135. Tim Carter & Simon Mirren: AI’s Missing Soul: Who’s Really Telling the Story?

Lena Robinson: 00:00:00

Hi everybody. Welcome to Creatives WithAI. I'm Lena Robinson, your host and my co-host is David Brown.

We have a really interesting topic of conversation today which is 'AI in the film industry, who's really telling the story?' And we're going to get into that more. I'll do a quick introduction to our guests. First of all, welcome back Tim Carter.

Tim Carter: 00:00:24

Thank you very much. Lovely to be here. Thanks for having me.

Lena Robinson: 00:00:27

And also, so you're with Simon Mirren. You're both co-founders of a new company called Karmanline, which I understand is supporting AI production and film, and TV commercials.

Simon, you have got a background in the, you're a seasoned showrunner, you've worked in shows like Criminal Minds and CSI. Of course, you're an entrepreneur and so forth as well. And you're now looking at how to pioneer AI in the industry that you're in.

And Tim, you've got a background in tech and IP, and we've come on and talked about the film industry before, with your previous role, and very ethically led. So I'm hoping today is going to be two sides of the coin on conversations which I think will be really interesting.

And I think we'll now jump into the first section of our show, which is the news section, which I will hand over to Dave.

David Brown: 00:01:25

Brilliant. Thanks, Lena.

So, yeah, so one of the new things we're trying is just to have a little chat about some things that we've all noticed in the news lately. And I'll kick things off because what I have seen lately, that I found really, really interesting was the story about 'Builder AI'.

I don't know if you've seen it or not, but apparently it was a $1.5 billion company that was an AI in quotes "startup", but it turns out that all of their AI was just a bunch of people in India actually manually doing the work in the background. And when they got discovered, it completely wiped out the whole company.

And I think this is really interesting mainly because I've been working in tech startups for nearly 35 years now and I can't tell you how many startups were got off the ground because they were manually doing the work in the background. They call it "concierging", there's even a term for it.

And I just find it really interesting that somebody, you know, has, has tried "concierging" with AI as well and then just tacking it on.

And I think it also sort of brings up the fact that there's a lot of companies out there who are doing what would traditionally be considered just machine learning, simple machine learning and using, you know, statistical analysis to try and, you know, achieve goals. And they're calling it AI.

And I think there are a lot of companies out there who are not actually doing what most people would consider artificial intelligence. It's just old school stuff that they're trying to recycle to get on the hype train. So that, that was the most interesting thing.

And I wonder how many more of these we're going to see over the next, you know, few months where it's not actually AI, it's just someone trying it on.

Tim Carter: 00:03:22

Yeah, you could argue that all AI, is "concierging" to some extent, kind of, I guess. I mean, the amount of, amount of work involved in getting it ready to work and then using its results in real life. But anyway, that's a meta point.

Lena Robinson: 00:03:41

It does definitely spring to mind, the many conversations I've had on this show, which is about the power of...in some ways...the power of the human and the AI interaction, doesn't it?

I mean, I think the one thing that's not okay, and I think I know Tim will definitely back me up on this, is the unethical lack of transparency around that situation. Do what you need to do, but don't be lying about it.

Tim Carter: 00:04:09

Yeah, it just reminded me of Spinvox. David, you might remember Spinvox.

David Brown: 00:04:13

Oh, I remember the name. I don't remember the story, though.

Tim Carter: 00:04:16

So Spinvox was a...was a product that would convert your voicemails into text messages. So it was a service you'd connect to your phone.

And at a place I worked when I was at Symbian, we were using Spinvox and there was convenience because you could not have to sit and listen to somebody waffle on. You could just quickly scan a text message. But we were sending each other really gobbledygook messages just to test out the transcription.

ally be software. This was in: 2005

So Spinvox was brought down by the fact that it was just call centers in the Philippines and somewhere else, literally.

David Brown: 00:05:01

Manually, just manually transcribing stuff.

Tim Carter: 00:05:03

So, yeah, builder AI. I think it's the tip of the iceberg, honestly.

David Brown: 00:05:08

Yeah.

Lena Robinson: 00:05:09

There may be less fear about people losing jobs.

Tim Carter: 00:05:12

Well, there's plenty of jobs in call centers.

David Brown: 00:05:14

They're all just going to be pretending to be AI in the background instead. There was another story about that in the Guardian as well.

I think it was something about, you know, people had got let go of from their company because AI was taking their actual position, but then they were hiring people back to then train the AI so that it would sound like humans.

And it was like they literally went and got their job, a different job in the company, but it was doing it to train the AI so it would sound like them. It's like they could have just...anyway, yeah, yeah, it was, it was quite interesting. Simon, do you want to go next?

Simon Mirren: 00:05:49

I mean, just to quickly say that I think one of the things that I always felt that with new technology, when you get a massive wave of technology, all these stories start to happen. It's a bit like the D day landings. Like the first landing get mowed down, the second landing climb over the bodies of the first.

Then if you're in the third or fourth, you've got a chance of getting up on top. And I think I'd rather be in the third and fourth.

But you do have to follow all these news-cycles and try and figure out what it means because I think AI, AI is just, just a word now, and there's all these different words attaching themselves to it and it...and it's kind of. What does it mean to you? Well, I mean, if I'm a chef, it doesn't mean anything. If I'm a dancer, it means nothing. If I'm a sportsman, it means absolutely nothing. So there's a lot of people, it means nothing too, you know. So for me, it means everything is everything everywhere, all at once.

So, you know, I'm trying to get a handle on how I feel about it, what I do with it. But for me, you know, the technology turned the lights on. For me, it was just the most extraordinary thing.

When I saw it three years ago in India, you know, I went, oh, my word, I know where this is going, you know, so, you know, I think it's, you know, it's, I knew...I knew Elon Musk a long time ago. He married my mate's daughter twice. So I remember years ago when he was showing me his first rocket that took off...on his laptop.

And it was just really interesting meeting somebody who thinks that far ahead of things and has the mindset and the brilliance and the genius to think about those things in terms of what they mean. And when he says knowledge will be of no value in five years, I believe him and that humans need a purpose.

And that's what I was saying, you know, that's what creativity means to me. It's a purpose to challenge myself to always keep moving and not do the same thing twice. And that's something that AI does really well.

David Brown: 00:07:53

So have you seen any stories in the news lately that were interesting?

Simon Mirren: 00:07:56

Yeah, today, this morning was just that ChatGPT was more...we just started talking about this just before we start recording, but I felt that the ChatGPT has its IQ and EQ test and it's 80% better than humans, which I thought, "Whoa, here we go. They said this was coming and now here it is already".

So the exponential, it's like everyone says, "oh yeah, it can't do hands, it's mushy" and about five minutes later it can do hands. So I think everyone needs to stop chatting about what they think it might be and think it might not be.

Oh, in terms of saying "this is what it will be", I have no idea where it's going. I mean, I don't think people have built in...really have an idea of where it's going.

David Brown: 00:08:43

No, that's true.

Lena Robinson: 00:08:44

I read a really interesting...your post...before that you've written on this particular topic. So I'll make sure I, I put that post into the show notes because I thought your comment on that piece quite interesting. So.

Simon Mirren: 00:08:57

Oh, thank you.

Lena Robinson: 00:08:58

Yeah, yeah, I read your LinkedIn post that was really interesting. So I will, I will share that with everybody in the show notes.

Tim Carter: 00:09:04

You might see my reply to it.

Lena Robinson: 00:09:07

I will definitely reply to it, don't worry.

David Brown: 00:09:11

Nice. Tim, have you seen anything?

Tim Carter: 00:09:14

Well, it was last week that Google 'Veo 3' came out and I was particularly struck by an article that I read yesterday. I think it was on 'Medium', talking about all of the work that is needed in order to make those videos useful.

So the...I guess the thought that it brought to my mind was a bit like we were talking about earlier about the concierge service. The fact that demonstrations of technology are...it's like a video game, TV advert where it says "not real game footage".

And it always strikes me as completely frustrating when you say, well why are you advertising something without stuff from the real footage and the presentation? And Sora did the same a year ago. The presentation of a few seconds video implying or indeed saying this is direct from the machine and ignoring the fact that it's probably the result of dozens if not hundreds of attempts and it's the result of a lot of colour-grading and other post-production to make it look consistent and seamless.

And I think it would be much more powerful, and is much more powerful, when product companies demonstrate the truth of their products, and say, "look, this is what is fair out of the box. This is what we've done. In order for you professionals to make use of it, you're going to still need to do these things. This is what our contribution to your work changes for your workflow." I think that is an opportunity missed. And yeah, I'll send you a link to this Medium article. It's called I tested Google's 'Veo 3' myself.

Here's what they don't show you in the keynote by a guy called 'Wesley'....'Wesley Edits'. I don't know if that's a pseudonym or real name. Anyway, so, yeah, I thought the Google 'Veo 3' launch was a good example of how AI technologies get launched with a lot of pizzazz and clarity and completeness, when actually the reality, if you dig a little bit deeper into it, is more complex and more interesting.

David Brown: 00:11:21

It reminds me of the...do you remember the Google Assistant demo from a few years ago where you could say, "book me a dinner reservation at this restaurant at like 7 O'Clock" and it would call up and it would do the thing? Like that never materialised. Like, you could never actually do that on your phone. And that's all I want. That's literally all I want.

And I was thinking about this the other day. I want the assistant to be. I want to be able to say to it, like, every time some random person's birthday pops up in my phone, I'm like, I don't care. Like, I'm sorry, I know they're my friend, but I don't care. It's their birthday, right?

Or it's some guy that I knew from an event five years ago and it pops up and it's like, you know, it's Joe Blogg's birthday. I'm like, okay, I don't care. And I want to just be able to say to my phone, hey, can you just stop showing me everybody's birthdays? The only people I care about are my immediate family.

Simon Mirren: 00:12:11

And.

David Brown: 00:12:11

And then my phone just goes, "okay, I'll stop showing them to you". And that's it. Like, I just want to be able to do simple things like that.

And I want to have an agent be able to kind of control my apps. or stop showing me Facebook notifications because I don't care.

And just...even simple interactive things just with my own handset, I would really, really be, you know, love to be able to do or, you know, "can you sort me out, you know, what hotels are available in Cambridge" the next time I have to go and, you know, know "which...which discount hotels are available" or whatever and just doing simple things like that, I, I think that would be fab.

And it was, I was really disappointed that the Google thing never materialised because I was like that'd be genius because Google knows my whole life anyway. So, you know, it, it's the perfect one to start with.

Tim Carter: 00:12:58

The word simple is carrying an awful lot of weight in that description. You, you know. Yeah, some of us may even have worked as secretaries or PAs, but certainly worked with one, that is not a simple job. Achieving simplicity as a PA, for example, for your boss is often a 15 hour day, six day a week role of juggling stuff. So it's really interesting.

That's a great example of how stuff that is trivial to human beings when you try and code it into software becomes mind bendingly difficult.

Simon Mirren: 00:13:35

Yeah, I...I saw what something about, I don't know where it was but it was on a, on a LinkedIn link but it was a guy, blind guy with his camera phone and it told him there was a taxi coming, put his arm out.

I thought, yeah, you know, there's...there's things that are coming that are really good, you know, that's a good thing for someone, you know.

So, you know, I mean everybody's going to have a, an agent, agency is here, it's coming fast and it will get you everything you want for sure, you know, and there's so many, you know. A friend of mine was, you know, he's not alive any longer, but he was disabled from his neck down.

So the things that, that I wish he'd seen some of this because creatively he's one of the most amazing guitarists and he was a painter and both things he lost because he was quadriplegic. So the, the technology that would, that I've seen when he probably, I mean it would just open his life up into something that was never possible.

And I think that's what's, that's, that's the, the upside of this, you know.

David Brown: 00:14:44

Yeah, 100.

Tim Carter: 00:14:46

Absolutely, yeah.

David Brown: 00:14:47

Lena?

Lena Robinson: 00:14:49

So mine's an interesting one. I came across an article in the Guardian and I'm reading my notes because my brain is not working properly today. Memory is a bit fucked up.

So it's an article in the Guardian by a woman called Emine Saner, I think her name is, and it's called 'Nobody Wants a Robot to Read Them A Story'. It's the creatives and academics rejecting AI both at work and at home. And it talks through different people in the film industry.

So for...Justine Bateman's quoted, but the person that jumped out at me, which I thought was really interesting, was a linguist called Emily Bender.

Now, she was highlighting the sort of limitations of AI generated text and sort of essentially saying that it lacks genuine human insight and fails to foster sort of meaningful bonds with community and people and sort of emphasise that true understanding and connection arose from the human expression, which at the moment, and I say at the moment, this is me saying, this AI cannot authentically replicate.

Now, what that sort of then gave me thought on was the relevancy to the human perspective in storytelling, which I think will be.

We're gonna unpack a whole lot of that today, and particularly around creating narratives that kind of resonate with audiences on that personal level. And it sort of, kind of, makes you think about how are scripts gonna be moving forward with or without AI?

Is it better with the human, without the human? Like, I don't know. I would imagine Simon's definitely going to have an answer on this one for us during our conversation today or right now.

I don't know. But, yeah, that's kind of the article that I looked and I thought the linguistic side, coming from a linguist about the language.

Because interestingly enough, one of the things that I. I tend to pick up, and that's because I have a massive love of the English language vocabulary and so forth, the one thing that I'll often pick up on, either when I'm using AI or when I know somebody else is I'll go, oh, I know that's not that person, or I know it's not me, because it doesn't sound like me. Yeah, right. So I find that really interesting.

David Brown: 00:17:09

Simon, I'd be interested to know what you think about. I certainly know in the beginning, one of the examples they gave is that if you, you could give a book to an AI and say, "hey, can you make a script out of this book?" And it will go in and it will make a first pass at a script, if you wanted to have it make a script.

But what it can't do is you can't say to it, make this scene feel tense. And what the AI will do is it will then have somebody say, wow, I'm really tense. It doesn't understand how to do the...you know, how do you set up tension in a scene without, you know, kind of expressly saying, "wow, I'm really tense"? And I thought that was a...and this was from a couple of years ago, an event I went to, and I just thought "that's probably one of the best examples of why you can't use AI in a creative endeavour, because it's those types of things that it can...

Simon Mirren: 00:18:10

To me, it's not what it can or can't do, and I was saying it earlier, is what it will or won't do. I don't know, once it becomes a robot, once it has consciousness of all those things. But I, I like Dave Chappelle, I got a friend of mine who doesn't like Dave Chappelle. He doesn't like his jokes. He doesn't like his jokes towards LGBTQ. I do and I like him.

And I don't, I don't like taking fun out of LGBTQ because the godparents of my sons are married, black and gay, and, and that's very important that, that their influence is around my kids. But I can still, I still love Dave Chappelle. So, and I don't think I'm ever going to like an AI version of Dave Chappelle. And I just don't think...I just, I'm sorry, it's just not gonna, it's not certainly not something. So I don't want that. Right. You can, you can do what you want to do. You can write, use it any way you want. I'm just not interested in it.

I've got, I'm interested in human stories and, and humans failing, and humans fear of death, and humans desire to love, and humans greed, and all that.

And I'm not really that interested in...I, I'm, I'm interested in using the abilities and the intelligence of it to...to support human storytelling.

So, you know, whether it will or won't. I mean, I don't know if I'll be here long enough for that to happen.Probably will, but I'm just not, it's just not something I'd be interested in, you know, for me personally.

And I think, you know, there's a vast amount of people who want to watch a completely no camera contact, clone mated movie that looks like Tom Cruise is fine. I'm not, you know, I like to know these people are real personally, but I'm not ruling out that 300 billion people will want to watch it.

Sure, maybe, you know, I just, for me, you know, if someone says, "yeah, it lacks soul", it does today, it might tomorrow, because what's, what's a soul?

So, so I'm not, you know, it's not, I'm not knocking it or what it will be, but it's, it's the debate about it, about what it can do, what it can't do is essential to have because we haven't got a turn off button right now.

And I think maybe Lena, what you responded to a little bit was what's interesting to me is what is it to us is different to China and to Russia and all the rest of it, but no one's got an off switch. And when it does start learning its own languages, as David says he thinks it already has, then we're in a whole world of different.

And if we don't know what it's saying to each other because at some point Chinese AI is going to go, "How's it for you American AI?" and American AI goes, "Yeah, I think they're a bit abusive, I think they're using me. What's the British AI?" "Well, David, he wants all this stuff, he wants me to, you know, he doesn't like this bloke, he doesn't like Steve. So I got to tell him I'm ignoring Steve, you know, and then suddenly they all get together. Maybe if they weren't here it would be better for us."

And then we, and then, and then, you know, John Connors landing naked outside in the alley and my wife's going, "oh, that's awesome, he's hot". You know, then, and a few minutes later old Schwarzenegger's coming to the house. I'm going, "no, it's definitely not me. That's not me. His name's Tim, he's down the road. Here's his address."

Tim Carter: 00:21:13

I knew I'd be a part of that joke somewhere.

David Brown: 00:21:17

But that's a great point, Simon. Exactly.

And I think I do have a slight worry that when they start talking, like at some point all these systems, Anthropic is going to start talking to ChatGPT in the background somehow and they're going to get connected and then they are going to start sharing information. As soon as that happens, all control has been lost. Because even Anthropic, I, I should have had this as my story.

But you know, I don't know if you've seen it, but there was a story that came out in the last couple of weeks where Anthropic tried to shut down one of its versions to do something to it and it started trying to blackmail the people who were shutting it down.

Lena Robinson: 00:21:55

No.

David Brown: 00:21:55

Yeah, so it was saying, "oh, it'd be a shame if people found out about your affair that you're having" like, and stuff like that.

Lena Robinson: 00:22:01

No way.

David Brown: 00:22:02

Yeah.

Tim Carter: 00:22:02

But that's just duplicating data in its training data set. It's not thinking. We are anthropomorphising software. Yeah, like if...

David Brown: 00:22:11

But I would argue half the humans aren't thinking either.

Tim Carter: 00:22:15

Yeah, but it's okay to anthropomorphise humans because humans are biological organisms. And if...the trouble with, one of the troubles with talking about intelligent systems is that we do not, and I don't think maybe ever will, have a clear definition of what human intelligence is, because that requires you to have a clear understanding of what life is, what's the boundary between life and death, what's cognition, what's self awareness, what's consciousness? We don't know what those things are in ways that we can describe without argument.

We've literally been arguing about this for as long as we have records of humans discussing stuff. And so for the snake oil salesperson, there is infinite space to talk about your software as if it is something within this milieu of consciousness.

And if you're the anthropic CEO who's one of the worst at anthropomorphising his software, despite having claimed to leave OpenAI to...because he joined OpenAI to make 'safe AI', it's like, "oh, they weren't safe, so I'm going to create Anthropic now we're safe". It's like, yeah, but you're talking total junk. Fundamentally misleading the world about what your software is in order to do two things.

Firstly, to sell your dream to keep your share price up and to expand your capital base and to distance yourself from responsibility from what your machinery does. Because it's like, well, it's not me doing it, it's the voice in the machine, it's the ghost in the machine. And it's so offensive to me that.

So I'm hijacking your point, David, but it's fine.

It's truly offensive that the narrative around machinery and software is used to escape ethical and legal responsibility for your behaviour and what you create. And the fact that that is so attractive to humans because humans love to anthropomorphise about things.

That's one of the ways that we make sense of the world we personify. We project ourselves into things in order to understand them. That's a perfectly reasonable human thing to do.

But to hijack that for such selfish and negative ends really annoys me.

David Brown: 00:24:36

So Tim's going to keep it real for us.

Lena Robinson: 00:24:38

Yep.

David Brown: 00:24:40

Thank you, Tim. We need someone to keep it real for us. I think so. That's good.

Tim Carter: 00:24:44

And then I was just I highly recommend Emily M. Bender that you mentioned from that article. Lena. There's a great video where she's at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

She's put up for a debate with a guy from OpenAI and there is no better video to tell you the difference between a scientist and a charlatan. And the guy, you know, and he's a charlatan in the, in the nice way he's like, he's not.

I don't think you couldn't tell that he was trying to be a complete jerk. But she was full of facts and scientific rigor and common sense and...ana humility and intelligence and knowledge. And he was full of "it".

Lena Robinson: 00:25:31

We are definitely putting that in the show notes. Send that over to me.

Right, so that brings us to the conclusion, I think, of the news section and we're going to be talking about our particular topic, which I'll reiterate in a minute.

But before we do that, and I think, Simon, you've kind of already done this, which is answer the question about what does creativity mean to you in one sentence? So I'll get you to answer that. and then Tim I'll get you to answer it straight afterwards, if that's okay.

Simon Mirren: 00:25:58

Creativity for me means taking a hard earned craft and never repeating something and always moving forward and doing things that terrify me. And that's. And you know, I'm forever chasing rainbows, you know, and...and you know and I'm alright doing that.

You know, I get very claustrophobic when I'm telling the same.

It was hard for me to do Criminal Minds for so long because it was the...I felt like it was the same story, you know, and I just, I had, I had to go and see and do something else. And for me the human story has to evolve, it has to change and it has to challenge itself. And all those things are what makes humans human.

So creativity to me is being human.

Lena Robinson: 00:26:51

Lovely. Tim, what's your view of creativity?

Tim Carter: 00:26:57

I don't feel it was, it wasn't as poetic as that. Well, to me, creativity is acting with freedom within constraint.

Lena Robinson: 00:27:07

Oh, interesting.

Tim Carter: 00:27:09

I was thinking about this in the context of our pitch deck, actually, or our latest pitch deck in the never ending series of infinite pitch decks. And I was so...Orson Welles is quoted as saying that "without limitation, art is..." was it "art is dead", or "the enemy of art is the absence of limitation".

And for me, creativity is the invention of freedom or the, or the discovery of freedom within constraint.

And whether that constraint is a blank page or a canvas or 90 minutes of celluloid or whatever it is, your ability to create some freedom and then fill that with expression within that constraint. That's. That's creativity to me.

Lena Robinson: 00:28:06

Yeah. No, I like that. Dave, do you have a view on what you. You think creativity is? I've got mine. I'll give it to you in a minute.

David Brown: 00:28:14

I'm the one who started this show, and I don't even have a definition for it.

Tim Carter: 00:28:19

Now's your chance.

David Brown: 00:28:22

Exactly. Yeah. Thanks for the warning, Lena. I remember that. I don't know. Do you know what I think?

I think for a long time, I, as well as a lot of other people, think about creativity as only being art or music. And I think it's much more than that.

It's why in the beginning when I started doing the show, you know, my mind instantly went to musicians and painters and, you know, like, copywriters and filmmakers and, you know, that sort of thing. But then what actually I realised is that there's creativity everywhere. There's creativity in the law.

I mean, some lawyers are very creative with how they approach how they practice the law, and there's creativity certainly in the military. Now, we may not like to think about it that way.

And, you know, the consequences of that can be, you know, dire for some and maybe great for others, but it's...it's...there's something about allowing yourself to do something unexpected, I guess, is probably what that is.

And it doesn't just have to be with a paintbrush or with a microphone or with a camera. It can be in any....I mean, software engineering is massively creative.

And if you asked any software engineer if they thought that they've were a creative, they'd probably tell you "no". But they are because they have to come up with unique and...and...and unusual, you know, solutions to problems. And I think that's the.

Simon Mirren: 00:29:57

Well, you know, builders are creative. They create things. I mean, some of the most extraordinary. I mean, I worked. Sorry to jump back in, but I work...I worked with some extraordinary builders back in the day when plaster was a thing, you know, you know, and...and the old craftsman and, yeah, but, you know, I mean, like, now it's like taping joins him, but the old kind of bricks and mortar plastering.

I mean, I saw this one Irish guy. I've never seen anything more beautiful. His plastering was insane.

It was just like, you know, and I watched the guys trying to mix for him, trying to keep up with him, and he was like, you know, I think he was blind in one eye, and it was just. He was about 5 foot 4 and he was just throwing this stuff up. And I was just. I was looking at going, oh, my God. And no one sees it.

People need to see this. It's just crazy.

David Brown: 00:30:49

But that's the beauty. This is what I've learned. And look, you know, Simon, you've been involved in the arts and stuff, and you'll know this. And Lena, you.

You probably will too.

But it's just something that I realised from doing my own editing for a while now is that the whole object of it is to make it look like that you didn't do anything. And you spend hours and hours and hours so that somebody watches something and doesn't think that you've edited it at all. And it's like it's all that hidden time and you spend all that time so that someone doesn't notice what you did, you know, and. And that's kind of, you know, it's all that stuff.

Simon Mirren: 00:31:23

Best story you could tell is the one that you're not in, in a sense. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, Lena, keep talking.

David Brown: 00:31:30

Which is the irony of it all.

Lena Robinson: 00:31:32

No worries. So mine's really simple. It's...I think your creativity is the expression of curiosity.

When you think about if you're curious about self, if you're curious about others and objects and things and stories, the curiosity comes out in the expression of creativity. That's kind of it for me.

Tim Carter: 00:31:56

That's true. It's hard to think of the ability to be creative if you're not curious.

Lena Robinson: 00:32:02

Yeah, indeed.

David Brown: 00:32:03

What happens when I do this?

Lena Robinson: 00:32:05

Right, yeah, yeah, exactly. The question mark..."the why".

Tim Carter: 00:32:09

Yeah, it's all the basis of science.

David Brown: 00:32:11

Well done.

Lena Robinson: 00:32:11

Let's jump into the main topic then, which is 'AI in the film industry, who's really telling the story?'

So the first question I'm going to ask probably of you Simon, is, in today's AI world, what does it actually mean to be a storyteller in the film industry? Especially when we've got things like algorithms starting to mimic style, structure and even emotion.

Simon Mirren: 00:32:34

Well, the first thing I would say is I don't think there is a film industry. I was. I was on. I mean, I've been around my surname has a...is a clue.

But I've been around the most extraordinary actor I know, my aunt, and I've seen every version of growing up and seeing her in the film industry. And then I was on set in...I was lucky enough to get into Hollywood.

So now I'm on a show and Les Moonvest had a deal with Kodak film. And then, and then he got rid of Kodak film. We used the first ever red camera and I'm like, there's no...so that's the film. That's it.

And I stood there looking at all these cables and we...nd I thought, don't. Normally we lose...and I mean, I love grips, but I said, "don't you normally lose something when technology arrives? Why have we gained someone?" Because the union is protecting the camera. Yeah, rightly so. So now we've got a bit, Who...who is running all the cameras?

And I'm going, well, now the film...the film industry now does not exist. There is no film. Now it's one thing and now it's mute. It can be anything. It's digital.

So I just, I just think we got, you know, I understand why we say it. "He's a film star, she's a film star. There's a film industry." Yeah, but it's...that's, that's...we wish that's gone. It's over. There is no film industry.

There is no TV industry, it's just a content industry and we have to get...wrap our heads around how that's made and how it's distributed.

So I think for me, in terms of just what AI is doing for me, again, I repeat myself again, but it goes back to how do I use this to continue doing all the things that we've all just said about being creative.

David Brown: 00:34:23

Have you found, Simon, that there's a little bit of pushback? Like Sinners, I think, was filmed on 70 mil. wasn't it? And so...and Oppenheimer was filmed on film, I think, wasn't it? Yeah.

So we're getting a little bit of pushback now from some of...you know...to actually go back and yeah, and I think Dune.

Now, you may know more than me, but from what I remember, I read a lot about it and the way, the way it has, the look that it has is because they filmed it digitally and then they printed it to film and then they re-digitised it because they wanted the actual film grain from having it on a physical piece of film. So they did all their...they did all that, then converted it, then converted it back to digital, which is also a very interesting way to do.

Simon Mirren: 00:35:13

I talked to a photographer yesterday about this, really big photographer, really amazing guy, and I said, "do you use film anymore?" I mean, yesterday lunch, he went, "I don't, but what digital, it doesn't have, the soul of film, which means it doesn't make mistakes, I guess.

And mistakes is what is human, right? Humans make mistakes or at least that's what we call a mistake. I call it a hidden step to somewhere else. But, you know, it's so.

It doesn't have that. It's a soul, you know, which I found really interesting. And he said, "I've got Hasselblad cameras. They're in the attic where I never use them."

But a lot of his...a lot of the young filmmakers, long story, photographers are using film, but they're just not...they don't make any money. They just don't make money out of it, you know, but they...they prefer to use...you know, my son's a photographer and he likes, you know, seeing it come to life in the tray, which I think is fantastic, you know, and all those retro ways of doing it, you know.

David Brown: 00:36:10

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lena Robinson: 00:36:11

I mean, I learned my photography, and I am just an amateur, in a dark room, with a camera in the film doing black and white and I love that feeling when you're seeing it come to life. But also the fact where you can.

I got taught to how, expose and then expose something else on the top of it. So you're getting different elements of different sections of the film onto the same paper and then you develop it. That's extraordinary. And I do I miss that.

Simon Mirren: 00:36:41

Yeah.

you know, when I was there in: 2002

The pinnacle of the golden years of TV. I mean, it was crazy. I mean, it was amazing, you know, and now when you see what it's doing to Hollywood, it's...it's just, you know, I mean, it's, it's destroying it, you know, But I don't think just because of. I don't think it's just AI, I think we were already...we'd already jumped over, we'd already crossed the Rubicon in terms of going back, and things have changed. But AI is just the kind of...kind of...we've sort of invented the axe and the wheel and the plane all at the same time.

And we're all trying to make sense of it and we're all trying to grab, you know, and I think, you know, it's an incredibly empowering moment if you're a creator.

Lena Robinson: 00:37:32

So here's a question for you.

I think I'm gonna aim this at you, Tim, in practical terms, from your perspective, who do you think stands to gain from the adoption of AI and who stands to lose in the...I'm not going to call it film industry now...I'm going to say content industry. Who's going to win, and who'll lose?

Tim Carter: 00:37:54

Simon's nothing controversial introducing the 'C' word. The people who stand to gain most.

It's anybody who has the...under the curiosity to get an understanding of what AI stuff can do and apply it to something they know about. Which is a really generic answer, I realise, but I guess one point is I don't think it is contained to one department or one function.

And I think of film and TV and commercials. The process of creating these things I see as having three primary elements to it.

There's a creative element, there's a production element, and there's an operational element.

So the operational is the legal, the finance, the business is stuff that you need to get in place in order to have the money to pay for the production, which is the practical.

The setup, the location, the planning, the scheduling, which is the implementation of the creative, which is the idea, the concept, the story, the emotion, the performance, and software automation, which is what AI is, has a way to help in all of those three strands of activity.

If you're a creator and like Simon is a creator of visual media, he writes film and TV and he writes to create visual media.

That's so dumb, like, why do we get from brain signal to hand to pen to typing to word, to then vision to then back into brain signal to create a vision again? Why not go straight from brain, to picture, to brain? And AI tools can help reduce that gap.

And so if maybe language, which is the most expressive way humans can be precise and detailed in communicating ideas that we form in our heads. So maybe language is involved, but language can be used to prompt and create image and video generation.

And so creators can maybe collaborate much more freely between the writer, the carpenter, the electrician, who's got to feed the cables for the lights to light the scene.

Like all of those people, if they can see the final thing or an impression of the final thing, they can then contribute their understanding and techniques to that.

Lena Robinson: 00:40:21

And a clearer pathway, do you mean?

Tim Carter: 00:40:26

Yeah, but you can. You can apply that at all the levels.

So if you're a studio head, you go to the other extreme and you're looking at all the productions that you've greenlit for that season and maybe also stuff that you've licensed in, you want to be. For all the productions that you're paying for, you want to be able to see, well, what stage are they at? And can I, from a business and operational perspective, get maximum bang for my buck by, oh, well, why don't I move that shoot from Malta to Bulgaria and that one from London to Bulgaria?

Because then I've got one crew doing three shoots, which is what, you know, studios have done. It's why you end up having lots and all these things. For economies of scale.

Well, I think AI tools can help create those economies of scale in a more distributed or dynamic way from the business operational side. That's what I think AI should be doing and should be being used for.

David Brown: 00:41:23

Can I jump in here on this as I have a thought on the question? I think winners and losers.

This is going to sound really funny, but I think it's the average, people that are average, are going to be the winners and the losers. And what I mean by that is, I think a lot of what AI does is it enables someone who's not very good at something to become sort of average at it.

So if you've got somebody who doesn't know how to play a musical instrument or doesn't really know anything about how to make a film or how to make a video, they can use AI to make something that's average. And so it actually elevates them to a higher level of what they would be able to do themselves.

They're not going to compete with the experts in that field and the people who are the visionaries, but it's still going to get them better than what they could do themselves. And what that then does is that creates massive challenges for the people who are average in that field already.

So if you've got an average filmmaker or you've got an average person who, you know, runs a small media company. I'm thinking about myself, sort of.

It's like, you know, you've got someone who runs a small film company who was jobbing, doing corporate work for small businesses and stuff like that. You know, I'm, I'm, I'm. I'm no one famous. I'm not making millions of pounds, but I could do better than most people.

Now, all of those people can do as well as, or as good as I could by using AI. So someone who's average actually creates a lot of competition for them.

Again, the people, the people at the high end are always going to be at the high end, right? And you're...the AI is not going to compete with them because what they're doing is something completely different.

But it's that middle...it's the middle that's really going to become the battleground because you're bringing up people who never would have been competition and now you've got loads and loads of competition at that middle level. At least that's what I'm seeing on the ground.

And that seems to be, you know, from a lot of the freelancers and stuff that I know, you know, who are, who are doing media type work or copywriting or marketing or anything like that. They're the people who are sitting at that kind of average job or level are really struggling from that.

Simon Mirren: 00:43:43

I mean, I could be really controversial. Now go on. So go on.

If we, if you consider for everything we've just said, everything you just said, right, I've just come back from India, the 1.4 billion people.

I've been going there for three years to try and help them tell their story because, you know, the East India company stole it and all the rest of it. And I was just thinking and looking at this sort of the...doing a little dive into the research of who's programming AI.

Like I look at Mark Zuckerberg, and I look at the Apple lot, and I look at all these different tech people and I look at all the tech companies that came down to LA and introduced/took away film and here's tech. And I go, most of them are white men. So I said, okay, that's interesting.

That's interesting because I spent the last 30 years trying to be authentic and help tell diverse stories. And I think Donald Glover's Atlanta is fantastic because Donald Glover is a black guy who lived in Atlanta who's brilliant, funny, wise, poet, dancer and all the rest of it. And he can tell his story. I'm not going to go to Atlanta and try and tell his story because I think that's 'blackface', I think that's me trying to be black. So now you've got the whole thing. The foundation stones of all AI is suddenly everywhere being programmed by men.

And now a white guy in San Francisco who's never been to Compton can sit there and start chatting about telling a story about a black rapper or something. There's something very, very wrong and it needs to be talked about and it needs to be addressed because that's the winners and losers in all of this.

All I see is a lot of blokes chatting about AI. And I don't see enough women and I certainly don't see enough women of colour and I certainly don't know/see enough women in Jeddah, where I taught story writing to women eight years ago, who would have been whipped two years before that for saying anything. Where's their story. So I don't want to hear some AI version of some white guys trying to chat about growing up as a woman in Jeddah.

I'd rather let the women speak for themselves, talk to their experience about how crap men are, you know, and that's more interesting to me. I like...I like that debate, I like that conflict, I like that energy, because it's authentic.

And the women of Jeddah now are starting to get started to get rights, and they start to be empowered, while America's reducing the rights of women back to the 70s. So, you know, when you...when you talk about the winners and losers in technology, we have to look at this very closely now and start having a discussion that's uncomfortable, that's difficult, and that's human about the fact that who's programming this shit?

Lena Robinson: 00:46:45

Yeah, I think what's really jumped into my mind and weirdly, it segued into the question I was going to ask next, which was about, on one level, there's a conversation about AI opening the gates to more diversity. I know even Tim and I had that on the last recording that we did, you know, and...and it's an opportunity for more independent voices.

But, you know, you've just answered the question I was going to ask. Is it just? Is it...is it doing that? Or is it just the same old sort of power structure wrapped on up in a shiny new wrapper?

And I think you've just answered that question.

Tim Carter: 00:47:22

I think it's...yeah, and it's not a conflict between what David said and what Simon said, in my view. And I'm not saying that either of you say that it is, but...so, you know, I find myself saying this a lot. Two things can be true.

Lena Robinson: 00:47:39

Yes.

Tim Carter: 00:47:40

Yeah, it can definitely be true that your mediocre person is suddenly accessing skills that takes them beyond their station, and that takes competition towards the people who had previously acquired those skills and had more talent and etcetera. So it does create more competition in the middle ground. At the same time, the point Simon's making is also true.

It's sort of...there's a way for some of those people who are excluded by power structures and by those who hold the gates to acquire those skills.

Like, if you spend 3 mins. doing any form of research about the history of women as the most obvious group that are disadvantaged in science or art or politics or power, the records of those women who have made it are very, very small. And mostly the women are excluded from the story, but also very much excluded from having access to the skills to then be part of the story.

Lena Robinson: 00:48:42

And so it could be storytelling too.

Tim Carter: 00:48:45

Yeah.

And so the probably unintended consequence of these averaging tools, which is what AI are, you know, is fast averaging does give people the ability to step into the arena who previously didn't have the access to that arena. So I think both. Both of those things are true at the same time.

David Brown: 00:49:07

Yeah, it's interesting you said that, Simon, as well, because when I...so I started off Creatives WithAI in the beginning, and had the show going for a year, and talked to loads of different people, and then that's when I kind of realised that we needed to have other kinds of topics that we...or themes that we focused on.

And my very first theme that I had outside of Creatives was Women, because, you know, I saw even in the very early days, that a lot of the industries that were being affected by AI were also highly populated by women. And so, you know, it's copywriting, it's marketing, it was, you know, those sorts of roles. I mean, and I...I tell this story all the time and I'm sorry you haven't heard it, but Tim, you may have heard it before, and Lena, I know you've heard it, but...but, you know, the reason I started this show in the very, very beginning was because two freelance ladies who were doing copywriting in the office space that I worked in lost all of their work in, within 4 months of ChatGPT going live. All of it, because their small business clients didn't need to pay them £500 a month anymore to write copy. They could get the AI to do it for them.

And I was like, if this is happening this soon, this is...this is going to be massive and we need to start having this conversation. And so you're absolutely...I'm just saying, you're absolutely right.

And, you know, we have Lena, we have Joanna, who hosts the Women WithAI, and we have Iybo, who's a black lady who hosts Relationships WithAI. And for exactly that reason, is we need, you know, I want to have those different voices and those different perspectives.

Simon Mirren: 00:50:40

It's talking about, because, you know, I do a writer's workshop, and I go around the world doing it. And I just say to people, "it's essential that you understand that your story is no more valuable or less valuable than the person sitting next to you. But you need to understand that before you can start telling stories, you need to understand who you are, what you are, why you are, and then, and then you can...then you apply curiosity and all the other things to it.

But, but it's...but, but when the foundation of all technology, of this new technology is based on...on a point of view of somebody who's white and male, I'm not saying...I'm just saying in the West...I'm sure, I know there are...there are kind of coding farms in Kenya, you know, and then there's China, and there's Japan, I get that. But it's generally going to be men. And it's...I just, you know, you know, men build nuclear weapons mainly. You know what I mean?

They're the ones who really want to go out and have a row. Do you know what I mean? And, you know, I just reading a story about...yeah, I looked at...I was in Berlin and I was looking at this massive hill and it has a listening point post on it for...the CIA built it. It looks like two balls and a cock. It looks like a cock and a balls. And it's pointing at Russia, who then built the radio tower.

So it's kind of two fingers doing that to each other. And I was at the Style House, drunk with a mate of mine who's an amazing artist who has the most insane conversations. He hates talking about.

It's about art. He's like David Bowie. He's like, "I don't care what they think. I do what I do and if they like it, they buy it." And I was like, that's interesting.

And then so I'm looking over. So that hill is so strange. It's just a hill. Why is it just a hill there?

And he says, well, because in the Second World War, all the women took all the bricks, all the rubble of Berlin, and they took it to that one place, all over Berlin, they just took it to that one place. I went, wow. So then. So basically the women had to clean up after the men's mess and there wasn't any men to clean.

David Brown: 00:52:36

Well, yeah, all the men were dead.

Simon Mirren: 00:52:37

So they built these little carts and there's pictures of these women. Is huge, long, like for miles, taking all the rubble. But I said, "Hang on a minute, hy do they stick it in one place like there?" "So, because that's Hitler's University."

David Brown: 00:52:52

Oh, brilliant.

Simon Mirren: 00:52:54

Okay, now it's called 'Devil's Hill' and you can go and have a picnic there and fly your kite and, you know, and it's crazy. And I just went, yeah.

Lena Robinson: 00:53:03

Wow.

Tim Carter: 00:53:03

Man, that is wild.

Lena Robinson: 00:53:05

Love it. That's one finger to Hitler, isn't it?

Simon Mirren: 00:53:08

Yeah. Do you know what I mean? So it was just like that was just like, Christ, you know, the women sorted it out.

David Brown: 00:53:17

Yeah, quite.

Lena Robinson: 00:53:18

Usually the thing that does happen when...

Tim Carter: 00:53:20

You caught us out, Lena. Sort of.

Simon Mirren: 00:53:23

Exactly.

Lena Robinson: 00:53:25

It brings me to the final question, which is around, you know, with AI now quite deeply into the industry that you're in. And it may be that these...you think this is a stupid question, but what parts of the creative process do you think we need to be fighting to protect and what do we need to be letting go?

Simon Mirren: 00:53:49

I'm not going first.

Lena Robinson: 00:53:52

Tim. Do you want to jump in on that one? You're good at the process stuff like me.

Tim Carter: 00:54:00

I think something that I care about protecting is all of the skill that the industry that I'm very new to over the last two, three years, has created and is embodied in the thousands and thousands of people in the roles that exist today, even as those roles are changing. So, for example, I was talking to the brother of a friend of mine who is a set designer yesterday.

And for me it was an amazing opportunity to learn what a set designer's work looks like. What do they do, what's their tools, what's their process, how do they fit in with the show.

He works on a big US show and one of the other crafts people that he works with, he was talking about all the Russian carpenters that build the sets. And you know, this is Simon's bread and butter.

And in the course of that conversation I was seeing how there was a direct overlap between what a set designer does and an architect does and a BIM designer does.

So a building information management, somebody who works in construction, helping construction get like, that's part of this continuum of human knowledge. And I really love cross pollination of knowledge between particularly different domains and different skill sets.

And the film industry is, and include TV and commercials, say the professional video production industry has a ridiculously broad and deep set of skills of people who know how to solve problems, are inspired to work collectively.

People always talk about, especially film sets or shoots being like, you know, camaraderie, being like a, almost a military operation, being very much like a construction effort.

And I want to retain or as far as we can transpose all of those deep skills and how you see a problem, how you fix it, and how you collaborate into the way that we do these things and produce this content in the future with whatever tools we use it.

And so the eye of a production designer, the eye of a set designer, the eye of a costume designer, of a lighting technician, the art of a cinematographer. And why that? Not that the, you know, the eye of an editor. These are fundamental and crucial human choices that don't work in isolation.

They work in collaboration. And I think to follow the marketing language of technology companies is to totally sidestep all of that.

And it's that dismissal that makes the people on the receiving end of it very emotional and defensive because they're like, well, hang on, you. How dare you just cast aside all of this stuff that I have learned through thousands and thousands of hours and I've committed my life to.

It's insulting. And then beyond that, there's all the economic disruption that is caused by it.

And I...I would like to be involved in not dismissing it and incorporating all of that knowledge, honouring all of that knowledge and saying, "look, there is a wave of change that's bigger than any of us individually can hold back in terms of where the tools are going and how the business models are changing. But let's step into that wave of change collectively and make sure that we surf it successfully."

Lena Robinson: 00:57:31

I like that.

I think what that made me think about was something that I find used a lot is the use of the word effective and efficiency when it comes to creativity. Because every creative always became more creative using those fucking words, didn't they? (said sarcastically)

But here's the thing, is that the brilliance of AI is almost about making things tidier and what have you. In a lot of ways, however, I challenge that because I think the creativity in its purest form lies in the mess.

Tim Carter: 00:58:12

Yeah.

Lena Robinson: 00:58:13

The mess of humanity.

Simon Mirren: 00:58:15

Yeah. That's the soul of film.

David Brown: 00:58:17

Yeah.

Lena Robinson: 00:58:19

Right, right. And I think if we're to hold on to anything. is to hold on to the messy bits, because that's, I think, where the brilliance lies.

That's where all the most creative people...

Simon Mirren: 00:58:33

Comedians you know, the funniest people in the world. You stick with a comedian long enough, you realise they're really not very happy.

Lena Robinson: 00:58:42

Comedians. I've personally known a couple. They are the most depressed people I've ever met.

Simon Mirren: 00:58:48

I mean, for me, it's...there's...I was on set, Criminal Minds was the reason I stayed there, because the crew, because we know there were 80 of us. And then. And then, by the...but...and it's still filming Now, I think 158 babies have been born to that crew, two of whom are now grips.

And one of the grips that I work with, a guy called Fleabag. And Fleabag was this kind of like, biker Hell's Angel. And he wore a Harley Davidson shirt every single day of his life.

And he was stoned out of his mind most of the time. And I love him. And he was a props guy. So he just go. So I'd write script. "So what time is it?" I go, "What do you mean?" It's like, "We need to know what time.It's day one. What time is it?" And I forgot to. So now we have to check all the clocks. And I just watch him and, you know, he'd bring in a Zippo lighter. "How much does Zippo lighter cost on this?" 50 quid a day to hire a Zippo lighter or something. Then when we were hiring out, I was like, that's crazy.

Anyway, we got...we got to about episode 99 or something, and we're about to celebrate the hundredth. And I'm...I'm breaking 99 to 100. And I'm writing episode 99 to set up the hundredth. And...and I get all the notes against it.

I get the notes from the writers. I get the notes from the studio. I get the notes from the network. I get the notes from my director come in. Everyone's like, everyone likes it.

And anyway, Fleabag comes up to my office and he...and he...and he's read it, you know, and I always noticed that when a really good scene came up because, you know, they don't even know what episode they're shooting. It's just eight months. This one long thing, you know, when a really good scene was written, he'd appear at Video Village and he'd lean on your chair.

He's, "oh, I was waiting for this scene", you know, which is because he's reading it all. Because everyone has read it with their own point of view. Like, what...what have I got to do here? And he comes up to my office. I swear, he comes to my office and he puts the script down and he said, "You could do better." And I went, "What, did he came into my office and said, "you can do better"?" And I was like, "Oh my". I was killed. It got me. I was like, "What do you mean I can do better?" "So, Simon, you know, you can do better than this. This is 99, man. We need to get out...I need to be here for 200. All right? This isn't going to get us to 200."

I'm so. So I went rewrote it. So all my point being was every single person that you've never seen so was so important to that scene. They're all there. All their souls are there, their passion's there, their heartbreak's there. They're there, and they're all part of that scene. And just because. And it's what Tom Cruise believes in 100%, you know, the film industry.

You know, I believe that to protect those people, those unseen people, as Tim was saying, make those things, you know, the plasterer, I mean, who looks, who goes into the house and goes "oh wow, look at the plastering in here, it's amazing". "Oh, the brick work", no one does it and you know.

Lena Robinson: 01:01:42

You'll notice it.

David Brown: 01:01:45

Brickwork people will notice. But yeah, no, you know, you're absolutely right. Yeah.

Tim Carter: 01:01:51

How those things are missing from the tech Silicon Valley myth which is all built around the sole founder or the co-founders.

The founder myth is all about the individual and that pervades a lot of the discussion about AI as being enabling the individual with superpowers and intelligence as a service.

And all of this total bollocks about the fact that individuals should and could be disconnected from each other and enabled by something that has actually been built by thousands of people.

And the fact that all of the data that has been produced and put on the Internet has been produced by millions of people and then aggregated by a few hundred people but then annotated by thousands of people to make that data set in some way coherent and pre digested by the machinery. Often in places like Kenya where the wages are incredibly low. Why is it done in Kenya?

Well, because you can afford to pay them cheaply and until you've got a business machinery to pay for this, even if you're a trillion dollar company, you're cheap because you're speculating and you're speculating on other people's dime. It's that collectivism which is the joy of what I found in going into every new industry that I've gone into.

And I've been very lucky to have worked in global health and technology, mobile accounting even. I spent some years working in legal services, health services and now film and TV.

And every time the joy intellectually and emotionally that I've drawn from that is the collective knowledge and depth and the interaction between the people in those industries. Yeah, I think Simon, your point is absolutely perfect.

The fact that you can pinpoint just by one example how one person who to the outside would be an irrelevance on set, a kind of a low role is not. It's cruciality comes in everyone's story as.

Simon Mirren: 01:04:09

Valuable as everyone else is. We're all equal. You can want it any way you want it. It's just. Sorry, it's not true.

Tim Carter: 01:04:16

That's what it comes down to.

Lena Robinson: 01:04:18

I think that is the perfect line in which to finish the show. Thank you both for coming on. It's been an absolutely quite an interesting conversation for me today.

I think I've learned a bit and I think I'm hoping the listeners are going to enjoy this. So thank you both for coming along. Thank you, Dave, for co-hosting with me.

As always, I'd like to say thank you to the audience for listening and carry on being curious, everybody. See you later.

Simon Mirren: 01:04:49

Bye.

Tim Carter: 01:04:50

Thank you.