Authenticity and Creativity in AI-Assisted Content, with Chris Do

How this transcript was made

Transcribed by machine from the published audio, then corrected by hand. It is not a verbatim record: the changes below were made, and are counted.

This episode

67 speaker turns, 40 changes.

• closing CTA identified as CTA 3 - Resources (match 99%), replaced with the authored script and attributed to Max

What was changed in these transcripts, and what was not

Generated: 2026-09-20 from 2026-09-20-named/, itself transcribed from the audio that is live on the feed. Every change below is mechanical and counted. No sentence was reworded, no claim altered, nothing removed for being awkward.

The editorial decision

Owner's choice, 2026-09-20: light clean. "Um", "uh" and stammered word repeats ("and, and") are removed, because nobody intends to say them. "You know", "I mean", "kind of" and "sort of" are KEPT - they run to roughly 2,300 instances across the catalogue and stripping them would make the page read as somebody else.

Counts across the whole set

Change	Count
stammered repeat removed	667
um / uh removed	654
space before punctuation	241
split contraction	132
guest turn named (Joe Casabona)	101
organization -> organisation	71
diarisation fragment returned to the host	62
ai -> AI	57
empty turn dropped (was filler only)	36
synthetic outro restored from script	21
organizations -> organisations	18
hyphen followed by space	14
realize -> realise	14
A.I. -> AI	10
recognized -> recognised	9
gray -> grey	9
summarize -> summarise	9
color -> colour	9
behavior -> behaviour	8
synthetic intro restored from script	8
analyze -> analyse	7
behavioral -> behavioural	7
recognize -> recognise	6
percent -> %	5
personalized -> personalised	5
skeptical -> sceptical	5
analyzing -> analysing	5
center -> centre	5
optimization -> optimisation	4
realized -> realised	4
favorite -> favourite	4
realizing -> realising	4
canceled -> cancelled	4
recognizing -> recognising	4
announcer turn relabelled from Guest	4
summarizing -> summarising	4
labor -> labour	4
behaviors -> behaviours	4
colors -> colours	4
organizational -> organisational	4
customized -> customised	3
analog -> analogue	3
optimize -> optimise	3
honor -> honour	2
optimizing -> optimising	2
summarizes -> summarises	2
personalize -> personalise	1
prioritize -> prioritise	1
prioritized -> prioritised	1
organize -> organise	1
rumor -> rumour	1
organized -> organised	1
capitalize -> capitalise	1
centered -> centred	1
organizes -> organises	1
emphasize -> emphasise	1
split name repaired (Schaefer)	1
humor -> humour	1
traveling -> travelling	1
defense -> defence	1
maximize -> maximise	1
Organizations -> Organisations	1
apologize -> apologise	1
digitized -> digitised	1
monetize -> monetise	1
analyzed -> analysed	1
narrator opener re-attributed to Max, words left as transcribed	1
theater -> theatre	1
specialized -> specialised	1
split name repaired (Wadsworth)	1
aluminum -> aluminium	1
specializes -> specialises	1
skeptic -> sceptic	1
customize -> customise	1
personalization -> personalisation	1
optimized -> optimised	1
visualize -> visualise	1
spoken domain -> humanspark.ai	0

What was deliberately left alone

• "Program". A computer program keeps that spelling in UK English; only a broadcast or a scheme is a "programme", and only a reader can tell which was meant.
• "License" and "practice". Both have a noun/verb spelling split in UK English that a rule cannot decide.
• Capitalised words mid-sentence that would otherwise have been respelled: 4 of them, most often part of a name. Left as spoken.
• Retired show and brand names. Spoken by the host and guests. A transcript that removes what was said is not a transcript.
• "Co-pilot". Sometimes Microsoft's product, sometimes the metaphor. A rule would corrupt the honest ones.

The synthetic segments

The opening voiceover on the archive episodes and the closing call to action are read by Max, the show's AI narrator, from a script written in advance. Transcribing them means guessing at words already on file, and the guesses were wrong in places - one opener came back as "an AI that boned him up" where the script says "phoned him up". Those passages carry the authored text instead, and are attributed to Max rather than to the guest: the diariser groups Max with the non-host speaker, which would otherwise put a real person's name on words they never said.

Alastair McDermottI have a super guest to talk with you today about AI, thought leadership and content creation. And this guest is somebody who I've been following online for quite a long time.

We were just talking before the stream. When I started following him on YouTube, he was somewhere between 200 and 400,000 followers. We just checked today, it's 2.41 million followers on

Chris DoYouTube.

Alastair McDermottSo I think that by any stretch of the imagination, this person is a true thought leader. That's coming next.

Chris DoWelcome to the AI Powered Thought Leader.

This is the show that helps thought leaders and aspiring thought leaders to explore the challenges and contrad ictions that occur at the intersection of AI and authentic thought leadership.

Here is your host, Alastair McDermott.

Alastair McDermottAnd today, I'm very happy to have Chris Doe from The Future

Chris DoOn the show.

Alastair McDermottChris, you're very welcome.

Chris DoHi, Alastair.

Alastair McDermottSo I'm wearing my black baseball cap out of respect for you. So today we're going to talk about AI and thought leadership.

And I think this is an interesting kind of intersection because thought leadership is supposed to be about people who are leading with their thinking.

But the AI is now doing a lot of the work involved in thinking. Can you tell me how you think about thought leadership, about thinking, about use of AI in kind of creative purs uits,

particularly when it comes to, you know, what we're supposed to be doing in terms of the thinking?

Chris DoDo we need the human now? Why don't you start off with an easy question? Just a nice softball warmup question, huh? Okay.

There's a couple of different things that I want to talk about and break down your question and some components. First is like, what is thought leadership?

And we kind of use this term a lot now. And it's a term that makes a lot of people cringe a little bit. Like, what do you mean thought leadership? You can lead people in thought.

But let's just take it old school.

People who are intellectuals, writers, poets, people who move culture, moved ideas through art or through literature or through information and entertainment.

And we can think of somebody like Seth Godin, who I look up to a lot, who's written over, I think, 20 books. Very prolific writer. Writes a daily blog for over 10 plus years now.

I would consider him a thought leader.

Someone who is contemplating, reflecting, observing life and packaging it in bite-sized pieces of information for you to consume, for you to better understand the world.

So they're doing the thinking for you, the researching, the writing, the reflecting, comparison and contrast, the synt opical reading. So they do that.

In the modern era, thought leadership is a little bit used a little too bit loosely.

Where someone who creates videos on the internet, like myself, who says a few things, who has a following, all of a sudden they're a thought leader.

I just want to be careful how we use that term. So I'll park it there and see if you have any reflections or a yes, but.

Alastair McDermottYeah, you know, my other show that you've also featured on is called The Recognized Authority.

And actually that's the name of my brand, because I'm interested in how people build authority and become known as an authority like you have done.

And I kind of shied away from the term thought leader until I thought about this intersection with AI, because I think that thought leader is one of those terms is a little bit kind of,

it's a little bit kind of self-promoting as a term. If people use it about themselves in particular. And it sounds a bit highbrow. But I think that it is actually a real thing.

And it is a little bit provocative when we're talking about AI to think about thought leadership, because it's just one of those things where actually that was the comments people

Chris DoGot about this show.

Alastair McDermottAnd I call it the AI power thought leader as one person just replied provocative. So I know that this is an area where there is some conflict.

But I think it's really interesting when we think about how much work that in particular stuff like that is known to be thought leadership,

like writing like a groundbreaking book in an industry or something like that. And now how much of the actual grunt work in that can be done by these AI tools.

And then can we then claim credit for authorship? Can we claim credit for the thinking in there, particularly if we use these tools? And that's what I'm trying to dig into here.

And I'm interested in your take on this.

Chris DoOkay, if we look at just, I think it's easier for us to talk about this if we look at traditional models, because most people understand them,

they've been around long enough, and we kind of can form a thought and an opinion about that. And then we can bridge it to AI.

When you're writing something, especially in academia, you realise it's mostly research, that you might read published reports or things that are only available to academics.

And there's a rigor to it where you're supposed to cite sources.

And so you'll see in the footnotes, quite often, subscript or superscript number one, two, three, four, they're citing sources all the time. And they'll reference people.

But reading books like that can be overwhelming, because if you read the part, then you read how they cite things in the footnotes.

It can be overwhelming, because now you're trying to keep track of so many different things.

So more contemporary writing tends to cite sources, but it's not into the bibliography where they reference everything. They'll make mention of it.

And this is very important, because we don't want to be accused of plagiarism, where we borrow parts or rephrase ideas, and we don't cite those sources.

In conversation, it becomes much more difficult.

I wrestle with this all the time when I'm doing a keynote presentation, where I know most, if not all, the ideas that I'm sharing come from some other source,

because I'm not conducting the field studies. I'm not doing the deep analytical dives using data that I'm crunching. Most of us do not do that.

So we're citing other people who've cited other people. And I think as long as we do this, we're okay.

In my authorship, the only thing I can claim is that I've assembled in a very specific sequence. I didn't play the instruments. I didn't write the notes. But I'm assembling in a certain way.

And I think it's okay. And generally, it's accepted. So if we're okay with that, then we have to kind of think about where AI comes in.

So if you publish something that's mostly generated via AI is referencing source material. So you should instruct it to always cite source material wherever possible and to include links.

So you're doing what you're supposed to do from decades of us doing this.

And then when you publish something, I think it's kind of important for authenticity and whether or not people can trust you long term is how much of this you wrote.

Or is it you directing AI to write it for you? Because then it gets into this whole, I think we're faking it. I think we're pretending to be something that we're not.

And this is problematic. So let me give you the worst case scenario. You write and publish a beautiful report. It's a 300-page report. And it's beautiful. Everything about it sounds perfect.

And then they invite you to go speak. And they realise you can barely string together two or three coherent sentences.

So now there's this kind of component of inauthenticity and fraud that I think you're going to be struggling with.

And then you'll refuse those talks because you know you're going to be exposed. Maybe we'll call this the Milli Vanilli effect, right? You're just the front person.

You really didn't do any of this. And you're taking all the credit. That's problematic, I think.

Alastair McDermottYeah, I agree. And you're actually not the first person. I think this is episode six, but we already have had people reference Milli Vanilli already. I think that really hits people.

So I think that the really interesting thing is where exactly is the line? Because, for example, I use some tools. When I'm driving, sometimes I do a cross-country drive here

Chris DoIn Ireland.

Alastair McDermottIt doesn't take that long because it's not a big country. But I'm driving for two, three, four hours. And I'm recording, dictating into my Otter or something like that as an app.

And then I take that and I process that with AI. And I ask it to turn that into a blog post or a series of

Chris DoBlog posts.

Alastair McDermottAnd so I've given it the majority of the input that it's

Chris DoWorking with.

Alastair McDermottIt still may need to source some ideas or connecting ideas or it fixes all the spelling and the grammar. So is that AI created? Is that AI assistance? Where is the line there for you?

Chris DoI think this is going to be a conversation that we're having more and more in the coming years and decades, I believe. And I think culture moves. And it moves for the better, I think.

Because not that long ago, I think women didn't have rights. People owned people as property. And so the culture moves. And so we have to kind of get familiar with new ideas.

And the new idea right now is if you have a virtual assistant, like a real human, or an artificial intelligence assistant, how often are you citing their work?

And this becomes kind of like dependent on each person and their moral compass. I mean, I know a lot of people who work with virtual assistants and executive assistants.

Are they always saying, well, Sarah or Bobby or Kenny did this part? They checked for spelling errors and grammar and they were an English major? You probably don't.

We can probably say like the core ideas come from you. They're reformatted for different consumption, grammar, spelling, structure, those kinds of things. But the core ideas came from you.

The bigger question I think that very few people are asking is, while you're driving, where do those ideas come from? Now, we think we're driving, so we're tapping into the ether.

But really, you are just a reflection of all your life experiences from your parents, from your friends, colleagues,

mentors, coaches, rivals, from the books you've read, from the videos you've watched, from the movies you've consumed. You're regurgitating, you're regurgitating that.

You're reprocessing it. So, Kirby Ferguson talks about this. Everything is a remix.

It's when we recognise the notes and the harmonies and the melodies too clearly that we're like, wait a minute.

Are you saying you wrote that melody like how Vanilla Ice, sorry, second reference, is like, no, this is totally different. This is not Bowie and Queens under pressure. Really?

It sure sounds exactly like it. You know, even when you try to explain it to be different, it's not.

And I think the best thing that we can all do is to make sure we're checking in with our values so that we don't have the guilt or shame of saying like, yeah, I did something I did not do.

I'm taking credit for. I don't think very many people feel great about that. They know they're doing something wrong. They're just trying to get away with it for a period of time.

Alastair McDermottYeah, you know, this whole area of giving credit is really interesting because Microsoft brought the grammar checker into Microsoft Word in 1997.

And I don't think I've ever seen anybody give credit to Microsoft Word for grammar checking their work.

But now people are talking about, well, if you use AI, we need to give credit to the AI and possibly to the people whose data the AI was trained on,

which gets into a whole other world of hurt and, you know, intellectual property issues.

But this idea of credit is super interesting because there's so many different levels that we can go to because we can have like we can have an original work.

And I think that you've done something like this. I've taken I've got a few books up on Amazon. I've got five books on Amazon.

I took those and I put them into ChatGPT and I made a custom GPT just for me. I took some of my blog posts.

I exported my RSS feed from my website and I put all of that into a into a single GPT, custom GPT on ChatGPT. And I asked it to write blog posts for me on a certain

Chris DoTopic.

Alastair McDermottAnd everything that's gone in there is stuff that I've

Chris DoCreated.

Alastair McDermottI own the copyright, too. But it's also using the data set that has been trained on

Chris DoAs well.

Alastair McDermottAnd so when it generates a blog post or whatever it creates for me, it does sound like me. It has my opinions. And it's actually pretty good.

It's, you know, I'd give it a I'd give it a B minus probably. It's not quite good enough for me to publish, but it's I'd say in another year it probably will be.

But where do we where do we say, yeah, that's OK to to do that or that's not OK? You know, do I need to claim credit? And then what happens if I do claim credit?

What implications does that have?

Chris DoThis is getting real tricky now. We're getting some pretty nuanced arguments and thoughts here. And I don't know if we're going to convince anybody one way or the other.

But what we can do, I think, is at least start the conversation, get people to kind of reflect on their own lives. And you're right, Microsoft does grammar, grammarly people.

It's even better than Microsoft Word grammar. And it's helping you to fix structure and sentences. And it kind of knows. And there's a lot of predictive things.

But I don't think people think to credit it because it's really not generating a thought. It's just helping you to fix things according to English rules.

And that seems to make a lot of sense. And no one's complaining about that.

In the same way that how you use Photoshop cut out the masking tool, it's using a lot of AI to figure out that's hair, that's tree. We don't want that. We want to keep this.

That should be transparent. And again, we're not like all credits props, you know, to Photoshop and the team, John Nolan, whoever else is writing the software.

We don't do that because it just becomes part of accepted workflow when we see utility.

And I think there's like a grey area in the middle where how much input did you have relative to output?

I don't think people complain about you writing an essay and using Grammarly or Word to help you fix it because I think it's 98% input and 2% output from the machine.

This is where it gets tricky, where some kid who doesn't even know how to write, who doesn't have an idea, can say, oh, write a story about X. So the input is like 0.1% and output is 99.9%.

And then to say, written by Joe Smith, problematic there. And then copyrighted by Joe Smith, like, can you do that?

So currently, and this came up, I think, a year and a half ago when lawyers said the works of AI-generated machines cannot be copyrighted because copyright applies to humans.

Now, this may have to change pretty soon because the laws were not written to anticipate works that are generated by machines prompted by humans. It becomes really tricky.

I'm just going to say this. There are a lot of shortcuts.

If you're thinking about using AI because you don't want to learn skills or you don't want to develop critical thinking or do any reading or research, you yourself do not get any better.

The product of what you create might get a lot better, but you haven't grown at all. And I think the whole point of life is to continue to work on this perpetual personal development.

And if you're just sitting there typing in a few words and you get output, you don't grow. It's like that expression. You can't hire people to do push-ups for you.

You can't use AI to become a better artist if you're not trying to be a better artist yourself.

Alastair McDermottYeah, that's interesting. I mean, you can hire somebody to do push-ups for you. It's just not going to help you a lot.

But we've had this concept for a long time, like going back to authorship, where we've had ghostwriters coming in and writing books for people.

And it's really common, like in the world of sports journalism, for example, it's very typical for a column to be bylined by a current player on a team.

But we know that that wasn't actually written by that

Chris DoPlayer.

Alastair McDermottIt was probably a journalist who's on the phone to them. And so we already know that there's this concept of people are not writing every word that we see.

And so we're trying to figure out how much do we need to disclose about if we use it for grammar and spelling checks

What if we use it to write a bridging section between two chapters? What if we get it to clean up a dictation?

Or what if we feed it in our work already and ask it to create something new that's actually a remix of the work that we've already written?

And the interesting thing here is what happens if we disclose it?

Because we already know, for example, that the U.S. Supreme Court, and I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, but the U.S. Supreme Court says that AI-generated works are not protected

by copyright. And if I take work that I've created and put them through generative AI and it fixes it in some way, and then I lose access to that copyright,

that's very concerning for me as a content creator. And then what happens if we disclose the fact that we've used AI? Does that devalue our credibility?

For example, Amazon have a little box that you have to tick if you upload a book and you're uploading a new book that says, did you use AI? Now, what happens if you tick that box?

Chris DoWe don't know.

Alastair McDermottDoes that mean that Amazon is going to, you know, drop it

Chris DoDown the rankings?

Alastair McDermottYou know, who knows what these things mean? And so disclosing could potentially be damaging in terms of copyright and all of these other issues as well.

So, like, I think it's really that the transparency stuff, I agree with you about being transparent about it, but I think that we have to be careful about how we do that as

Chris DoWell. Yeah, I mean, I'm not saying auto-tune is AI, but auto-tune changes your voice and we can hear it change.

And at first it was a way for people to hit notes that they couldn't to correct little minor errors. And I think the peers would say never use auto-tune.

And then auto-tune, that sound became, like, on trend where people who could sing would use auto-tune because they kind of like the way it has a kind of a synthetic sound,

like 80 s synth pop music has a sound. It's got a vibe and a lot of the music today is influenced by those electronic samples and synthetic sounds. And I think that's pretty cool.

I don't know if it hurts. And if you care so much, maybe you shouldn't do it. And if you don't care so much, don't worry about it.

I just think the number one rule is to try to, as much as possible, be 100% authentic to yourself. And each person gets to decide what that really means.

Like, if I wear a different hat tomorrow that doesn't have this stripe or, Chris, you're off-brand, I'm like, no, I'm on-brand. Because I, Chris, chose it. You don't understand.

That's how that works. You think it's off-brand. That's your projection. But it's not off-brand for me because it is me.

You know, people often say, what you're doing is not incong ruent with your mission statement. I'm like, how do you even know what my mission is? How do you even know?

And are you saying, like, my mission can't evolve? That it's this concrete thing that just becomes a thing that boxes me in? I don't think so. I think I know what my mission is.

It's like you're saying, Chris, you're not living your purpose. I'm like, really? You as an internet stranger can figure all that out by, like, looking at a couple of comments and videos?

That seems odd to me. Yeah.

Alastair McDermottWell said. Okay. Let me switch text and ask you, at a very practical level, what are you using AI for right now? Are you using, like, to boost productivity?

Or how are you using it to kind of glue things together, I

Chris DoGuess? My general answer to that question is not enough. And I keep thinking, how else can I use it? And so I'll tell you how I'm using it right now.

But I see friends in the space and the works of other people.

I'm like, darn, I'm not dedicating enough of my thinking power to understanding and utilizing all the tools and resources as it seems like every other day there's a major breakthrough from

another platform or things are just improving at exponential pace here. So let's just break it down to basic. When I'm using Photoshop, I believe I'm using AI.

When I'm using generative field, things to expand the background, to fix things, to create an arm where an arm didn't exist because I was given an asset that normally would not use and I'd

have to spend hours of, like, retouching and it would just look like a mesh warp mess on the arm. I don't want to spend my time doing that.

I want to spend my time thinking about ideas, like, what's going to communicate the message of the thumbnail? What's going to communicate the idea that there's urgency behind this offer?

That's what I want to work on. And then everything else, I want AI to do most of it for me. And it's getting better, surprisingly better.

And now I understand that Firefly allows you to sketch something, to give it an input reference. And so now you can more closely work with something. And I'm loving this moment.

And I'm thinking every creative person, if they're so inclined, can use these powerful tools to enhance their vision, to improve their productivity.

But going beyond that, to be a partner in collaboration. I have a buddy who was here on camera prior to us going live. His name is Rodrigo.

And I was trying to tell him, like, how I generate ideas for things. I go to Shutterstock. I type in keywords.

And I see, like, what does the internet and this massive company, how do they tag images so that I can get a sense of, like, how to communicate an idea?

If I want to communicate value, is it always piles of cash? But sometimes when you type in value, a diamond appears. And it gets me to think differently.

Like, oh, that's another symbol that can communicate value without over-reliance on cash, money. And then I start to use that as a brainstorming partner. Now, this is not AI at all.

This is just how images are tagged by their creators, presumably human or assistants, helping with this kind of stuff.

But this is where I think AI takes it to the next level, where you can ask it, what are commonly accepted symbols or analogs to the idea of wealth or value that might be relevant to people

who have a high school level education in America? What does that look like? Give me 10 symbols or ideas, and then it would give it to you. And then you have to do something.

And I think this is a really important part. You have to discern good from bad. You have to use taste, judgment.

You have to curate the answer and say, well, that's not quite it, but let's do this again. You know, the 10 answers you gave me aren't what I'm looking for. I'm looking for more like this.

And then you art direct and you talk, and then you're just kind of pushing and pulling until you get something like, yeah, that feels pretty good.

You're like, now I know what I want to create. So this is like a creative sounding board. This is a creative partner.

This goes way beyond you telling it what to do and it telling you what to do. There's interplay here. And I love that part. So I am using it for that.

I'm using it to summarise videos that we've made. So when we produce a video, it could be an hour and a half, two hours long, heaven forbid. And my team's like, what do we call this video?

I'm like, not that title. But I don't have two hours to rewatch this and try to process it, right? Because in the natural part of a conversation, 17 different topics could come up.

So I ask AI, first of all, create a transcript from this. And then what are the most salient points?

Give me the top three, four hardest hitting salient points that I talked about in this video. It will give it to you. I'm like, oh, yeah, that kind of reminds me.

So if I want to base that video title on this one point, give me 10 ideas for that based on these parameters. And I'm very specific about parameters.

What people don't realise is garbage in, at least for now, garbage out. Make something great. Well, it's not going to make you something great. Very rarely.

Make something that appeals to children, boys and girls between the age of 7 and 11, who are interested in fairy tales and have some kind of rebirth kind of concept in it with these kinds of

parameters. Write it this way, make sure it rhymes, and make it into a 16-page book that can be friendly for illustration. That is a higher quality input. So you can still get garbage out.

But the chances of you getting better output is better because I've learned to articulate what it is that I want.

Alastair McDermottYeah, I think that what this really demonstrates is, and you're getting really detailed there, I think that AI literacy is something that we need to be aware of and learning how to use it.

And actually, we got a comment from somebody who's going to show up here on screen on YouTube. I'm just starting out, and I don't know how to use AI.

Do you think it would be good if I'd never learn it? I mean, the process of learning computer is at 56 for a

Chris DoPlay.

Alastair McDermottWhat do you think of that, Chris?

Chris DoOkay, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to say replace the word AI with internet and read it again and see how you respond to it.

Okay, so let's try, and I'll do it since this person can't speak for themselves right now. I'm just starting out, and I don't know how to use the internet.

Do you think I would be good if I had never learned how to use the internet? What do you think the answer is? Yeah. Okay, let's try it again. Let's try, let's say you're an artist.

We don't know if you're an artist, okay? Let's try, like, the Adobe Creative Suite. Let's try that. I'm just starting out. I don't know how to use the Adobe Creative Suite.

Do you think I would be good if I never learned how to use the Adobe Creative Suite?

So you see, it's like, it's a question of, like, transformative tools that empower human creativity in ways that we never thought possible. And you're like, should I not use it?

You don't have to use it, but that's up to you.

There are people, especially in rural parts of the world, where they're sitting there, and I've seen this, where they chop down things of bamboo,

and they scrape it, and they make it level, and they split into pieces. And then 1,700 hours later, it feels like they made an umbrella. I'm like, oh, my God.

Artistry, the craft is ridiculous. And then they go sell the umbrella for $30. I'm like, wow. Not such a great use of human capital. But artistically, I love it. I appreciate it.

I'm glad you do it. I hope you get 2 million views and you make money this way.

So we're entering into a new age where creatives, people who have really strong craft, handmade goods, and artisanal kinds of things,

can profit not by the making and selling of the thing, but by other people watching them make it, that they can then earn a revenue stream based on how many people watch it.

And I think that's a powerful idea.

Alastair McDermottYeah, and I guess this comes back to something we talked about actually in the last episode when we spoke probably two years ago,

where we were talking about creating content that resonates with people and maybe educates and also entertains.

And this is something that I've been thinking about a lot as a content creator and as somebody who does live streams and videos and podcasts and things like that.

This is more my forte than making the kind of amazing graphics that you and a lot of people who follow you are

Chris DoGreat at.

Alastair McDermottBut how can we, as people who want to get more of those views, who want to get more attention and turn our creation into something that can become a sustainable income for us,

how can people who are doing that now survive in this world where people can use DALI and all of these generative tools and create content at the drop of a hat that is better than what we

can create with our hands? How do we, how do we survive in that environment?

Chris DoOkay. I just want to give a quick shout out to Power Plus Nature because I felt resistance. Like, you know, I feel this force is strong in this one.

I felt resistance strong in this one in the way that the questions were phrased.

But right now, and I love this, and this is telling you something about neuroplasticity, your ability to adapt and change your mind is a sign of a healthy mind and a creative mind and a

fertile mind. And I want to drive this point home because in the short span of time, I was just talking about it, reframing the question. They said, thank you, I shall learn it.

And I love that. I don't care how old you are. If you're five, you're six, or you're 56, the fact that you're willing to try means this is the key component to art is curiosity. That's it.

It's just to be curious and observe things and be willing to try. Like, I've never had that kind of pasta before. Squid Ink, let me try. And just to do that.

Now, how do we capitalise on this?

In the age of AI, when I think when the thing that rubs artists the wrong way, there's two major components to this that are getting in the way of us fully adopting.

Number one, we don't understand how the AI generative tools work about the data set. Okay, without swimming into too deep of waters. It's not what you think it is.

There's a process, and they call it diffusion for a reason. That's why it's called stable diffusion. It takes images, yes, from artists.

It blurs them to the point in which it's almost unrecogn izable. And it plays a game with itself. It tries to guess what that is. That kind of looks like an eye. That's kind of like a face.

That's a body. It's an arm. And it keeps training itself over and over again until there is no point of referencing the original anymore.

And the original was, to begin with, diffused to a point of, like, obscurity. And this is why AI struggled with typography. It struggled with hands.

Because when you blur a hand, it's just a blob. And now it's just getting better and better, and it's training it on itself. And so what we think of it as copying is not what it's doing.

In fact, I think the way we can understand this is, do you remember in the early 2000s, late 90s, there were Intel chips and there were clone chips?

And it is potentially violating a trademark or patent on the chip, right? Intel makes these chips. Like, how can you reverse engineer a chip that's compatible without copying our design?

Are you familiar with this process, Alastair? It's fascinating.

Alastair McDermottYeah, there's been, like, in the history of software development, and, like, I think one example from gaming is World of Warcraft,

which was this super popular game where Blizzard had a game that was being played by, you know, tens of millions of people.

And they changed it, and changed it, and changed it, and their audience said, hey, can you make it go back to how it was before? And they said, no, you know, we're changing it now.

And so, some developers took the software and the game software and set up their own servers and recreated the original.

And, you know, just a lot of people figuring out, okay, well, it's sending this message, and let's reverse engineer how that works.

And, you know, it took a lot of time, and obviously I was a World of Warcraft nerd, but it took a lot of time, but they managed to create these stable versions of a World of War craft server

without ever having any access to the original code, which was quite a big code base. So, that kind of stuff is super impressive.

And I think we're talking about kind of the same process here, right?

Chris DoVery similar. And if I remember what I read in the early 2000s, late 90s, it works something like this.

It's an incredible process, and it has to be very well documented so that they can escape being sued for copyright and patent infringement, those kinds of things.

So, they have a group of people who have never looked at an Intel chip sitting in a different room.

They're developers, coders, I don't know what you call them, software engineers, and they're just sitting there waiting.

And then there's another group of people who observe the chips and describe it to the other people. So, the other people only have secondhand information about what it does.

So, then they can say, we think it does these kinds of things. And then they describe, and they start working on it, and they keep testing. So, eventually, they run a piece of code.

If it works on the Intel chip, does it work on the AMD chip? And where it breaks, they make more observations. So, you can think of AI like this. Like, the AI itself has not seen this thing.

It's being described this thing by another party, and it's feeding itself. I think that's the general premise.

And it's remarkable to think, like, how crazy smart humans are that we can, from someone's description, be able to create something that's so technically complicated that's actually

compatible with the other thing. And it's like, you guys can look it up, read this stuff, and you'll see what happens here. So, in the age of AI, what are artists going to do?

The second part that I said is a problematic thing for artists is, A, the first part, remember, is that we believe that the data set it's trained on is stealing the intellectual property,

creativity of creatives. It's not exactly how you think it is. Number two is that, what part of ownership do I have of this? And if I use it, then I lose a sense of myself. So, they say.

But what they don't realise is the inconsistency in their thinking. It's like, we use Photoshop to do things that we previously could not do with our bare hands.

So, the traditionalists would say, well, that's cheating, and that's not right.

There are even people who, like, cling on to, say, analogue film celluloid versus digital sensors, and, like, that's not pure. And you can just keep going back.

The previous generation complains of the current generation using things that allow them an inherent advantage.

And no one is sitting here saying, well, we should go back to manually typesetting things on a letterpress if we want to do design.

Or we should go on a phototype machine and do phototypeset ting. No one is arguing for that.

So, it just depends where you are in this gradient as we move from one paradigm to the new paradigm. And third, and I think this is the biggest gripe.

Well, these tools are so powerful, and this is true.

That non-creatives, an accountant, a lawyer, a bookkeeper, somebody can sit there and generate a piece of poetry or to generate a video or a static image.

This is what artists are concerned about. And I think there is some fairness to this. But I always think this.

If you can't use the same tools that they can use and the non-creatives are creating better art than you, I think we have a real problem here. It's like, well, what are you then?

You're holding on to some tools or some ideas that are now democratized to society, so you just have to raise the bar. Now, I don't know if you remember this.

I think judging by the white hairs on your beard, there was a time in which we did not have the tools to create professional cinema quality images unless you were part of a very small elite

group in Hollywood. If you rented a 60mm camera, you would have to deal with purchasing film and processing and then transferring something called telecine. This is a very expensive process.

This is why so few documentaries or feature films are made that look high quality.

And then Canon changed the game with the Canon 5D Mark II, which allowed you to record video on a really large sensor, and it changed the game.

The early pioneers started to make films that are rivaling what you would see. And now today, the industry is dominated by digital sensors, by Ari, by Red.

And so we went through this weird period where the tools were given to so many people, and truth be told, a lot of crap came out. Because you have digital tools doesn't make you an artist.

That's the mistake that people think. It's the artist that makes the art, not the art, or not the brush, or the canvas. It's the artist. Remember that. The tool doesn't make the artist.

The artist makes the tool. And so what we're doing right now is to totally focus on the wrong things. We're focused on the tool and not the art. What do you want to say about the world?

What has your life experience been? How do you want to make people think? How do you want to change their POV or to invite them into yours? This is art.

And to be able to see connections between things that previously didn't exist, we're just taking away the production away from you. So if you love production, keep doing it.

There will be a need for this, to see the kind of viscous paint that is smeared across a piece of material, media, wood,

metal, canvas, and to have your imprint, your fingerprint all over it. People will still want that. I get that.

But for people who want to explore image making, which is kind of what we do, static or video, what is it to you? If you don't want to do it, don't do it.

But sitting around complaining about it's not going to change anything. My advice, everybody, please, I'm saying this because I care about you. Expose yourself to as many tools as possible.

Decide later if you want to use them.

And the number one key skill that you're going to need in the 21st century, and I said this prior to AI becoming a thing, is the ability to articulate ideas, to speak persuas ively.

Because when you can speak persuasively, you can clearly articulate your ideas. Then you can speak to a machine or you can speak to people.

And speaking is the second part to the first part, which is writing. Writing is thinking. Thinking is writing. We must learn to write our thoughts.

And so this skill that I think has been problematic in the last 30, 40 years, like if you had an humanities degree, it probably meant that you can work at Starbucks.

Now it becomes super critical. People with deep knowledge about art history, about culture, about history, and understand the periods of art from different cultures,

now have a rich reference point in which they can speak to the machine and get exactly what they want.

And better, come up with new combinations of things that people who don't have that reference point won't be able to get. This is the really important part.

And two, this is another skill that we need to have, which is the ability to have taste, to know what looks good, what sounds good, what reads well. And taste is not something AI has.

Alastair McDermottAnd it's something that people like you who are trained and many of the viewers who are watching this who have those skills.

That's what you have over somebody like me who's using these tools to create graphics without a graphic design background or understanding of the language even that I need to use to describe

these things. There's no way in a million years that I can create something that's even a quarter as good as what one of you people can do if you go and learn.

Because I know that you can take these tools and do so much

Chris DoMore with it than I can.

Alastair McDermottThe other thing I think that is super important, and you kind of referenced this, is I think curiosity and just kind of having that open mind and going and exploring a bit.

Because particularly now with these tools, there's no

Chris DoManual.

Alastair McDermottWe're all just trying to figure this out right now. So, Power Plus Nature, you were talking about learning this at the age of 56.

You might be 56 doing this, but just remember, you're in the same place as everybody else who's just starting now. We're all starting to figure this out, and it's new to

Chris DoEverybody.

Alastair McDermottSo, you're not actually behind the curve here.

I think if you're watching something called the AI Powered Thought Leader or reading about AI right now, you're still actually at the forefront of that wave.

So, you're not behind the curve by any means. We've had a ton of great comments. There's too many, like there's 215, 220 people watching right now.

Loads of people having great comments and having a conversation, Carl and Day and Matthew and people in the

Chris DoConversation.

Alastair McDermottThank you for participating, and thanks for your comments. Chris, I think we have four minutes left. Do you have any advice for anybody who's scared of AI?

Chris DoYes, I do. So, let me just write this down. I want to say a couple things in the four minutes that we have.

First of all, thank you, everybody who's on the future side, who are tuning in on this unannounced live stream.

We were just talking about, like, should we restream this and share this with our future community? And luckily, with Alastair Rodrigo's help, we were able to do this.

You know, Daniel Priestley, I saw him speak in Newcastle in London, or not in London, UK. And he said something to a small group of people.

He said he believes that AI is going to be the biggest economic driver in creating the new millionaires and the billionaires. And it's a force in which we've never seen before.

And he's a very smart business guy. He says, the problem is how it's going to be distributed. This wealth, this newfound wealth, is not going to be even. So it got me to think.

And I went on stage weeks later, and I said something like, you know, I don't want to be the person when my children are adults.

And they're like, Dad, there are all these millionaires and billionaires who were created. What were you doing and thinking and feeling about AI?

Looking around us like we're not millionaires and billion aires. I'm like, damn it. I slept on that, son, because I thought it was just going to be a fad, which reminds me of a conversation.

Say what you want about Facebook, but it's a dominant cultural force for good and for bad. But I remember when Facebook just became a thing.

One of my creative directors, she came over to me. It's like, oh, you're using Facebook? What is that all about? I'm like, I don't know, but I'm just going to play.

I'm going to plant my flag here and see what happens. And who knows if this is a thing? There wasn't even this term social media back then. It was just a friends group.

And she goes, yeah, I don't like to follow fads. And she said that so like righteously indignant and proud of herself. It just meant that she's going to be asleep at the wheel for 10 years.

And now she's like on Facebook all the time. It's like, so yeah, you're just saying I'm a Johnny come lately. Now, I'll end our conversation with this thing.

What do we do if we're afraid of AI? Look, there are real reasons to be afraid because people are like, hey, we're not talking about all the negative things.

There are lots of negative things, but that'll be like part two.

So you want us to do a part two, comment right now, say part two, and we'll think about it because that's a long conversation. It can be equally long.

I don't want to be Pollyannic in this like I'm an optimist, an AI optimist, and I can't see all the negatives. There are lots of negatives.

But right now, the way I look at it's like within every obstacle is an opportunity. Like the world does not present to you, oh, here's a check for a million dollars.

Here's a client you're going to love to work with, even though it looks like a pain in the ass right now.

And if you learn and you grow from this experience, you'll exceed what it is you're capable of doing in the future. In the moment, they look like obstacles.

They look like a pain in the butt. I have to fire this person. I have to grit my teeth and read these three books.

I have to go and give a presentation in front of 300 people, and I'm scared out of my mind. So my wife is reading this book. It's called Conversations with God.

And it's an incredible book, and she's telling me about it. And one of the concepts she said to me was, there are only two true emotions, love and fear.

And I'm like, okay, that's pretty good. When you're angry about somebody, when you're jealous and when you're envious, that you're afraid of losing that friendship.

You're afraid of losing that relationship, that connection, that bond. And it's really driven by fear. And if I have to decide how I want to live my life, Alastair, I'm 52 years old.

I don't want to live a day in fear. I want to live the rest of my life in love. I want to love what I'm doing. I want to love the future that I'm creating for myself.

And so if you are all afraid, ask yourself, what is the worst of two possible fears? The fear of AI or the fear of not living up to your potential.

The fear of losing out on this kind of great economic driver that's going to push us into the next 2,000 years. Ask yourself that. And I hope you choose love. That is poetic.

Alastair McDermottI hate that you're older than me and look younger than me. I'm so jealous, Chris.

Chris DoThank you so much.

Alastair McDermottYou know Asian Don't Raisin, right? Thank you so much for coming on. This has been the AI Powered Thought Leader.

I do have a guide for people who want to get started with AI at learnai.guide. And it's just some quick ways to get started with it. Chris, it's a pleasure, as always, to chat with you.

And, yeah, I'm going to put this up on. It's going to be on all the podcast apps.

If so, if you want to listen to this, again, you can find it on all good podcast apps, Apple, Spotify, and all of the

Chris DoPlaces.

Alastair McDermottChristo, from the future, thank you so much.

MaxThanks for listening to Something About AI. Everything discussed here, and a good deal more, is backed up by free resources over at humanspark.ai. No cost, no catch.

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