing the amount of information that any one person needs to know to be successful at that task. And whether it's music, whether it's farming, whether it's creating a script, or whether it's just doing more rote business tasks, and I think what we are going to arrive at in the not too distant future, is a world in which the ability to complete a task is fully democratized and anyone can do nearly anything with the assistance of an AI.”

“The value, then, of our human input is gonna be on the creative input and the creative direction, so that, as people, how can we direct the workforce and the work effort of these machines to do something that's meaningful to us.”

“All you need to know to create unique and professional music tailored to your content are three things: the style of music you want to create, the mood you want to convey and the length of your piece of music and that's all you know. In a matter of seconds, you'll make something brand new.”

“We think our job is just a matter of tasks in a sequence that accomplish something specific that they get a goal done, whereas our career is all about helping others achieve their goals, and the manner in which we do that will change. We used to communicate via written letters only, and then it became telegraphs, and then it became phone calls, and then it became email. Now it's texts. We're still communicating. We're still conveying messages, but how we do that will change. And in the same way, in music, the jobs of the music world that exist today will certainly evolve and be very different in a matter of years, in the same way that they're very different now than they were 10 years ago.”

“So what I would say to those, both coming up in music, and those who are already successful and experienced, is to understand that technologies evolve. The way we do things will change. Be accepting of that. Be on the forefront of the adoption of those new technologies and their tools, but also be mindful at the core value in music. It's not because of the process by which it's made. It's because we're making art and people value art.”

“Whether or not we exist as a company, this is happening. AI music is here.”

“And then we said to ourselves, ‘As composers, we are experts at translating music into emotion and emotion into music.’ And so we suggested, ‘What if we could create a creative AI that gives you the same collaborative experience of working with us, but within the time and economic framework that you need?’”

“And with each evolution in technology, the barriers to expressing oneself creatively through music were dramatically decreased, the time it takes to learn to express oneself and the cost of purchasing the tools to do so. And in that manner, we see AI music and Amper as the next step in this centuries long, if not longer, progression of technological innovation democratizing creative abilities.”

Who You'll Hear

Dirk Knemeyer, Social Futurist and Producer of Creative Next (@dknemeyer)

Jonathan Follett, Writer, Electronic Musician, Emerging Tech Researcher and Producer of Creative Next (@jonfollett)

Drew Silverstein, Co-Founder & CEO, Amper Music

Join The Conversation

Website & Newsletter: www.creativenext.org

Twitter: @GoCreativeNext

Facebook: /GoCreativeNext

Instagram: @GoCreativeNext

Sponsors

GoInvo, A design practice dedicated to innovation in healthcare whose clients are as varied as AstraZeneca, 3M Health Information Services, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. www.goinvo.com 

Design Museum Foundation, A new kind of museum, they believe design can change the world. They’re online, nomadic, and focused on making design accessible to everyone. Their mission: bring the transformative power of design everywhere. You can learn about their exhibitions, events, magazine, and more. www.designmuseumfoundation.org

BIF, As a purpose-driven firm, BIF is committed to bringing design strategy where it is needed most - health care, education, and public service to create value for our most vulnerable populations. www.bif.is

AI is driving innovation in the field of audio production. Jonathan Bailey, the Chief Technology Officer of iZotope, a company pioneering advances with these technologies, talks about the state-of-the-art in audio software.

As recently as 50 years ago, audio production required physical tools such as a soldering iron to achieve. With the rise of the personal computer these technical requirements have disappeared, replaced by software which handles all of the work with bits and bytes. From mixing to sound repair to post-production, machine learning-powered software like that offered by iZotope continues to automate an audio engineer’s workflow and even put professional audio production within the reach of amateurs.

Memorable Quotes

“There's a macro trend which is actually bigger than sort of machine learning or AI, which is for the professional working in audio the last 50, 60, 70 plus years has been a transition away from the technical problem domain to the creative problem domain.”

“You have a person that has a point of view that is guiding and steering the neural network. Now, there are new network architectures where a neural network can train another neural network, and those are pretty interesting, but there's still someone behind that, right? So they're, currently and for the foreseeable future, there's going to be kind of a guiding hand who's steering and curating what these things are capable of.”

“There's a lot of buzz in the world of technology overall and I think probably a lot of snake oil and misunderstanding of what machine learning really is capable of, but on the other hand, it is a pretty spectacularly powerful technology and set of techniques that we can use in the world of music and audio.”

“By being able to encode some of the best practices and some of the learning that only an audio engineer would have, and it's like your virtual audio engineer buddy, now people can create recordings that will sound good enough that they could be uploaded directly to Spotify or SoundCloud.”

“As a team that works with ML all day long, we are just scratching the surface of what is even possible to do in terms of personalizing the experience to a specific user, in terms of continuing to enhance our algorithms in response to real-world data.”

“We can really see a future where the audio engineer sits down, they've made a recording, it's de-noised, it's cleaned up. Everything works well together, and they can start getting creative, just painting with colors rather than having to fix a bunch of problems in the content that they produce. That's the world that we're trying to push those people towards.”

“The sort of next horizon for both the world at large but definitely for audio is how can we use neural networks to generate content?”

“We have a stream of audio coming into the product and a stream of audio leaving the product, and our job is to process that audio to make it sound better or make it sound more like the user wants us to.”

“We can almost treat that representation like an image, and at each portion of that spectral representation, we can attempt to make a decision, for example, is this voice or not-voice?”

“So we've trained a neural network to be able to make point-to-point decisions, both in time and in frequency.”

“We had an idea that it might be possible to use machine learning to solve this problem.”

Who You'll Hear

Dirk Knemeyer, Social Futurist and Producer of Creative Next (@dknemeyer)

Jonathan Follett, Writer, Electronic Musician, Emerging Tech Researcher and Producer of Creative Next (@jonfollett)

Jonathan Bailey, CTO, iZotope

Join The Conversation

Website & Newsletter: www.creativenext.org

Twitter: @GoCreativeNext

Facebook: /GoCreativeNext

Instagram: @GoCreativeNext

Sponsors

GoInvo, A design practice dedicated to innovation in healthcare whose clients are as varied as AstraZeneca, 3M Health Information Services, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. www.goinvo.com 

Design Museum Foundation, A new kind of museum, they believe design can change the world. They’re online, nomadic, and focused on making design accessible to everyone. Their mission: bring the transformative power of design everywhere. You can learn about their exhibitions, events, magazine, and more. www.designmuseumfoundation.org

BIF, As a purpose-driven firm, BIF is committed to bringing design strategy where it is needed most - health care, education, and public service to create value for our most vulnerable populations. www.bif.is 

AI is the latest technology to spark innovation in the art world. Artist Mario Klingemann, creator of “Memories of Passersby 1” which was auctioned by Sotheby’s in 2019, talks about his work and the future of art.

Machine learning technologies like Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) are accelerating progress in the automation of creative output. While Mario is best-known for his visual art he is shifting his attention to text-based output, which he sees as ripe for pioneering work. Art has always been interwoven with technology, and the future will be increasingly digital, leveraging smart machines that raise questions about the nature of humanity and creativity.

The impact of AI and other emerging technologies is of great interest to artists, who translate that interest into insights about where the world is heading. Transmedia artist Stephanie Dinkins shares her work and insights.

We go through our lives, ubiquitously using technologies like Alexa and Netflix, without critically thinking about the impacts that machine learning and other emerging technologies have on today and tomorrow. Stephanie’s art, as well as live event projects that create dialog and participation from experts and every citizens alike, strive to make us aware of and active in how we think about and engage with our technology - being particularly mindful about issues of representation, bias, and empowerment.

Memorable Quotes

“Not The Only One is talking a lot about ‘the would be’. So if you ask it a question it will say, ‘Take it to the would be.’ And I always marvel at that, because it seems to be offering this idea that you take it to this thing that I'm not quite sure what it's talking about, but the advice feels sound, and also feels in line with the way that my family and ancestors might answer that question.”

“If this is one example of this technology, are there others that represent people of color in a way? Are there others that represent different cultures and attitudes in different ways? How are they programmed, and what does this mean for the world?”

“She is a system that is representationally one thing, but perhaps is informed by coders who are not completely in line what her representation might be.”

“I've been able to step into this arena, learn by doing, and then have a voice in terms of trying to get people to think about ideas of bias and equity and ethical thinking and inclusion in the AI sphere.”

 “And long run, really being involved in the making of the systems so that at least there are a multitude of different ways of being and ways of existing in the world, to start questioning how the system are working, what data they're based on, and bringing up why that might be a problem.”

“Not The Only One is my attempt at making a memoir of my family through artificial intelligence. And the original idea was to take three generations of women from the family, have us all talk to each other, do oral histories, transcribe that information, feed it into a recursive neural network, or a chat bot system, and allow others to question it so that they get to know us and our values and ideas.”

“I also think that there's a space where we get to interrogate and question the systems and think a little deeper about not only using those systems, but changing them.”

“We need to find ways to make technologies that seem really inaccessible and perhaps not for certain communities feel like they are accessible, and find ways then to use them.”

“I've come to the conclusion that in the short run specifically, the data is going to be the thing that we need to be conscious of.”

“I feel like the story of my family is a very specific one that has some specificities that we would like to share in a certain way, and that I don't want to be lost even to a next generation. And a way to hold onto that is to build it into a system that will be going on and engaging other systems. And so I do this work hoping that will hang around, and hoping that we don't just get overrun by whatever it is makes it most expedient to get to the information or ideas that are out there.”

“We seem to be creating a world through algorithms and artificially intelligent systems that - it's gonna really form and inform the way the world functions going forward.”

“I was talking to this robot and questioning her and we were having conversations, and it became clear to me that some of the things I was looking for were not in her.”

“I happen to think that we're entering a time where artists and everyone else are going to have to be learning all the time.”

Who You'll Hear

Dirk Knemeyer, Social Futurist and Producer of Creative Next (@dknemeyer)

Jonathan Follett, Writer, Electronic Musician, Emerging Tech Researcher and Producer of Creative Next (@jonfollett)

Stephanie Dinkins, Artist & Associate Professor, Stony Brook University (@StephDink)

Join The Conversation

Website & Newsletter: www.creativenext.org

Twitter: @GoCreativeNext

Facebook: /GoCreativeNext

Instagram: @GoCreativeNext

Sponsors

GoInvo, A design practice dedicated to innovation in healthcare whose clients are as varied as AstraZeneca, 3M Health Information Services, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. www.goinvo.com 

Design Museum Foundation, A new kind of museum, they believe design can change the world. They’re online, nomadic, and focused on making design accessible to everyone. Their mission: bring the transformative power of design everywhere. You can learn about their exhibitions, events, magazine, and more. www.designmuseumfoundation.org

BIF, As a purpose-driven firm, BIF is committed to bringing design strategy where it is needed most - health care, education, and public service to create value for our most vulnerable populations. www.bif.is

The digital design profession has undergone tumultuous change over the last decades, lessons from which inform the future of AI-driven computational design. Daniel Harvey, Head of Product Design & Brand at The Dots Global, is our guest.

Design has evolved since the rise of the Internet and mobile computing, resulting in unintended negative consequences in our world such as the appropriation of social media technologies by evil actors, and the pernicious influences of bias and other invisible forces. In extreme cases our tools even contribute to the culmination of the most horrific of outcomes, such as the genocide in Rohingya. We explore how these complicated dynamics provide a glimpse into the future of design and technology.

Memorable Quotes

“When we're ripping off the same Silicon Valley apps, or the same sort of business models we end up inheriting, intentionally or not, all their weird, fucked up, white tech world biases too.”

“There is this fantastic service that you can take the content of a job description, put it into that, and it will  remove the gender bias from it.”

“As design does evolve, and as tools evolve, and as patterns evolve, I think we could get to a point where design is less about sort of pixel level craft, it's about more higher level value.”

“One of the things that I'm most excited about is  the reemergence of niche networks.”

“Facebook was used as a platform to promote  hate in Myanmar which led to an unconscionable number of real deaths, a massive refugee crisis.”

“You can have the most diverse and inclusive team in the world, but if you're looking at the same three or four big tech companies as examples to swear by, you're never going to really see the benefits of that diversity.”

“What's still not happening is you don't have one sort of common tool that's pointing to the same common assets and  common design libraries or pattern libraries.”

“Because of this proliferation of advertising as the default business model, we're just accustomed to it now, and we're willing to accept it when it does creep back in.”

“When you have voracious growth of a community, of an audience, and then you start to put advertising on top of that, the inevitable metric becomes daily active users. And the inevitable experience of using the product is, we'll cram advertising more and more into every part of the experience.”

“If you start to grow your skill sets in other areas, it's just an extra superpower.”

“There's a real problem with so much sameness in design today.”

“The scale of these platforms is what invariably leads to their potential for damage.”

Who You'll Hear

Dirk Knemeyer, Social Futurist and Producer of Creative Next (@dknemeyer)

Jonathan Follett, Writer, Electronic Musician, Emerging Tech Researcher and Producer of Creative Next (@jonfollett)

 Daniel Harvey, Head of Product Design & Brand at The Dots Global (@dancharvey)

Join The Conversation

Website & Newsletter: www.creativenext.org

Twitter: @GoCreativeNext

Facebook: /GoCreativeNext

Instagram: @GoCreativeNext

Sponsors

GoInvo, A design practice dedicated to innovation in healthcare whose clients are as varied as AstraZeneca, 3M Health Information Services, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. www.goinvo.com 

Design Museum Foundation, A new kind of museum, they believe design can change the world. They’re online, nomadic, and focused on making design accessible to everyone. Their mission: bring the transformative power of design everywhere. You can learn about their exhibitions, events, magazine, and more. www.designmuseumfoundation.org

BIF, As a purpose-driven firm, BIF is committed to bringing design strategy where it is needed most - health care, education, and public service to create value for our most vulnerable populations. www.bif.is

What is the role and future of generative design and machine learning in the field of architecture? Lilli Smith, Senior Product Manager AEC Generative Design at Autodesk, joins us to discuss these emerging technologies.

Architecture, in collaboration with Engineering and Construction, leads to the creation of the millions of buildings around the world. Like many other creative professions, architecture is being transformed by smartware in the form of things like generative design applications and additive fabrication, which is better known as 3d printing. Autodesk’s Lilli Smith brings more than 20 years of personal history and insight to our conversation on these topics.

Memorable Quotes

“By the year, 2050 there are going to be 10 billion people on earth and if you do the math, we're going to need to build about 13,000 buildings a day to accommodate all those people.”

“Humans are still going to be critical in these design efforts because they're gonna be setting up the problems, deciding what kinds of problems to solve using machines to help them to do a better job.”

“Machine learning algorithms lessen the number of design options that the designer has to sort through.”

“The computer can actually surprise you with combinations of different inputs that you might not have thought about before.”

“Computer literacy and coding literacy are really seen now as core competencies for architects and engineers in school.”

“When there are several inputs to the design, it becomes really hard for the human mind to keep track of all the combinations of those inputs.”

“We have tools that can actually predict the next node that you should place in a design sequence and give you ideas about what can come next.” 

“Technologies like machine learning can help people to code better and they'll be able describe their design ideas better for other kinds of automation.” 

“What people say they do and what they actually do is usually different.” 

“My 10-year-old has been coding in Scratch since before she could read. It’s really exciting to think about what her generation, the creative things that they're going to be able to come up with to deal with these technologies.”

“Generative design is really not new. There's a long history of generative art.”

Who You'll Hear

Dirk Knemeyer, Social Futurist and Producer of Creative Next (@dknemeyer)

Jonathan Follett, Writer, Electronic Musician, Emerging Tech Researcher and Producer of Creative Next (@jonfollett)

Lilli Smith, Senior Product Manager AEC Generative Design, Autodesk (@LilliMSmith)

Join The Conversation

Website & Newsletter: www.creativenext.org

Twitter: @GoCreativeNext

Facebook: /GoCreativeNext

Instagram: @GoCreativeNext

Sponsors

GoInvo, A design practice dedicated to innovation in healthcare whose clients are as varied as AstraZeneca, 3M Health Information Services, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. www.goinvo.com 

Design Museum Foundation, A new kind of museum, they believe design can change the world. They’re online, nomadic, and focused on making design accessible to everyone. Their mission: bring the transformative power of design everywhere. You can learn about their exhibitions, events, magazine, and more. www.designmuseumfoundation.org

BIF, As a purpose-driven firm, BIF is committed to bringing design strategy where it is needed most - health care, education, and public service to create value for our most vulnerable populations. www.bif.is

How are computational tools changing filmmaking, and how will it change the video content of the future? To explore these topics we welcome Genevieve Patterson, Chief Scientist and Co-Founder of TRASH, to the show.

Tools like those offered by TRASH, Genevieve Patterson’s software that uses AI to make and share video, are beginning to edit video automagically for people. While these are currently limited to short, simple, social media-style videos the underlying machine learning technologies are building toward something far more.

Memorable Quotes

“The big goal of our app is both to make it so that users can have an Instagram or Photoshop type feeling about  creating beautiful videos, but not having to really understand how editing works.”

“My big issue with lots of public use of artificial intelligence, especially in  life threatening situations, in extreme situations that affect people's lives, is that there's no regulatory agency to check whether or not they're working, or achieving the objectives of the law enforcement body or of the citizens.”

“I think that TRASH, and other complementary apps, that we're going to make it easier for those people to do their jobs. And because it's easier for them to do their jobs, I think they're going to do more work, and I think that it'll add a lot to creators, creative professionals. think that creative professionals will become even more professional in a sense, because they'll have this new media that they can participate in and create in and advertise in.”

“Machine learning systems, the way they're set up, they'll just give you the wrong answer. And you don't know that it's the wrong answer because it's not telling you.”

“When you create machine learning systems, those systems can only possibly understand or know the data that is fed to them at the beginning. And it is very easy to feed them the wrong data, to feed them images that don't apply to the context in which the system will be used.”

“Google trained a huge deep network, and the thing that deep network was the best at was identifying cat faces. And that's because the cat faces have such a rigid shape. The nose is always shaped in the same way, the eyes are always shaped in the same way, the ears are in the same location. And so finding  out what that pattern was and then being able to match that pattern worked very successfully.”

“How do you use image filtering,  signal processing, machine learning, deep learning techniques to change  more than just like the color, although that's often an important thing, but more to change superficial characteristics that apply to an entire frame. How do we change  the behavior of the objects in the film? How do we re-time the film? How do we make people's motions line up with music? How do we completely alter the backgrounds and make it still look photorealistic? That's the ultimate goal of computational filmmaking.

“I'm also interested in how  the perspective of  creators who don't have a bias about how films should be made or stories should be presented will give us a whole new look at non-narrative filmmaking, from a maybe even like a different cultural perspective, or not a particularly  human biased perspective. We could get films that are just radically different from films of the last 100 years. And that they'll look really good because we will automate all of the things that are really labor intensive and take a lot of education.”

“I'm excited about trying to figure out how to automate that super laborious, manual technique.”

“I think that computational filmmaking is going to make it so that more people are making, what we would currently perceive as professional quality film.”

Who You'll Hear

Dirk Knemeyer, Social Futurist and Producer of Creative Next (@dknemeyer)

Jonathan Follett, Writer, Electronic Musician, Emerging Tech Researcher and Producer of Creative Next (@jonfollett)

Genevieve Patterson, Chief Scientist and Co-Founder, TRASH (@GenevieveMP)

Join The Conversation

Website & Newsletter: www.creativenext.org

Twitter: @GoCreativeNext

Facebook: /GoCreativeNext

Instagram: @GoCreativeNext

Sponsors

GoInvo, A design practice dedicated to innovation in healthcare whose clients are as varied as AstraZeneca, 3M Health Information Services, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. www.goinvo.com 

Design Museum Foundation, A new kind of museum, they believe design can change the world. They’re online, nomadic, and focused on making design accessible to everyone. Their mission: bring the transformative power of design everywhere. You can learn about their exhibitions, events, magazine, and more. www.designmuseumfoundation.org

BIF, As a purpose-driven firm, BIF is committed to bringing design strategy where it is needed most - health care, education, and public service to create value for our most vulnerable populations. www.bif.is

Amy Yoshitsu, a Founder and the Head of Design for Kleeen software, joins us to talk about their vision for using machine learning to automate a variety of design and engineering tasks for enterprise software.

She introduces us to the plans of her startup, Kleeen Software, which aspires to transform enterprise software by automating a variety of design and engineering tasks. Amy also talks about how Kleeen hopes to level up remote collaboration in the process, shared in part from the perspective of their own distributed team and model.

Memorable Quotes

“Imagine a world where the enhancement of the core features were part of a release all the time instead of just once a year.”

“What makes software a good candidate for automation? Consistency. What makes good UX, what makes good code, or even good features? It is consistency. We were able to determine patterns and repetition in something, and that something may be a good candidate for automation if we can do that.”

“When designers are creating wonderful things and working with engineers who aren't totally bogged down by the tedious tasks on their end, they can be excited about and engaged in making the product they're working on its best.”

“The process is about making connections and determining patterns, and then the goal is to automate those patterns away.”

“Our goal is that anyone can quickly make a high fidelity prototype of a flow or a product to clearly communicate their ideas.”

“The skills that are gonna be important are critical and analytical thinking, creativity, and emotional intelligence. And the requirements for these will only grow, especially in the design world.”

“Maybe technology could facilitate people having different experiences that are outside of the limitations of their body and identity. And maybe this will help people to understand each other and maybe themselves a little bit more.”

“Enterprise spaces are more appropriate for this automation oriented approach than let's say the consumer or the medical product space.”

“We start with the problem, we understand the data that we have right now around that problem, and then we back into the right algorithm for a specific situation.”

“We are able to decompose UI and teach our system about these modular concepts.”

Who You'll Hear

Dirk Knemeyer, Social Futurist and Producer of Creative Next (@dknemeyer)

Jonathan Follett, Writer, Electronic Musician, Emerging Tech Researcher and Producer of Creative Next (@jonfollett)

Amy Yoshitsu, Co-Founder and Head of Design, Kleeen Software (AmyYoshitsu.com)

Join The Conversation

Website & Newsletter: www.creativenext.org

Twitter: @GoCreativeNext

Facebook: /GoCreativeNext

Instagram: @GoCreativeNext

Sponsors

GoInvo, A design practice dedicated to innovation in healthcare whose clients are as varied as AstraZeneca, 3M Health Information Services, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. www.goinvo.com 

Design Museum Foundation, A new kind of museum, they believe design can change the world. They’re online, nomadic, and focused on making design accessible to everyone. Their mission: bring the transformative power of design everywhere. You can learn about their exhibitions, events, magazine, and more. www.designmuseumfoundation.org

BIF, As a purpose-driven firm, BIF is committed to bringing design strategy where it is needed most - health care, education, and public service to create value for our most vulnerable populations. www.bif.is

Tatiana Mejia, Head of AI Product Marketing and Strategy at Adobe and named one of 2018’s top Silicon Valley women in AI, joins us to talk about the present and future of machine learning tools for digital designers.

Tatiana Mejia, Head of AI Product Marketing and Strategy at Adobe and one of Silicon Valley Business Journal’s 2018 top Silicon Valley women in AI, joins the show. She takes us into the world of Adobe Sensei, the company’s artificial intelligence and machine learning technology that is impacting all of the software company’s key applications. We discuss the design tasks that are already being automated, how business users will increasingly benefit from additional design capabilities, and how Adobe will help evolve the practice of design.

Memorable Quotes

“But even in the creation, it's going to make some of the more individual pieces easier to do. So you get the creative more in a kind of a creative director mode, rather than a production assistant.”

“We're finding patterns, we're taking that computer vision and helping to enrich the information so that for the user, it just feels like magic.”

“I think that AI is a necessary and important tool that will help us cope and meet the demands of, all of this content velocity, of being on 24/7, of having to stand out from the crowd.”

“It's also going to lower the bar for some of these things that I don't know that a professional would think of as creative, but I would say as a business person, we may be intimidated by.”

“The designer sets the creative intent. They know what they want to do. They may even create the first one. But even if you think about for production or post production, creating the variations, that's where AI is very powerful. It also helps with the ideation and being able to create all of those different versions.”

“So you can do things like, for example, search for family, and then drag and drop in the color scheme you're trying to match, and you now you have all of the stock photography of families that are in the color scheme.”

“So as we think about automation, the things that are easiest to leverage AI for are things that are easily defined and repetitive.”

“What AI allows you to do is to figure out what you're trying to do faster.”

“The biggest fear is they were worried that it would become homogenous. If everyone had access to these kinds of tools, would we start to see art look all the same?”

“We're not a broad-based AI solution like others in the market. You're not going to see an Adobe self-driving car. we're not going to be helping identify or cure cancer. But what you will see is dedicated tools that leverage all of the unique data that we have and the decades of expertise to help power creation, delivery, and optimization.”

“One of the things that AI is going to do is make those beginning careers a lot more interesting.”

Who You'll Hear

Dirk Knemeyer, Social Futurist and Producer of Creative Next (@dknemeyer)

Jonathan Follett, Writer, Electronic Musician, Emerging Tech Researcher and Producer of Creative Next (@jonfollett)

Tatiana Mejia, Head of AI Product Marketing and Strategy at Adobe (@TatianaMejia)

Join The Conversation

Website & Newsletter: www.creativenext.org

Twitter: @GoCreativeNext

Facebook: /GoCreativeNext

Instagram: @GoCreativeNext

Sponsors

GoInvo, A design practice dedicated to innovation in healthcare whose clients are as varied as AstraZeneca, 3M Health Information Services, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. www.goinvo.com 

Design Museum Foundation, A new kind of museum, they believe design can change the world. They’re online, nomadic, and focused on making design accessible to everyone. Their mission: bring the transformative power of design everywhere. You can learn about their exhibitions, events, magazine, and more. www.designmuseumfoundation.org

BIF, As a purpose-driven firm, BIF is committed to bringing design strategy where it is needed most - health care, education, and public service to create value for our most vulnerable populations. www.bif.is

AI isn’t just changing the tools designers use; it is a new design material that can be harnesses to enhance the experiences we design. Josh Clark, founder and principal of design studio Big Medium, joins the show to discuss.

Josh Clark, Founder and Principal of design studio Big Medium, has spoken and published around the world on his notion that designers should view AI as their newest design material. Available to use in solutions similar to other existing materials like pixels, code, and papyrus, AI in general and machine learning in particular offer a compelling array of features and opportunities for designers to innovate and improve their designed experiences in important ways.

To understand the history and nature of design we invited one of the most important design theorists practicing today. Richard Buchanan, author of Discovering Design and a professor in the United States and China, joins the show.

Richard Buchanan, Professor of Information Systems in the Department of Design and Innovation at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University and also Chaired Professor of Design Theory and Practice at the College of Design and Innovation at Tongji University in Shanghai, joins Dirk and Jon to share his frameworks for design and creativity while exploring the past, present, and future of this profession that will dominate much of our upcoming Season 03.

From science to technology, and from society to policy, we are heading into a future of change, instability, and complexity. To explore these interesting times Scientist-in-Residence at Lux Capital Sam Arbesman joins Dirk and Jon.

Sam Arbesman, Scientist-in-Residence at Lux Capital, who professionally identifies as a Complexity Scientist, joins Dirk and Jon to explore the lattice of complexities facing us in the near and medium-term futures. Taking deep looks at everything from science, to engineering, to policy, to automation, Sam provides insight in a variety of directions, finally suggesting how we might best prepare for the post-scarcity Utopia we all hope will someday come.

Memorable Quotes

"When machines and AI are creating art and music, how do we think about credit? How do we think about copyright?"

"The earlier we begin having these kind of really philosophical conversations as a society, the better we're gonna be because when people are already losing their jobs for all these kinds of things, a huge swath of the population, then it's already too late. So we need to really be having these conversations right now."

"In technology we have to kind've actually move a little bit away from this kind of traditional engineering mindset and move almost towards a biological mindset and then take some of the ideas of how biologists might query complex biological systems and use them even for our own technological systems."

"I happen to be a big believer of when you're dealing with a complex system that doesn't necessarily do what you intend for it to do, you begin tinkering with it and kind of slowly but surely and iteratively changing that system to kinda get it closer to what you want. Because if you scrap the thing and start from scratch your gonna end up with another really large, complex system that you might understand even less."

"I can see okay we have the world now kind of on the edge of maybe huge amount of automation, loss of jobs. And then maybe in several hundred years we're gonna be in this kind of like wonderful post scarcity utopia. But between now and then there could be a huge amount of disruption."

Who You'll Hear

Dirk Knemeyer, Social Futurist and Producer of Creative Next (@dknemeyer)

Jonathan Follett, Writer, Electronic Musician, Emerging Tech Researcher and Producer of Creative Next (@jonfollett)

Sam Arbesman, Scientist-in-Residence at Lux Capital (@arbesman)

Join The Conversation

Website & Newsletter: www.creativenext.org

Twitter: @GoCreativeNext

Facebook: /GoCreativeNext

Instagram: @GoCreativeNext

Sponsors

GoInvo, A design practice dedicated to innovation in healthcare whose clients are as varied as AstraZeneca, 3M Health Information Services, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. www.goinvo.com 

Design Museum Foundation, A new kind of museum, they believe design can change the world. They’re online, nomadic, and focused on making design accessible to everyone. Their mission: bring the transformative power of design everywhere. You can learn about their exhibitions, events, magazine, and more. www.designmuseumfoundation.org

BIF, As a purpose-driven firm, BIF is committed to bringing design strategy where it is needed most - health care, education, and public service to create value for our most vulnerable populations. www.bif.is 

How does the rest of the world use technology? Author of The Next Billion Users Payal Arora joins Dirk and Jon to explore the use of AI and digital tech in diverse places such as India, China, Africa, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia.

Payal Arora, author of The Next Billion Users and Associate Professor, Department of Media and Communication at Erasmus University Rotterdam, joins Dirk and Jon to share her research on the ways emerging technologies are used in developing nations. From teenagers in India to the Chinese state to gangsters in Brazil to Imams in Saudi Arabia, we get an inside look at the current and future impact of technology in important places around the world.

Memorable Quotes

"Look at India with a biometric identities scheme, which is the historically largest scheme in the world, which collects 1.2 billion fingerprints, iris scans, and links that with your background information, your bank information, your social media... And all this provides and reinforces your identity."

"We need to also understand that we can only celebrate automation when we have strong safety nets and strong security systems that allow us to reimagine our ways of living."

"If you want to win an election in India or any of the developing countries, you need to win the WhatsApp war."

"Some of the favelas, which are low-income settlements, were run by drug lords and gangs of all kinds who would force you to be on Facebook."

"If you look at say, Twitter, where 50% of young people are very active in Saudi Arabia, the most popular Twitter accounts are often imams themselves, because there's a lot of competition amongst these religious leaders to get the young people's attention."

Who You'll Hear

Dirk Knemeyer, Social Futurist and Producer of Creative Next (@dknemeyer)

Jonathan Follett, Writer, Electronic Musician, Emerging Tech Researcher and Producer of Creative Next (@jonfollett)

Payal Arora, Author of The Next Billion Users and Associate Professor, Department of Media and Communication, Erasmus University Rotterdam (@3Lmantra) 

Join The Conversation

Website & Newsletter: www.creativenext.org

Twitter: @GoCreativeNext

Facebook: /GoCreativeNext

Instagram: @GoCreativeNext

Sponsors

GoInvo, A design practice dedicated to innovation in healthcare whose clients are as varied as AstraZeneca, 3M Health Information Services, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. www.goinvo.com 

Design Museum Foundation, A new kind of museum, they believe design can change the world. They’re online, nomadic, and focused on making design accessible to everyone. Their mission: bring the transformative power of design everywhere. You can learn about their exhibitions, events, magazine, and more. www.designmuseumfoundation.org

BIF, As a purpose-driven firm, BIF is committed to bringing design strategy where it is needed most - health care, education, and public service to create value for our most vulnerable populations. www.bif.is 

How are marketing agencies adapting to smartware and emerging technologies? Tiny Giant co-founder Kerry Harrison joins Dirk and Jon to share her perspective, including explorations in techs such as chatbots and neural networks.

Kerry Harrison, a co-founder of Bristol, U.K. marketing agency Tiny Giant, joins Dirk and Jon to talk about the work her firm is in areas such as AI, chatbots, and neural networks. A veteran marketing professional, Kerry also shares her thoughtful take on the future of agencies, how marketing and emerging technologies can synergize, and what marketers need to do in order to adapt to the changing face of future technology.

Memorable Quotes

"AIs will help dictate when to begin and end campaigns. Even the mix of content we create and also even the type of imagery we're using. And we'll also see AI begin to automate the timing and delivering of messaging. But technology such as like AI will also give us a new ability to measure as well."

"Outside of marketing of course, creative thinking skills are going to be needed to provide innovative solutions to some of the world's biggest problems."

"So whether your advertising or marketing promotes joy or whether it pulls at the heartstrings or whether it surprises people, or even if it enrages them, it just needs to make people feel something. And then I think if you don't feel anything, you don't do anything."

"Gartner predicted that 25% of customer service and support operations will use some form of chatbot technology by 2020 which was up from 2% in 2017."

"There's been a lot said recently about the death of advertising agencies, but I still feel there's a very much a place for agencies."

Who You'll Hear

Dirk Knemeyer, Social Futurist and Producer of Creative Next (@dknemeyer)

Jonathan Follett, Writer, Electronic Musician, Emerging Tech Researcher and Producer of Creative Next (@jonfollett)

Kerry Harrison, Co-Founder of Tiny Giant (@copywriterkerry)

Join The Conversation

Website & Newsletter: www.creativenext.org

Twitter: @GoCreativeNext

Facebook: /GoCreativeNext

Instagram: @GoCreativeNext

Sponsors

GoInvo, A design practice dedicated to innovation in healthcare whose clients are as varied as AstraZeneca, 3M Health Information Services, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. www.goinvo.com 

Design Museum Foundation, A new kind of museum, they believe design can change the world. They’re online, nomadic, and focused on making design accessible to everyone. Their mission: bring the transformative power of design everywhere. You can learn about their exhibitions, events, magazine, and more. www.designmuseumfoundation.org

BIF, As a purpose-driven firm, BIF is committed to bringing design strategy where it is needed most - health care, education, and public service to create value for our most vulnerable populations. www.bif.is

Could the future of advertising actually make our lives better? Automat co-founder and CEO Andy Mauro joins Dirk and Jon to talk about his work in conversational marketing, an attempt to align value for customers and brands.

Andy Mauro, co-founder and CEO of Automat, joins Dirk and Jon to explore conversational marketing and the many benefits it offers for both their corporate clients and the final consumers who will engage with it. We explore the state-of-the-art in these methods and look ahead to a future where marketing and advertising may increasingly break toward value-added service for the consumer as opposed to the long tradition of disrupting and degrading our experiences.

Thanks to cloud computing and the Internet of Things, the smart home is on the rise. Yonomi CEO Kent Dickson joins Dirk and Jon to discuss the present and future of the smart home, and how it might become essential for you.

Kent Dickson, the CEO of Yonomi, the IoT company connecting the smart home, joins Dirk and Jon to explore the state of the smart home. With roots in home automation that goes back decades, the smart home of today leverages the Internet of Things and cloud computing to offer modular solutions that are affordable and easy-to-use. We come at the smart home from a variety of perspectives to better understand where it is now and is heading later, as well as how it might impact the environments where we work.

Memorable Quotes

"The home will be an API."

“Because the moment that the music starts playing at four o'clock in the morning because we assumed that that's what you wanted, yet you were in deep REM, that's, that's the day you start unplugging your smart home devices and none of us want that.”

"You don't wake up one day, and say, 'You know what I wanna go get today? A smart home.' Nobody does that."

“And so one by one you get these things. They don't cost very much, you don't have to rewire your home for 'em, it's compatible with the home just as it is today, and before you know it, you do have a smart home.”

"I don't feel like I have to have a computer science degree to make my stuff work together. It just works. And it does what I want it to do, when I want it to do it. And along the way, my privacy was protected."

Who You'll Hear

Dirk Knemeyer, Social Futurist and Producer of Creative Next (@dknemeyer)

Jonathan Follett, Writer, Electronic Musician, Emerging Tech Researcher and Producer of Creative Next (@jonfollett)

Kent Dickson, CEO of Yonomi (@kentdickson)

Join The Conversation

Website & Newsletter: www.creativenext.org

Twitter: @GoCreativeNext

Facebook: /GoCreativeNext

Instagram: @GoCreativeNext

Sponsors

GoInvo, A design practice dedicated to innovation in healthcare whose clients are as varied as AstraZeneca, 3M Health Information Services, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. www.goinvo.com 

Design Museum Foundation, A new kind of museum, they believe design can change the world. They’re online, nomadic, and focused on making design accessible to everyone. Their mission: bring the transformative power of design everywhere. You can learn about their exhibitions, events, magazine, and more. www.designmuseumfoundation.org

BIF, As a purpose-driven firm, BIF is committed to bringing design strategy where it is needed most - health care, education, and public service to create value for our most vulnerable populations. www.bif.is

Voice UI is just getting started. Karen Kaushansky, an expert in voice experiences, joins Dirk and Jon to share the technology’s progress in a variety of applications today, along with a peek to the innovations soon to come.

Experience designer Karen Kaushansky, who has specialized in voice experiences for some 20 years, joins Dirk and Jon to give us a sweeping view into the present and future of voice UI in our everyday lives. From chatbots and voice assistants, to smart homes and workspaces, to the integration of voice into the driverless cars of our future, Karen provides an essential survey of how this emerging technology will actually impact us on a daily basis.

Television, our most universal form of visual storytelling, has undergone a digital revolution. Open Television founder AJ Christian joins Dirk and Jon to discuss the medium today and how it may change in the future.

AJ Christian, the author of Open TV, Founder and Head of Development at Open Television, and Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University, joins Dirk and Jon to take a deep dive into television. Moving from past to present to future and analyzing the development and distribution sides from both a corporate and independent perspective, Dr. Christian provides a rich foundation to explore. We delve into computational augmentation, automation, and the social opportunities and challenges that the present and future have to offer.

Memorable Quotes

“One of my concerns is, will automated technologies make us think that it doesn't matter that people get to tell their stories?”

“Culture is so complicated. It's ever changing, so diverse. It's very difficult for AI to really understand how to develop culture in a way that actually will be sustainable to a business independent of human intervention.”

“Humans exist through storytelling, and our world is shifting all the time. And we're in the world first before the machines are.”

“The barriers to entry are lower so people who had been historically excluded can now make their own TV shows and distribute them.”

“The beauty of television and the Internet is that it's easily accessible to anyone at almost any moment these days, and AR and VR and anything that you might lay on top of that still seems not quite there yet.”

Who You'll Hear

Dirk Knemeyer, Social Futurist and Producer of Creative Next (@dknemeyer)

Jonathan Follett, Writer, Electronic Musician, Emerging Tech Researcher and Producer of Creative Next (@jonfollett)

AJ Christian, Author of Open TV and Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University (@drajchristian)

Join The Conversation

Website & Newsletter: www.creativenext.org

Twitter: @GoCreativeNext

Facebook: /GoCreativeNext

Instagram: @GoCreativeNext

Sponsors

GoInvo, A design practice dedicated to innovation in healthcare whose clients are as varied as AstraZeneca, 3M Health Information Services, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. www.goinvo.com 

Design Museum Foundation, A new kind of museum, they believe design can change the world. They’re online, nomadic, and focused on making design accessible to everyone. Their mission: bring the transformative power of design everywhere. You can learn about their exhibitions, events, magazine, and more. www.designmuseumfoundation.org

BIF, As a purpose-driven firm, BIF is committed to bringing design strategy where it is needed most - health care, education, and public service to create value for our most vulnerable populations. www.bif.is