great well I'll I'll get started with um with some introductions um so uh thank you everyone for joining us today for this uh second in our second webinar in our second series of webinars on um Ai and and writing and and Publishing um I'm Professor Kate pullinger I am the co-director of the center for cultural and creative Industries here at baspa University uh where we also have our narrative in emerging Technologies lab uh so this these webinars uh like I said this is the second in our in a a new series of four webinars um really are looking at where creative writing publishing and an an artistic practice meet um generative AI writing tools uh as you all know artificial intelligence is rapidly changing and challenging the landscape of creative writing and Publishing and storytelling in general uh so these webinars to offer an in-depth look at ai's emerging influence across across writing and Publishing in multiple fields So today we're we're joined uh by uh with Janet BS who's um with us from the US and Nadem sadic who's with us from London to look at how AI is reshaping the landscape of creativity um and they're going to talk about um things that they're working on uh exploring Divergent attitudes showcasing some of the Innovative projects that they're both working on and discuss the role of AI in augmenting human creativity so we're going to start today with uh uh kicking off with Nadim so Nadim is the founder and CEO of Shimmer AI which is revolutionizing book sales by generating and deploying automated self-optimizing advertising for titles which he'll He he'll talk about a little bit about today but he's also the author of Shimmer don't shake how publishing can Embrace I AI which is published globally by Forbes he's trained as a psychologist and founded and led Global Market Research agencies a whiskey food and music brand from an island off the west coast of Ireland and an aid driven brand management platform he also has a regular column in the um the book seller which is the UK's um trade publication for the publishing industry uh so uh the format we'll take today is that um nine will talk to us for between 10 and 15 minutes uh and then I'll introduce Janet who will talk to us about her work and then we'll open up to um questions and comments so please feel free to put questions and comments and thoughts into the chat and the Q&A um we've got Louise Chapman and Amy SP Spencer with me today uh to help uh facilitate the conversation oh and I should have mentioned that um these webinars are um part of our our our big five-year research project uh that is led by the University of Bristol which is called my work World which is really a a technological R&D project looking at immersive immersive technology across a a big range of fields um so uh I think that is all I needed to say and Nadem over to you thank you very much that was a lovely um introduction Kate I think that professional history shows that I rarely know what I'm talking about but I will give it my best shot for you today um hello everybody thanks for coming along um Janet and I uh are looking forward to your questions and um I'm I'm taking if you like a slightly more macro perspective on AI and its um intersection with creativity talking a bit about education and Neuroscience and a few other things it's it's pretty exhausting trying to keep up with AI generally um even if you do it professionally as I do um so I don't think that any perspective on it can be completely comprehensive or as multifaceted as it should be so I apologize in advance for all the deficiencies and what I share with you now but um I have tried to take the wider perspective and once I'm done then K Janet will will be showing something much more specific that she's got going as a project and um brings it to life I think in a really nice way so let me see if I can do the first non AI thing which is to share my acrobat and I think it's going to do the same thing as it did when we were rehearsing oh dear is it showing just the side yes it is thank okay let's stop that go again it's so annoying You' think that somebody with AI on their brains could do something more easily than this I think it's gonna keep doing it no worries you'll get there yeah like I did earlier but I was hoping not to waste everybody's time with this little performance um one more time that should be a bit better we've got we've got the sidebar still though we do see disappearing now I hope we see the slide but with the slide with the sidebar yeah is it visible now the slides are there but also the Adobe kind of um big um menu down the left hand side I am sorry everybody this is something we tried to overcome earlier hopefully now there you go don't don't let any tell you that AI fixes everything in the world at all so um I've I've already kind of suggested what I'm going to be doing and I'll get on with it having now wasted a minute of my time um I think the first thing that I always kind of say to people about AI is just brace yourselves I know we've been told that it's the you know most impactful technological change and all of that um but it's true the the the rate of development surpasses anything that we've seen you know the internet AR social media arrived browsers arrived you know they they've all become part of our lives but this is going so much quicker than they did and it's accelerating you know yesterday um at the whole Trump show um we heard about another half a trillion dollars being poured into just the infrastructure for AI I mean it it's being taken incredibly seriously it's becoming one of the new weapons of domination in the world it's becoming you know an international competition it and it's pervasive you know we're going to see it everywhere I'm I'm sure you've all been hearing things about agents um and again you know a lot of these things we're just going to have to kind of tap quickly and move on from but 2025 is meant to be the year of the agents we're by now me have got used to using llms large language models and diffusion models which things that kind of create the imagery and some of the music things and now that we've had long enough to get used to all of that we're going to be going to agents which essentially kind of read your mind and do what you would do but more efficiently and faster like booking an airline ticket you know or reminding you to to get in an Uber or something like that so there's there's a lot that's going to be coming at us even faster this year I did want to touch um um I'm a psychologist by training so long ago that I'm probably not really worthy of the title any longer but I have always kept an interest up in Neuroscience as well and one of the things that I found fascinating about AI is that um as as some of you who might have come across slow thinking and Daniel carman's work um there is a truth about The Human Condition which is that we feel really quickly like by now already you will think who is this Nadem guy or you quite like me or you don't or it's worth hanging on and listening to a bit of the content we can't help responding with feelings to people and we do it really fast we do it intuitively or implicitly as it's technically called and we think relatively slowly we think slow and the thing that AI does that makes us become mesmerized by it is it thinks fast it thinks astonishingly fast I mean whenever you put something into one of those AI chats and you see how swiftly it comes back with a pretty coherent answer we are astonished and we can't really get over that because it's something that we can't do but I think the future is going to be that human beings rely or come to really legitimize feelings as a means of navigating decisions and the world and relationships um and we delegate much more of the thinking making sure sewage doesn't go into the rivers and planes don't fall out of the sky and that we invent virus vaccines much more quickly and all those sorts of things um we will be relying upon AI to do the thinking for us in many more ways not saying that's a good thing I'm just saying that that's what's going on neuroscientifically in our heads I think the the other thing that's kind of at a macro level astonishing about AI is its multifaceted impact societally it's um challenging our understanding of e economies um it's potentially bringing around a new political opportunity where we Define ourselves very differently rather than just in terms of our economic output social structures philosophically um you know thinking about what it is to be human and how we're separate and you know a big part of that is creativity from machines so it it's causing us to reflect and be introspective in a way that hasn't really been so focused for a long time and then professionally there's probably not a single workflow anywhere that isn't going to be touched by AI in either a shallow or a deep fashion I was reading a book um called the better angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker which is very long and very dense and full of Statistics but fascinating for all of that and in it he describes the way um the world's always been pretty violent and will remain so because each one of us whether we're a snail an eagle or a human being spends quite a lot of our time trying to be the Apex genome on earth like we want to be dominant all of us and so we create offensive and defensive strategies to to see whether we should be aggressive or whether we should be somehow supplicative to the person or the thing that interacting with I think we've done that with AI I think we've kind of anthropomorphized it and thought what are is this a threat to me or is this a good thing for me and I think it's led to us being very fearful that it will be the Apex genome um most people if you ask them we'll say that they don't believe AI is here to take over the world though I think many of us fear that it could turn out that way um still to be decided but it doesn't have a genome that is programmed to do that whereas the rest of us do so I I account for some of the fear and Terror that I've seen particularly within publishing um by this very kind of Primal reality that we we want to be the Apex genome we have been the alpha species um and in a way particularly with intelligence um AI is challenging that what can we do about all of this um ethical AI development whether that is you know all the the the the very kind of common conversations that we have around copyright and recognition remuneration of creative people um through all the way to actually trying to endow AI with a sensitivity towards compassion empathy kindness benevolence you know all the things which if we don't feed it literature that has those things articulated and celebrated then it won't recognize that they're good things to have in the world so in the crudest way AI is what it eats and I think we have a resp responsibility to to feed it well and then publishing is responsibility I think you know we in publishing we kind of have the greatest reflection of The Human Condition written down codified um and available so I think trying to find a really constructive way for literature publishing in general to interact with AI um is a responsibility we should feel in some way just a couple of things um work is worth you know this this is going to affect creativity I think because um I'm going to put it very pessimistically for a moment just to kind of make and illustrate the point we spend about 20 years learning how to work about 40 years working and then about another 20 years slowly dying as we become redundant from work but it's work work work in every definition and there's an opportunity with AI to say I'm not going to Define my My Life by my work but instead to take that 40 Years of Highly productive living and do something else with it I mean ask yourselves each of you on this call if you didn't answer the question what do you do with your professional answer what would you say like I like chocolate biscuits I I you know I'm a bird watcher I I love the tides you know what what are you going to say we're we're so unaccustomed to defining ourselves with anything other than work but AI could do half our work for us and we could either become twice as productive which is probably the way it'll go or we could become somehow more reflective and more creative in the time that is spared and given to us in education I think there's a profound change going on which is going to affect creativity too until pretty recently A wise person was a person who retained a huge Fortune of knowledge in their big brains and then when you ask them clever questions they had an amazing way of accessing it and articulating it and you know making it seductive and interesting for you so that that's the way we kind of look to brainy bright wise people nowadays and you see it particularly with Gen Z there's very little appetite for retention because you can stream everything you don't have to hard dis stuff you sure you have to know that a snake bite might kill you and steam will burn your skin off and you know all of those sort of crucial things but apart from that do you really need to know when the film was made or what the actor's life was or you know where this author was born or anything you don't you just kind of act access it whenever you want it so I think we'll be I think it's an imperative that we move from retention and learning by root as it were to critical thinking also having continuous learning also having personalized paths and I think we'll see some very different brains emerging and coming to the four because of this it's quite intimidating to retain and um there are a lot of people who can think fast um who haven't had the ammunition to think with fast before and who now will be able to to have it at their fingertips all the time so that's going to impact us and then I think there's kind of creativity reimagined um there's lots of AI tools that'll democratize the crafting processes and creating new ones I'll talk a bit more about that in a second I think um we can bring voices that are um not in the light uh quieter voices less recognized voice voices underprivileged under resourced voices into the world and I I can contend that there are 8 billion creators in the world um and only a few of us have been lucky enough to have the crafting skills those who can write well those who can draw well those who can sing well also who can discover new drugs or you know architect Bridges and things like that so there have been many different forms crafting of creativity but I think AI is going to open up new forms and I'm explicitly not saying write books with AI I think that's the worst use case for AI of all it's just really Bland and anod but um I think there'll be many new collisions of of media and art forms and thoughts that that'll give voice to people who haven't previously found a way to express their creativity and certainly in in Creative Pursuits using AI to to research and to iterate things and to be your companion I mean I I write a colum as um was mentioned and every time I write the column I put it into Ai and say please contradict me and tell me why I'm a Fool to write this you know and it's astonishing how well it does it and how diminished I feel after every exercise like that but it's healthy and it's good and it makes my columns a bit better than they would have been I think I think we're moving from corporate efficiency to what I call authorial emancipation or just more simply from efficiency to emancipation at the moment if you talk to Publishers about AI it's all about you know sustainability programs and streamlining rights payments and contracts and print runs and you know all that kind of stuff which is great good you know why not um but I think we can move to creative augmentation where AI enables people to be more expressive they can have those internal arguments that I just described around my column they can do all sorts of things with this indefatigable constantly cheerful companion um that does good things for them and ultimately we might realize human potential in a different way so I try to imagine you know again to return to the Gen Z example somebody sitting there with a video game that says actually be quite cool to have a bit of writing here and if I had a bit of cryptocurrency there you know and then something else you know a live event alongside it and that becomes a new art form that we haven't previously been able to anticipate um before AI enabled that to happen you're you're at about 14 minutes now NAD just to let you thanks so I think we'll we'll have new writing as as I've been describing we'll have new forms of expression as I've just described a second ago and I think we'll have new interactions um which are different in the author reader department so in the kind of more immersive stuff um you know books where the plot changes on reader decisions as you go through them that's been talked about for decades but it's now enabled in a way that can be immediately interactive um we can have customizable protagonists so that you can create a hero into a story that doesn't exist and see how it kind of evolves um highly highly interactive we can have adaptive text where you dynamically change uh the way things go and you can imagine communities well we're the ones that led to you know we're the ones that believed he should die no we're the ones that believe that she should die you know in the horror story um and communities grow up and start interacting with each other and then really immersive experiences you know a kid reading about a cobra coming out of a monsoon drain can read about you know can go down the rabbit hole discovering cobras and Monsoon drains and so on I think we'll also have much greater accessibility so AI translation um you know translators are the kind of the super ninjas of the world they're often under um announced and under celebrated but they they make art in one language beautiful in another language there's quite a lot of content which doesn't need artistic interpretation which is really just kind of content translation Communication in simple terms and law that can happen through ai ai powered audiobooks I'm sure going to be on the way where you say I want a more animated voice a more languid voice a female one you know one that one that's excitable and so on you kind of choose your way through things and um the kind of the Humdinger the the Premium Edition might well be the actor voiced or the author voiced um or translated uh editions of a book I think we could also have author avatars there there's a thing called personify it's just an AI That's appeared which can read everything you've ever written and then start emulating you and interacting for you so although readers and interactors would know that this was a robot they're dealing with it's one that's been finely tuned to represent the work of the author and the author themselves so you kind of have a virtual relationship um predictive content creation you know knowing what future Trends are tailoring content to those culturally innovating that come through AI just quickly to talk about Shimmer because we're very practical application of AI in publishing we know that a ton of Publishers have a bigger ton of books in their back list that never see the light a day because they don't have the human or the the capital resource to to make those come to life we we read each book with AI we psychologically profiled and understand all of its emotions and um values and areas of Interest um as well as a structure and and narrative Arc we then create um highly faithful um advertising executions which bring that psychological truth to life and then we deploy Those ads into media and match them with suitable audiences who then look at those ads for books and say oh that feels like one for me so these are some of the ads that uh you can you can see here there's a variety of Styles um it's all done handsfree end to end so the publisher gives us an UB we do the the reading and the identifying of a strategy the creation of a campaign and the deploying of that campaign into media with ads like these and you can see the the variety of styles that it's quite possible to do already and we're moving into video we'll be moving to sound as well so it's kind of Revenue driving on autopilot that suits the publisher makes more money for the author gives them more reach and recognition and matches readers to more psychologically fulfilling books too so without claiming nobility in our purpose it does do pretty good things for most parts of the ecosystem um and it's doing it uh you know that that those those books are being seen at about six times the regular rate that people look at ads and then people interact with them at about 15 times the rate that normally they would respond to an ad and go to an e-commerce page so there's something about the psychological profiling and manifesting of books with the assistance of AI that is making books much better discovered discovered and driving greater sales so I'll leave you with uh not a deliberately provocative thought but it probably is you know humans made AI um should we consider that it's the most creative thing we've ever done I think so you know it's it's an astounding feat of thinking conceptual engineering and an actual coding that has let everything we've ever done kind of appear um in our pocket at the Press of a button so thank you for your listening um I don't know whether you'd like to pause for questions now or whether you want us to do the two sessions before we we're goingon to do the two sessions and then and then open for questions just in the in the interest of of time Nadim so super interesting thank you lots of things to to follow up on there and so if you've got questions in the audience and you don't want to forget them because you're gonna have an equally interesting talk in in a just in another moment please do put them in the chat or the Q&A and we will I will do my best to pull those together after we've heard from Janet so um again thank thanks Nadim and I'm I'll I'll introduce uh Janet now um Janet bigs is a research-based interdisciplinary artist known for immersive work in video film and performance whose work focuses on individuals in extreme Landscapes and situations some of which we'll we'll see today in Janet's slides navigating the Territory between art science and techn technology bigs has worked with institutions including NASA and CERN her work has garnered garnered support from organizations such as the gugenheim foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and recognition from The New York Times art forum and art news her work has been exhibited and collected at museums and institutions worldwide bigs is a member of the new Museum's cultural incubator new Inc and of the Explorers Club so over to you Janet thank you so much I'm um excited to be here and uh I am going to just get myself set for a moment give you some sound hopefully okay so this is what it feels like to live inside of a spacit it's heavy not just the physical weight of having to wear a life a life sustaining garment but the psychological weight of knowing that you must I'm sorry my advancing is not happening here ah let me uh GNA start again I do thank you well it like we are both sharing a little technological challenge here sorry Janet I've jinxed you let me just see if I okay that looks like we are going there and let's try and make sure sound is still on okay so um oh gosh as soon as I check my sound I lose my let me try one more there's clearly some kind of AI powered Gremlin in the bring myself back in one more time see how we go from here simple tasks like picking up a stone become Herculean I learned to hum if you hum it regulates your breathing if you breathe too hard and fast your helmet fogs and you can't see if you breathe too hard and fast you use up all your oxygen once your helmet is locked into place any moisture inside sweat a runny nose tears can blind you this is a story from a time that I spent as a crew member of a simulation Mars mission um I did one both in the desert of Utah and high in the Himalayas this is a human generated story um stories are how we know the past and our histories stories are how we relate to the present and stories are how we can imagine and build our futures algorithms or stories my constant challenge to myself is how do I tell inclusive ethical and essential stories generative AI is in the process of becoming we can shape the future by the stories that we choose to tell this is a story that I tell myself about who I am I'm a research-based interdisciplinary artist working mostly in video installation performance and sound my installations when they go up generally look like this they're large scale projections that are synchronized with immersive sound and look like this when they're finished um in the course of making my work I have traveled around the world um including being at both polls um I have filmed in the taka Maan desert of western China on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan I have filmed inside of active volcanoes in Indonesia and Ethiopia um I have filmed in areas of conflict in The Horn of Africa and on mars or at least as close as we can get right now um with those Mars simulations I've learned some skills along the way including how to film from the back of a camel how to film um in a kayak with a polar bear hanging out over my shoulder um and I've had the real honor of working some with some amazing people in institutions including CERN um at the Hadron Collider uh both Noah and NASA I was able to send a project up to the International Space Station not so long ago and have worked in collaboration with neuroscientists with aerospace engineers and with a robot named shimone um so I came to working with a through the back door as an artist with an idea and a story to tell um not not as a coder and not through computation um so let me tell you a little story about my family my mother had a sister who was 10 years younger than herself my aunt Anne was born in 1937 and pretty soon after her birth my my grandparents her parents realized that she wasn't meeting the benchmarks for Child Development she wasn't making IC cont uh forming words and exhibiting she was starting to exhibit repetitive behaviors the doctor's advis that she be placed in an institution so at age five Anne was admitted to the Brandon training school which was historically known as the remont state school for feeble-minded children she then lived there for the next 47 years of her life eventually Anne was diagnosed with autism and apraxia which prohibited speech an was non-speaking but could vocalize in hum in 1995 my husband and I became ant's Guardian for the last 10 years of her life and then in 2019 10 years after my aunt's death I created AI an AI an is a non non-speaking um disembodied entity that can detect emotion and respond with emotion in real time using procity the um The rhythms of poetry AI can communicate with humans through interactions and exchanges that really vary from very basic utterances to really sophistic tonal Duets I collaborated with Richard Savory who's a robotic developer and singer songwriter Mary Esther Carter on AI um AI was trained on Mary's voice but patterned after my aunt's communication methods her phenotypic data um AI is a Storyteller without words the one thing that I keep in mind though is that um a exists but my aunt an never gave permission for any of this um the first time you know I I actually became interested in creative collaborations with generative AI as a way to advocate for inclusiveness in this technology um especially inclusiveness of neurodiversity um so the first performance that AI ever uh presented was at the new Museum in 2019 um this is a new Museum in New York and it was uh it was presented by Asher Remy Toledo of hyphen Hub um it featured Mary Ester Carter the singer interacting with AI an it also uh featured um Brian rennolds who is a bilateral amputee marathon runner and Jason Barnes um I spent 25 years of my life with having to work a day job before my uh creative life uh was self- sustaining self-supporting and self- sustaining um and that working world I uh my my day job was to create Prosthetics so I met these two people through my job um Jason lost his arm in a workplace and went to uh Georgia Tech to Gil Weinberg and my friend Richard Savory um and asked for help in building a prosthetic so that he could continue to drum and the prosthesis that they created had two sticks one that Jason controls and the other which has AI um so and with oral input so that stick can hear what Jason is playing improvise and then improvise off of Jason so Jason is now a self-defined cybernetic drummer that drums at speeds that exceed human capability and now if all goes well I'm going to share an excerpt from that performance that hopefully has sound so let's uh let's see how this goes try it again and look look deeper where the line breaks and then 2020 came and Co hit and the world really went into shutdown um my collaborative team with Richard and Mary we decided to present a live stream version of AI because that's kind of all we could do at the time um we were working within New York City's covid guidelines and so I went into a gallery um in the uh Lower East Side and I cleaned the gallery I set up cameras lighting sound equipment cleaned the gallery again left the gallery and then Mary came in and performed um all of the technology was run remotely so AI actually resided on a computer in Australia and I directed sitting in my kitchen in Brooklyn um the the thing that I thought was really interesting about this performance is that it it Amplified the interactions that can happen with AI technology especially when humans are um experiencing isolation and I'm going to show you a little clip from that in the past populations hidden fear during an eclipse when the moon passed across the Sun h um so aan has G on to perform in many venues in 2023 um aan was asked to perform at uh the United Nation headquarters here in New York City um as uh part of the first International Day of care and support um for the performance I reached out to a number of friends that I had met around uh the world in my travels and especially women and asked them to write a text that described their experience with care and support and these are women primarily that um are disproportionately Ed by uh the burden of caring and supporting for both family and community so um I had friends from Yemen that were writing uh I had a friend who was um an immigrant from uh from Bosnia and herzo during the war um so a really wide range of responses and um AI then really stood in for all the absent voices that were not heard and then I'm going to end with a recent relatively recent performance I did last year um in collaboration with I aario um another artist and friend who's lives right around the corner here um so we uh we CH chose for this performance I decided not to include a Ain and instead actually use language and IIA had been developing um a performance and she an AI model that was trained on an early version of gpt2 um and the data set that she had uh had created was the Poetry of the performer on the right which is candy store and also um the cybernet uh the Cyber feminism index and Project Gutenberg um and I included Jason Barnes uh who use some of my images from videos and then generated AI um alterations and uh new imagery from that and I will again give you a short excerpt there have been times however where the dragon has gone after the body Le leaving it lying in fear of life and death there are many I was interested in your art and your pros and your scientific and your science and your pictures and all the bells and the cables and you were interested in the stories that you told me you told me the stories the Nay I had a lot of trouble imagining that I would have gender Old Iron Man and the adventures of Dan and Dan and Dan and Dan and Dan and Dan and Dan and Dan and Dan and Dan and Dan and Dan and technology is seductive um really seductive and but just because you can doesn't mean you should and I'm gonna Echo um naame here in that humans created this technology and humans will continue to create this technology um I really feel that this is a time when diverse voices creative voices must be included and really need to ask questions about who holds the money and the power and the profits and what voices are absent thank you thank you thank you two such thought-provoking talks and um both with really lovely Inn evocative slides as well so yeah thank you very much to both of you um we have got some questions in the C in the Q&A and I uh just to to kick off just to say that yeah in the face of in the face of what is is coming toward us and and also the you know the environmental impact of of a AI which which we don't have the scope to talk about right now but it's on all of our minds um the idea that um AI is as Nadim said human powered um and Janet y ly at the beginning that you know algorithms are stories these are human-made Technologies and and we we the people need to figure out what what we what we want from them so super super interesting um I think also that there's a couple there's a couple of questions that that talk about what we feed the what we feed the AI um and uh one of those issues uh is one that has come up for me repeatedly really which is the business of of representation of non-english non-english language work in the llms in these giant language large language models that that um currently um generate most of the text-based AI that that some of us as writers and Publishers are are working with and what to do about this issue of um vast numbers of languages in the world not being represented in in these large language models at all and I wondered if if either of you had any any thoughts on that particular issue sure I do but Janet do you want to go first you've just finished sure I will absolutely uh weigh in here um you know I think that the fact that most uh large language models are just scraping the web means that they are limited to the dominant uh economic forces on on this planet and I would argue that not only are there languages that are missing but there there's a huge percentage of the population that does not have access to technology and I think you know for we in the west um that becomes a large Wii we even realized that during the pandemic there were so many kids that didn't have a computer that couldn't you know their education was interrupted um and then you talk about the places on the planet that are not wired that are you know don't have electricity so I am not sure how inclusive this technology will be and I'm also uh fairly sure that the real powers behind it don't care um and so you know if you're looking at the uh the Mana of big Tech um if you're looking at Zuckerberg and Altman they don't care whose voices are included and they certainly don't care if everybody has access to technology um so then it becomes a big challenge one that I'm not sure you know I I may not be the most optimistic voice here on that n what's your perspective on that um it's it's not contradictory to that it's just it's perhaps slightly different um I'm not an apologist for for AI companies and I think there's been lots of bad behavior um particularly the kind of the theft of copyrighted materials which which would be put right one way or the other through either through courts being punitive or a kind of a recognition and remuneration model that becomes applied to everything that's gone on the past but I I kind of liken AI in my mind and the and the current models to somebody who who stole three eggs and made the most amazing omelet and offered it out of a window into the street and people said my God that's the best omelet I've ever seen and and so they kind of prove the case that with a few eggs they could make astonishing omelets and and so now what they're doing is going around to all the chicken farms and saying can we buy all your eggs please and that is the process that's going on at the moment you know the Publishers weren't ready they weren't kind of of organized to sell all of their literature to an AI company which they' never heard of a few months before anyway and had no idea what was about to come and the AI companies had no idea how to deal with all these Publishers which were from an entirely different ecosystem so I think there was kind of a real mismatch of the supply and demand um which which led to the bad behavior I think that's now going to get worked at partly because of the law and partly because of the need you know AI models need as much as many eggs as they can get and they'll buy them everywhere and I think in the end they'll probably pay a fair price for it my my um I would urge publishing as an industry to license everything that's ever been published and to make it included in llms and in doing so to generate new money for publishing to reward authors for works I mean our business model exists because 95% of published Works never get seen you know we advertise stuff that nobody can ever find or or see it's terrible you know there's a huge amount of work that sits there um unknown putting everything that's ever been written or at least published into an llm certainly makes it better than it is today there is a misconception that um if you know if this is the kind of the whole world of content that it's all been scraped and it's all nlm actually isn't that at all they've just taking these little slivers and with those little slivers those three eggs here and there they've shown what they can do we need to kind of get the whole lot in there so that as I said earlier on empathy and compassion and benevolence and all the positive things kind of get um included now and that's the way I think we'll we'll diminish bias I think we'll still be left with a problem that you know the Begg under the bridge in Mumbai Who as a creative thought hasn't had it expressed or crafted or articulated her notion of creativity in the world won't get included in the LNM anytime soon but you know one of the things I loved about Janet's um presentation was kind of showing that the kind of the Collision of different Technologies and morphologies and personalities leads to new art forms that's what we were just witnessing and I think a AI can really helped to accelerate and reinforce all that so more AI enabled art forms expressed and captured and then um assimilated and all the published work in the world being properly recognized properly remunerated and then included into AI That's what I would be doing super interesting not without not without controversy but really really thought-provoking Janet there's a question here which uh you know are the same tensions that we're we're seeing in the publishing world uh present in the art world as well um what's your what's your thinking on that I mean certainly in in the worlds that um we inhabit uh there's a people people do feel very threatened people people are uh worried that AI is gonna not only steal their work but uh steal their livelihood for the F in the future as well uh is there anything similar going on in the art World in that regard um you know I think there is I I think there are multiple art worlds um the one that I think many people know of which is the big money one uh feels perhaps maybe a little more insulated from AI technology uh and and dedicated to quote unquote originality and paint on canvas kind of moment um but I think the reality is that all creative Fields like writing publishing certainly the music industry and the creative arts I mean now that we can you know that you can put a couple prompts in and uh and have a visual um uh product come out you know that it does make artists wonder what what that their future is but I think it's um yes probably uh less crucial for the Fine Arts at this stage and probably more worrisome for um the Arts in terms of uh design and uh other applications um but you know it is definitely a worry um I think we've got we've got we should we should finish with one one final question for you both which is which has come from our colleague Amy which is oh no it's come from Becky Becky from the chat um what is one thing you would say to someone who skeptical of using AI uh yeah one positive thing that you think would lead someone to maybe to maybe rethink and and have a look at some positive impacts that AI might have in their creative Endeavors do you wantan to you be the the voice of optimism I may not I'll certainly let you have the last word um I think just have a conversation with AI I I don't think I've seen anybody and I've and I've interacted with many Skeptics including people in my own family once they start interacting they're astonished and then they get mesmerized and then they start finding a constructive way to get some value out of the interaction I I created a whole leadership remuneration model that actually extends to 50 pages of word just by an iterative discussion with the professional version of an AI amazingly helpful for me I've never I've LED lots of companies and I've never had such a good plan before amazing but but my son was trying to work out the best way to get tickets to a festival somewhere in the countryside you know and and he figured it out talking to an AI it it kind of helps you with almost whatever you need and I would just say engage don't don't turn your nose up at at it and leave yourself out of it it's here get used to it yeah I mean it has been part of our lives for years now um in ways that we're aware of and certainly in ways that we're not aware of and I you know the the uh the way you ended your talk meeting which is like that that that AI is created by humans and arguably one of the most creative things we we have uh produced and you know it is astonishing um and but it is an astonishing tool and I think that um and so I would say to Young creatives that use it as a tool it's amazing it gives you an ability to you know it gives it gives larger accessibility um and and potential to you know anytime something is unknown it makes us become more creative and a generative AI is becoming this new a unknown and that's an interesting position but again again I would say that um you know one of the things that I am very cautious about is again the the money and the power that's involved here and the the lack of creative input the creative voices that are um you know contributing to the the further development of it and we must be present because it's going to go on without us um and so I think for that reason you you you know kind of responsibility to work with it but I so that you don't end up with individual silos and um you know just a a feedback loop of your own thoughts and um you know coming from a country where we just had an election that is taking all guard rails away from uh AI development you know I think again the it sits on individuals shoulders now to make sure that um that inclusion happens so yes engage well that that was really such an interesting session such yeah really thought-provoking talks and and really great questions as well in the Q&A which we which we don't have time to get to now but I'll just end by saying thank you Nadim thank you Janet thank you so much for agreeing to speak with us today and um we've got uh we've got our our next webinar is coming up just let me pull up that information uh 19th of February at 12:00 um UK time which is on AI and writing for games and for that for that session we've got inven e Richard Cole and Joseph wil uh chaired by S Sarah Campbell so um you should have seen a link for that in the chat uh but if not we'll um we'll make sure to spread the word about it so once again thank you to Janet thank you to na that was a super super interesting question um question session and thank you for everybody who came along today yeah thank you for your time and and for the invitation lovely thank you it was an honor
2025-02-02 22:34