You're recording? Oh, yeah. I would ask that and I was like, yeah, I have to double check.
My glasses. It's OK.
We'll make it work. All right. I am here with? Jonathan Horst.
And what do you do for the company? I write, host, produce, American Dress.
The Apple Focus channel. We love that channel.
Oh, I think. I like it, actually. I feel like I watched the, I watched, I think, Hoffman edited it.
They're the most recent one. Yeah. That was really good. I liked it. I watched the whole thing.
I was like, interesting. You'll be so lucky.
No. I'm not. I'm not that kind of editor.
You sure? Yeah. It's not my strength.
All right. I mean, I was like, maybe it is. We'll find out.
What's that? All right. So I'm just asking everyone in the company what their thoughts on AI it is.
Oh, my God.
Over-hyped? Over-hyped? Maybe incorrectly named.
Annoying? I don't know.
What is there to know? I don't even feel like I know enough about it,
but I'm annoyed by the hype around it.
Let's wait till the door closes. It don't work.
Yeah, I'm not a lot of the bad idea, but we're committed.
We committed to this location, and it's our fault.
Yeah, just. Yeah, go ahead. It's OK. The bid is committed.
It's committed. It's footprint. Yeah.
Yeah. OK, so it sounds like you don't like it at all.
I mean, OK, so here's the problem. Especially this past year, with the release of chat
GPT and the mid-journey bot and all this weird stuff, everyone started attributing all this amazing capability
to something that really hasn't been proven.
And so I think we got a little fooled by what it was doing and thought it could do more.
And think it can do more than it can. And we're thinking of it as like,
it's going to just do the thing we want it to do when it's probably just going to be yet another tool in the toolbox
to help. You still have to do the thing, though. You know what I mean?
So when people are like, writers are going to be out of jobs
because you could just use chat GPT, it's like.
And I'm not sure about that, because it's just
a summary of all the writing it's ever looked at.
So how are you going to get any new ideas or new ways of thinking about things or new thinking?
Because that's what writing is. From that, I don't know.
OK, well, surprisingly, you're the first person I interviewed today who is really against it.
So against it. But what's one thing you like about AI, then?
I don't know. I haven't really, ah, AI is such a broad term.
I guess AI in the current state. Or in the current culture.
Exactly.
It's impressive, but I'm not impressed, if that makes any sense.
It's like, I don't know, I dabbled with mid-journey.
And I was like, if you have broad strokes,
you'll get an interesting image. But then if you want anything specific from the real world
or something like that, it just starts making stuff up.
And you're like, ah, it's a bit of a fever dream still. And it's like, I don't know.
It can only get you so far, it feels like. And then hearing about people writing emails with chat GPT
or something like that, it becomes this weird question of, well, what's the point?
If you're not willing to put effort into saying
what you want to convey, then are you saying anything?
I don't know. So it just makes everything so much harder to trust.
And so I find these concerns way bigger than the benefits.
And so I'm just like, I just haven't
bothered to really play around too much with it.
So I'm not the most experienced, I could say. But when I have dabbled with it, I've been like, oh,
this is kind of neat. But and maybe this could be a tool,
like I guess Adobe's generative fill is kind of interesting.
But it's like, they're demonstrating it. And look, we could make this image so much wider.
We can fill it just from this tiny little portrait. We could turn it into a whole landscape thing.
And it's like, yeah, I guess that's cool. But it's also like, what is the picture then anymore?
Whereas it's probably a really great tool when you're trying to do a cool effect
or you take the subject foreground or the background.
But when you do that, the background has that thing cut out of it.
So you could fill it with the generative fill, that little space. And that would be really great.
You know what I mean? It's great for small things. It got marketed to us as this big thing.
And so I think then it becomes really hard to trust it or understand it within those limitations
and then be able to take advantage of it there. Instead, we're being hyped on this new future that actually
sounds worse. You know what I mean? Yeah, no. I always talk about AI as like, oh, I know, we've always had it.
It's like in a small scale, like you said. But it's like, now that it's this big scale thing,
like, oh, it can take over jobs. So I thought that's like, oh, OK, that's not really.
What's being said is that. I don't buy that. Yeah, near do I, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. So yeah, so it's annoying.
It's really annoying. I feel like, and then I get an argument with people about it.
I don't know what to say. Have you written something? It's going to be really satisfying when you figure out
how to write. I hate writing, by the way.
But when you figure out how to write something really cohesively, that's really impressive.
And I just don't know how a prompt is going to lead to that.
As a writer, you hate writing? I do.
All right, let me look at my next few questions here. OK, so you kind of touched on it.
But you said that like, there's always
like the idea of that AI is going to take over jobs. So you don't believe in that, right?
It's like, I mean, you could say any sort of technology
takes over jobs. But in some ways, the jobs shift, perhaps.
And so like, I don't know, like you would have trying to think of an example.
Like you could have a really specific job for like a really menial task.
And like, and then they get a robot to do that.
I think like, so I'm interested in cars. So in the car industry, like they tried,
there was an attempt to roboticize the whole production
process in the 80s. General Motors tried it, and it was a massive failure.
And like, I think there are certain tasks that like are really great where somebody
could get out of a job. So like, I don't know, like welding, you know,
stamping and welding, the like metal panels of a car.
You know, instead of having someone like manually doing that, you have the system because every piece is exactly the same.
Smush and bush and do the thing. And it's like, OK, so the person who
had to do that manual menial task, I guess it did replace their job.
But like, they can do something else. I think when we get up to this weird, like,
broad creative space, it's puzzling to me
that you would say, oh, this tool is going
to take over a creative job instead of like making the creative job easier or allowing the creative job
to be the boundaries to be pushed or something like that. Those are two like very different things.
And I just think it's more the last one. So I just want to go. Do you need ice? You can get ice if you want.
That's good, that's good. OK, so this is a bad idea.
I don't have any ice in my water, so it's a possibility.
Yeah, so it's probably more like, oh, maybe it'll push the boundaries of what the job looks like
or maybe how many people are involved in it.
Maybe, perhaps. Yeah, OK, I guess that's true. But it's not like a one-to-one replacement.
But I guess what people do shifts all the time anyway, right?
Exactly, exactly. All right, so and you kind of dabble on it,
but you've used AI. How do you feel about it?
You said you were OK about it, weird about it, or?
Oh, I was like, oh, this is pretty neat. And I tried some image prompts.
And I was like, oh, and weirdly, I thought the broader it was, the better it was,
which I thought was interesting. And you can sort of see the years of going through image
search or scrolling through Pinterest or whatever. You can sort of see how it all averages out
and how it starts to be its common thing. So I was like, oh, OK, this is like a weird kind of take
on all these pictures that I could picture having seen
or whatever, right? So I don't know. So in that case, it's like, that's neat.
But also, it has no sense of the physical world.
It has no understanding of anything.
It's literally just like, I know that this pixel is most
likely to be next to this pixel when these pixels clump
together like that. And I mean, I'm probably reducing it. I'm sure some AI people are going to be so mad, and I don't care.
But it doesn't know.
Have you seen the AI-generated commercials?
Yeah, I've seen a lot. They're like, whoa. Some of them are really like, some of them are like, cool,
but you can tell that it's very AI. Well, I mean, when you get to motion,
then even the animation, you're replicating
the physical reality, right? So animators in Disney in the past
would study how a bird flies. And then they would draw that out.
And it was an acknowledgement of how something actually
physically happens. And then you watch this. There's this really funny beer commercial.
And no one's drinking the beer. They're holding the beer bottle, and it's near their mouth.
And then the person's sucking on.
But they're making a sucking face.
And it's like, there's no liquid. There's nothing.
It's such an indicator of, oh, these things just
don't get the physicals. And so what are you going to do then?
Are you going to now create an AI that gets the laws of physics calculated and now has
to figure out how to render that? It's just going to be more and more complicated.
OK. So then as a tech-slash-creator company that we are,
do you think that we should be using AI in any capacity?
Or?
I mean, again, from what little I know of what's out there,
I'm sure there might be some really basic things where
it could be beneficial. Like again, like I said, the gender to fill,
if you want to animate a photo in our space.
Sorry, can we start again? So like, start again, yeah.
I'll start from the top. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, OK. This is a bad picture.
I'm so sorry. Don't worry about it. So in the case of here, using the tools really broadly,
saying chat GPT will replace a writer or that is a bit rough.
Maybe getting a good background image for a thumbnail
with mid-journey might work. I could see the gender to fill being really great
if we wanted to animate a photo and give it
this parallax effect. I don't know if I should have stopped because it's just sounds.
They're just backgrounds. But yeah, you get this parallax effect.
If you get the parallax effect, then you could have this really cool animation.
You fill it with the gender to fill. That sounds great. So again, really specific use cases
where it's going to be really amazing. But in terms of broad strokes, no.
It's going to help just like that tiny little step, like making one vision you have a bit easier
to execute or making it better. That sounds great.
So basically, we use it as a starting point, but then it won't be some new use for it.
We should use it as a starting point, but we shouldn't use it for the final product.
As a tool. We should be using it as a tool. Like you'd use a computer as a tool or a camera as a tool.
That's what it's supposed to be, and that's what it is. And thinking of it as anything but that is annoying.
Yeah. I think what everyone talked to, it's kind of like it is a tool,
but it shouldn't be something we really rely on, basically.
Yeah, no. No.
What's his name? Dax Flame has been trying to do.
Have you ever heard of him? He's a YouTuber who's been using AI to guide his videos along.
And sometimes I'm like, man, you have great ideas.
You just need to be confident in yourself.
Just do that. Yeah. Yeah.
All right, we're going to wrap up here quickly. But is there anything that we haven't mentioned
that you want to discuss? No, I'm so glad to get this off my chest.
All right, well, thank you. Or saying goodbye to the float planers now.
Goodbye float planers. Yeah, that's the name I've coined now.
I don't know if it's official. Is it one video or just each separate?
It's going to be like 20 uncuts. And then I got cut down to like a five minute video.
Oh yeah, OK.