SXSW 2023: Creativity, AI, and the Fifth Industrial Revolution

Tacos, live music, and...generative AI?

SXSW has officially landed in Austin this week and AI is definitely the festival darling. With dozens of panels featuring AI industry experts and entrepreneurs, attendees have been scrambling to hear about all things generative AI.

And as an Austin local attending my first SXSW as a Jasper employee, I was no less excited to hear what others had to say about this explosive industry.

The first panel I attended was Thinkingbox's "The Sunday Society: Creativity, AI, and the Fifth Industrial Revolution" which explored the relationship between generative AI and creativity, both now and in the years to come.

While there were a few questions around whether it's possible to maintain authenticity and creative expression when using AI tools, the panelists' views and predictions were largely optimistic, centering humanness as a key ingredient of AI usefulness, even decades into the future.

Here are some of my favorite moments from "Creativity, AI, and the Fifth Industrial Revolution", featuring Jasper's own Head of Enterprise Marketing, Samyutha Reddy.

Speakers: 

Michael Kern, Panel Host & Chief Creative Officer @ Thinkingbox

Samyutha Reddy, Head of Enterprise Marketing @ Jasper

Jeffrey Castellano, Global Leadership for Spatial, XR, and Metaverse @ IBM

Patrick Daggitt, Creative Technologist @ Thinkingbox

Paul Aaron, Co-Founder and CEO @ Addition

Over the next decade, what will the impact of AI on the creativity industry look like?

SAMYUTHA: Oh my God, the next decade. I feel like I can't even tell you what's gonna happen in the next three months. That's not even a hyperbole. I think every three months for us at Jasper, the landscape changes and we take a moment to understand what's going on, how we fit in, and how to position ourselves.

My take on the future right now really focuses around personalization of the AI, and AI that's tailored to me. If I'm using six platforms to get my job done throughout the day, I don't want to interact with six different AI assistants. I want one AI assistant that knows me inside and out, that knows my brand inside and out, and that knows my customer inside and out.

That way, when I'm floating through these six platforms and throughout my email and Google Docs, I have an AI assistant that can follow me as an individual and not just when I'm a customer within a specific platform. That's where I see this going from a business perspective.

And beyond that, I think that soon it'll all be so integrated into our lives that having a panel focused on generative AI will actually feel redundant.

JEFFREY: I think something that [will be] really important is the opening up and accessibility for people to actually build on these models for themselves.

As new models get pushed into the open ecosystem, it'll start trickling into the marketing consumer behavior where they can actually take and twist and use [AI] as a kind of paint on a canvas create what they want to see.

I think that's where this kinda ends up going, that's what we'll see with more companies exploring this.

PAUL: When thinking about AI as a productivity tool, that's just one use case that's taking hold. There's a million others that are possible when you start to incorporate this technology deeper into your tech stack or connecting it with your data and using it for personalization.

It's gonna be really exciting to see how the advertising community embraces AI to perhaps fix things that are maybe not working particularly well in industry. One thing I've noticed is there's just too much information out there, there's too much data to keep track of.

It's really hard for human beings to keep pace with the speed of all the platforms that have emerged over the last decade or so. And I think there's a big opportunity for generative AI to actually fill that gap and start to unlock use cases around personalization and make marketing more relevant to the user.

I want one AI assistant that knows me inside and out, that knows my brand inside and out, and that knows my customer inside and out. - Samyutha Reddy, Head of Enterprise Marketing @ Jasper

Is AI moving us away from creativity?

PAUL: From our perspective, there's a lot of things that you can do with these technologies when you start to integrate them into your workflow and your data.

As a creator or creative person, that's really empowering to be able to supercharge your creativity by training, for lack of a better word, AI to do something.

And so I think it's gonna have this enabling impact where creators who really learn how to use the tech and learn how to integrate LLMs and generative AI with their existing tech stacks are gonna be able to do really incredible things.

SAMYUTHA: I've never heard someone on my team say, "I really wanted to spend more time on grunt work".

I've actually only heard creatives say, "Wait, I want less time doing that. I want more time being an editor. I want more time providing a creative opinion. I want more time having a perspective, or building a strategy around what happens with my content."

So I think my perspective is very much that generative AI will elevate all of us in our careers and automate some of that work that I'm not sure any of us want to do more of. It'll redistribute our time as marketers.

PATRICK: I agree, I think it just allows us to be even more creative. It allows us more space for strategy and creativity. Anytime I'm grinding, I always feel like I'm a computer. Like, "Why am I doing this? A computer can do this."

There's a great opportunity to just have AI take care of stuff so you can focus on what got you into your job — passion.

There's a great opportunity to just have AI take care of stuff so you can focus on what got you into your job — passion. - Patrick Daggitt, Creative Technologist @ Thinkingbox

How do we see authenticity and how we are going to identify authentic work?

PAUL: It's an interesting thought experiment, right? There is this nightmare scenario where the entire internet just becomes filled with spam. And then that spam is used to retrain [the models] and we fall into this trap of everything just being garbage.

fhe flip side is that creators will figure out how to impart their creativity onto AI by using more sophisticated techniques, by connecting their data, by going beyond the basics. Then that actually enables these incredible creative expressions that could not have existed before.

PATRICK: I personally get a little scared by that [question]. This situation feels scary, especially if we don't have the tools to filter for it. So we need to develop tools that will allow us to filter this stuff.

And what I suggest is maybe within 10 years, there could be some sort of immutable 'token', which is a proof of personhood. So, when you're posting your profile on Tinder, [you can show that] 'Hey, I'm a real person. This is not a synthetic person.'

I think something that's marked for the proof of personhood will be of more interest to us after we become jaded with this [generative AI] tsunami.

SAMYUTHA: I also think, just like we saw with Web 2.0, we put structures in place that keep us from becoming this junk magnet or just creating content and loading it with keywords to try and rank higher.

I think it'll be the same with AI. I know even with Google now, if I were to create a hundred articles with Jasper and load them up with trash just to try to rank higher, they'd still catch that just as if I hired an agency to get those same hundred trash articles.

But I also think the enterprise version of that is what we're even seeing now with companies that integrate OpenAI, drop a press release, and get a bump in their stock price. I think we'll see a correction in that as well, where [we ask] 'Are you using AI so your users are more productive within your platform, or are you using it as a marketing ploy to say that you are an AI enabled company?'

So yeah, I think we'll eventually put some guardrails and structures in place that address inauthenticity with AI.

Tell me what makes you most excited about the future of generative AI and creativity.

SAMYUTHA: I think right now in the media, there's this narrative that marketers are the victims, that creatives are the victims, and generative AI is coming for our job.

So I think what I'm most excited to see is a shift in narrative away from marketers being a victim, and to marketers being the stewards and rising to the cream of the crop in terms of leading the discussion and showing the rest of the organization all of the ways AI can help them.

PATRICK: I can't wait to see how this works with quantum computing, I think right now our computers are still way, way too slow. I'd love to go to a movie theater and say, "Oh, I want to watch Pulp Fiction starring SpongeBob SquarePants," and it's rendered right there in real time.

I define who's in the movie and what's happening. It's gonna be awesome.

JEFFREY: I'm really excited for us to start introducing expression into AI. That's just gonna be such an interesting moment.

There [could be] a lot of healthy and positive ways that we're seeing these [tools] start to find expression. And I think as we figure out how we want to interface with some of these tools, I'm excited to see that open up as a creative platform and for us to rethink what are the micro-nuances of emotion and how that manifests on a sentence-by-sentence basis.

PAUL: I'm excited for all the ways that AI will make humans more creative. I have a six year old daughter and one of the things that we do is we work on her language and storytelling using LLMs like GPT-3, so it's helping her to learn how to express herself and to express her ideas.

It's gonna be really exciting to watch this new generation of AI-enabled humans.