Behind the Lens: AI, Adventure, and Big Ideas with Simon Needham

Simon Needham: 00:00:05

ow at this point in time, the: 2025

Lena Robinson: 00:00:22

You're listening to WithAI FM.

Hi, Welcome to Creatives WithAI. I'm Lena Robinson, your host and we have a great guest coming all the way from the States today, Simon Needham.

He is coming in from California, I understand, and we're going to be chatting all about his life around creativity and the ad industry and communications industry. He's doing photography now and there is elements that he's doing with photography and directing around AI, which is why he's coming on today.

So welcome Simon.

Simon Needham: 00:01:02

Thank you. Good to be here.

Lena Robinson: 00:01:04

I'm really glad that you're here. We had to postpone our last recording because you were dealing with all of the stuff going on with the fire. So I'm really glad you're okay.

Simon Needham: 00:01:13

Yeah, no, it's been a hectic couple of weeks over here, over here in LA.

Certainly have a couple of friends that have lost their homes, but you know, we're, I mean people are getting back to the, you know, back to the rhythm a little bit, but some, some people are really struggling, I gotta say.

Lena Robinson: 00:01:31

Well, it's been hard to watch from over here, but hopefully we'll create some fun content for somebody to be able to dive into and think about something different. Sending all our love to everybody there. It's, it's been, yeah, been a hard time. But I'm glad you're here, so thank you for giving us the time.

We'll jump into the first question really, which is about 25 odd years ago you launched a global communications agency called ATTIK, or you co-founded it and you're now doing photography and using AI in the world of photography and so forth. And they're amazing pieces by the way.

I'd really like to understand the journey that you've taken through having been in the communications industry and how you got into sort of doing AI and photography and sitting here today talking about AI, what's that journey been like?

Simon Needham: 00:02:26

Yeah, well, unfortunately it's not 25 years, it's 40 years.

Lena Robinson: 00:02:30

Oh God.

Simon Needham: 00:02:33

Than I want to be. But yeah, we originally, myself and a partner, James Somerville, we started a company in the north of England called ATTIK.

We were 18 years old at the time. We just left Batley Art College in Yorkshire and we basically built a big agency, mainly focused on design.

But in the later years we expanded into advertising and so on. And at our peak we had 350 employees. We had six offices around the world and our clients were people such as Nike, PlayStation.

We did a lot of record industry work back in the day and we really focused on youth marketing. Toyota was one of our clients. But yeah, our main focus was targeting young people and creating content for clients that are targeting that audience.

Since then we sold the ATTIK to a company called dentsu. And after what we, after a six year earn out, we then obviously decided, well, what we're going to do now?

Because we decided we wanted to move on from ATTIK. James went on to be the Chief Creative Officer at Coca Cola. I focused more on the passions that I had in creativity, which were directing.

Just recently, as we sold the company, I picked up a stills camera, having been directing for 21 years at that point, and started really, really enjoying, almost more so than directing, taking pictures, taking stills. And I was looking at that point as well to travel a little bit more.

So I ended up working for conservation charities and humanitarian charities and traveling around the world shooting content in different parts of the planet.

Usually some of the substantially poorer and rougher areas in the world to shoot content for these charities that needed creative content or content that was more professional to be able to market themselves. Alongside that I focused in on shooting a lot of athletes, a lot of sports content, sort of more as a commercial aspect, both directing and stills.

And then probably about three years ago now, I started to sort of, AI started to crop up in my, on my radar in terms of like seeing I've always been, I think ATTIK. We were always a little bit what you might define as futurists.

Like we always were looking for what's next, what's the next hot thing coming around the corner. Side note, which I think is kind of entertaining is we at... we were, we were there before the Internet. We were.

Our agency was started before the Internet and then the Internet came along and we were very negative towards the Internet. The web. We didn't see the opportunities for creativity. We didn't see the opportunities to, you know, we always saw design as tactile.

You know, it was a print texture, it was touching, it was feeling, it was moving images around to see reflections in foil blocking and so on back in the day. And we just saw the Internet being like a really janky place to do cool design. So we..., know we just hoped it'd just go away.

We thought, "oh, you know what that we're going to. That's not. That's not going to stay. It's cracked. Yeah, exactly.

So lesson learned on that situation back in the day, when we were in our 20s, early 20s, I think, at the time, and more recently, as I said three years ago, when I started to sort of... AI started to raise its head, at least for me, and I started to see some very early image generation, I recognised that this was something really, really powerful and unique. Just seeing the actual speed and progression of the creative visuals that were being produced.

Every output that was coming from, whether it's OpenAI or whoever, whoever was putting out content Midjourney, for example... every, very version was an enormous jump on the previous version of the technology.

And as a photographer, particularly photographer at the time, more so than directing, because I just couldn't at that point. I'm not sure I could imagine video being able to be done the way it is now. So I'm like, you know what? I need to run this concurrently.

I need to really, you know, learn from last time's web failures. This time I really need to get on, I need to get in front of it.

So I spent a substantial amount of time both listening to weekly podcasts that were much broader range than just creative content, but trying to understand the industry, trying to understand the principles of what's happening. How does it work? What's the technology behind it? How's that working and how can I benefit if you like, from what's coming and how can I ensure that I'm not going to get left behind?, which, having been burnt once, it was very important to me to not get burnt a second time.

So two and a half, three years ago, I started messing around in AI, just sort of doing little personal projects and so on, and playing around a little bit, trying to understand how to use that, the technology alongside, like I said, just shooting on a regular basis, traveling for humanitarian projects and conservation projects, and shooting projects locally, whether it was commercials or whether it was stills photography.

And as it progressed, there was obviously this enormous pushback, which right in the beginning of it, I was all on board about everybody's ripping off everybody's content, this technology is taking images from all over the...I mean, in every corner of the planet.

It's pulling images in to utilise as data, to be able to then recreate data.

And I was on board with that originally, but I recognised that my economic side was like, yes, it's not right, right now, but at the end of the day, it's coming whether we like it or not. I don't think there's nothing stopping. I didn't see anything stopping this, you know, and it's fast.

Lena Robinson: 00:09:18

I mean, you and I have lived through, like you said, we've lived through the 'dot com boom', we've lived through the Internet really coming into its own. And then social media came along and then this like, I have never seen anything move this fast.

Simon Needham: 00:09:33

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, the performance of the, I mean there's been, you know, like the live action Sora, for example, you know, the speed that, that came from nowhere to be in what it is now is just mind blowing. And of course, now we're ahead of that. Google's killing it right now with, in terms of video production.

So the, the whole thing's just happened so quickly. And you know, I think that there's been a lot of pushback from many people that even I, you know, I know a lot of creatives that were.

And it's still, I think we're still in that situation where there are, I'm guessing, but 50% of the creatives are still very anti-AI. You know, I think that, you know, there's this idea of, you know, copyright infringement and so on, that that is a legitimate concern.

But at the same time, it's like you can't stop using tools because of your core beliefs where if you still want to have a career moving forward, you know, if you still want to have a legitimate career in an agency or something, then you are, I think that, you know, 95% of the agencies are going to require you to be able to use this, these tools. So I think at that point it was like, okay, well, I just wanted to get in ahead of it.

I wanted to make sure that as this transitions, which it is, I'm able to be as good an AI photographer. And I'm, I use that word loosely because it's, you know, I mean, I don't want to propose that I'm, you know, I can, I'm a decent photographer, AI.

It's almost like you just need to utilise the tool well enough to get some pretty good results. I'm not saying it's really complicated because it's...as a photographer, you, there is more of an obvious sense of creativity in your work.

You know, you are there, you are, people are there. You're in a space, you are controlling the lights, you are determining where the light lands, what light it is, how your exposures are.

There's so many aspects to it.

With AI, you've got this idea of a prompt and then you know, manipulating that prompt and developing that prompt and playing around within that image to edit certain little pieces of it. And it certainly is a very different approach to creativity. And you know, I personally feel like, well, is it really creativity or am I just good at.

And I'm not. One thing I'm not good at is words. I consider myself particularly strong visually, but as weak verbally word, words wise.

So you know, for me, okay, today.

Lena Robinson: 00:12:30

You're doing okay today. Brings me to a question I was going to ask actually, just brought up...so you've got, you've got two ways of doing things.

You've got the traditional way of doing your photography and creativity in general actually, or you can go down the AI route.

Would I be right in surmising, and you can tell me whether you agree with me or not, that the thing that still has to be there in order for the quality to be phenomenal is the vision that the creative person has in the first place. Doesn't matter whether they're doing a traditional photography route or they're doing an AI photography route, the vision has to be there first. Right?

Simon Needham: 00:13:13

Yeah, that's actually a really good question and something that I've dealt with in terms of, you know, if. I mean I'm a sad enough person that on a Sunday I actually want to sit on my computer and start messing around in Midjourney.

Lena Robinson: 00:13:26

What's playing? Isn't it?

Simon Needham: 00:13:28

What's that? I love it. It's like playing, it's like painting like, you know, it's just a creative outlet for me.

And I do come to the computer sometimes and I'm like okay, well what am I doing? You know, where's the...what's my inspiration? Where's my sort of creativity?

And I think that in that, in that respect sometimes I'm just testing the machine and seeing how far we can go with typography, you know, how far can we go with graphic design, sort of contemporary looking type posters and so on. And then other times it's amazing, absolutely 100% image based. I think that it ultimately, the ideas still come from sort of like references from.

Well, what do I want to play around with today?

Or maybe the day before I had an idea that I want to try and create some sort of image that you know, I didn't necessarily know that I'd be able to achieve.

And then there's still this sort of like, it's almost like moving all the pieces around within the technology to try and get the result you're trying to get. It's you know, It's. It's like 20 dials that you dial up and down to ultimately land on that image that you're trying to achieve.

But, yeah, I think, you know, I mean, for example, from my perspective, if I'm trying to create imagery and so on, I'll be like, well, I've got somewhat of an idea, but I do need inspiration, as you know, I'm sure a lot of creatives do, you know, whether back in the day we were flicking through books, right? Design books, you know, you'd flick through. "Oh, that's kind of cool. That gives me an idea." It's the same thing now.

I don't think I'm doing anything different from that.

Whether it's going into, as an example, Midjourney's previously created content, that there's a whole library of content, you know, and you can type in the word and it'll bring up all that content that has been generated with that word associated with it. Or there might be Pinterest, for example.

You know, you go to Pinterest, and there's a lot of other sites as well, similar to Pinterest, where you can, you know, get inspiration for ideas and so on. But, yeah, I think the core principle still stands. I don't think that's particularly changed.

Lena Robinson: 00:15:36

And I agree. It's a question that I've been...well, sort of a question...I've been having with myself, but also starting to bring up with other people as well, which is, when people are worried about the copyright infringement. I sit there, is it copyright infringement necessarily, or is it inspiration?

Because there's a reason why, if you look at things like, you know, there were artist movements, there was cubism, there was surrealism, there was realists, there was, you know, there was all these different types of movements.

They were being inspired by each other still creating original pieces and work and so forth, but they were looking around to see what other people were doing, taking a note of that and creating, is why there were movements. Isn't it just the same thing with AI just doing it faster?

Simon Needham: 00:16:28

That's a conversation about, in past conversations is like, I mean, are we not all just LLMs that are essentially our own individual LLMs and, you know, we're pulling information and content from all?

Every, you know, every art gallery we walk into, every book we flick through is every piece of inspiration we get, essentially, is feeding the result that we're looking to create. So it's not as overt and as straightforward as where we are at the moment with generating AI.

But certainly, I think you could argue some of the principles are very similar. Of course, if you specifically say, I want to recreate the Mona Lisa, then you're going to be able to recreate the Mona Lisa. But I could do that.

Well, I'm not sure I could do that, but I could certainly attempt to do that with paint and a canvas and still end up recreating some representation of the Mona Lisa. Right. So, yeah, I mean, I'm definitely what you might define as a pro AI individual relative to.

But I do try and consider the sort of both sides of the coin. You know, I do try and accept that there are, there are a lot of negatives as well as positives.

There's some substantial amount of dangers that we've got to overcome and will continue to. But I think that's the same with every single technology that's ever happened in the world. You know, there's always been the pros and cons to it.

Lena Robinson: 00:18:06

I mean, like anything, you know, any technology can be used well, or be abused. You know, you know, just about every piece of technology out there can go one way or the other, I'm guessing.

Which kind of brings me onto the thought of impact. What are you seeing at the moment, the biggest impacts are on creativity in general. And I'll ask you a question about creativity in a minute.

But the creative. Creative industry in general. But then more specifically on the photographic industry, like, where are you seeing the biggest, both positive and negative impacts?

Simon Needham: 00:18:49

I just posted something just fairly recently that was one of the impacts of it. So I actually just created just a...I mean, the, the sick thing is that I created a video in probably an hour using Midjourney and Runway ML.

Lena Robinson: 00:19:08

Oh, Runway. Yep.

Simon Needham: 00:19:09

I forget sometimes the name. There's so many tools. I know. I basically produced a video that was...I'm not sure...maybe almost a minute long. Wildlife kind of feel to it, you know, sort of global earth sort of imagery, and put that whole thing together, including the music. And I mean, I didn't put typography on it, mainly because it tends to not get distributed as much in social.

But it took me an hour to put this whole thing together. And. And the...the images were pretty nice. I mean, they were.

You know, if I'd have got those in real life, I would have been pretty proud of those images. Well, very proud of those images. And so it. It's this.

It becomes sort of a challenge to sort of like, say, well, why even bother doing real filming and real photography when I can create this level of content? You nnow, well, like, what's the point? And, and this is something I wrote in the social was basically, I...I started to sort, because this has been my challenge is like, am I losing my passion for photography? Because I can just sit here and produce it, you know, without any drama whatsoever. And the reality is, particularly with like. And I'm very.

I love the wildlife photography. I mean, I love humanitarian photography. I love the fact that we can do some good for charities and so on, but the wildlife thing, you know, there's a passion for being able to sit in front of a lion and photograph. You know, there's something really special about that, and that, that comes down to what, what the difference is for me right now between photography and AI, is this idea of...it's the adventure involved in the photography and the truth behind that photography and capturing that moment in photography that you can create in AI, but it's not personally the same result. You don't get that same. "Oh, my God. You don't know what went behind this shot. Like, it took us four hours to get to this location. It was hot as hell, it was windy, There was dust in the air. We had to creep up to this animal.We had to sort of lay on the ground for an hour and a half, and finally it took a drink out of the water and we caught that moment." Right.

And there's something to be said for the journey, if you like, of that capture, relative to sitting on my computer literally for an hour and producing a video that would have taken probably three months to do, you know, in real life, if you like.

I have a shoot coming up this weekend where we're doing some fashion stuff, and it's the same kind of thing. There's a lot more. I feel like there's just so much more pressure. But the joy at the end of the result is much higher, too. It's you. It's a much...it's much more emotive doing it for real than it is computer.

Lena Robinson: 00:22:13

Now, that doesn't come through in the..what you're producing, do you think? I...I...my gut tells me "yes".

Simon Needham: 00:22:21

It's a good question. And, and I want to say "yes", because obviously I'm doing all that effort, putting all that time and energy in.

And, you know, I do hear this on, in comments and so on, in terms of, like, "well, you can tell there's just no feeling behind the animal's eyes, or you can". And I'm like, "well, if I'd have told you that this was like, just some video I shot, you'd be like, "wow, this is amazing. The lion looks amazing.""

ow at this point in time that: 2025

Lena Robinson: 00:23:05

Right.

Simon Needham: 00:23:05

Okay. A lot know.

I mean, the stuff that I'm putting out occasionally, and I'm doing it just to see the result, that's that I'm getting from people's comments. And the comments are, "this is the...these great shots. Wow, nice job"... blah, blah, blah, whatever.

On the flip side, if I open up saying this is AI, they go, "oh, it's really nice, but it doesn't have soul. You know, it hasn't got the realistic feeling that it would have if it was a real animal or real situation".

honestly, at the beginning of: 2025

Lena Robinson: 00:23:55

Some of those, it would be like the taste. I mean, like the taste test that people have around Coca Cola and Pepsi and so forth. Half the time they can't, they don't know the difference.

When they do a blind taste testing. It's probably going to be the same with a lot of. I mean, I think what will. This is.

I don't want to say it's a prediction, but it's kind of a prediction. I think what will happen is that you will get people. There's art and then there's fine art. Right? The fine art comes down to the, well, this is my opinion that you can go, you can go to something like the Affordable Art Fair, like I did a few years ago. Nothing wrong with the art there.

But there was only one piece in the entire place that I would have taken to go into my art gallery. Only one. There were thousands of people, people and pieces being represented there. So you've got IKEA style art, then you've got fine art.

The question is, and I guess this is possibly the same with AI and the photographer going out, is, is it...is this something in what's being created between fine, fine art photography, which is what you're doing predominantly from what I've seen, and you're...and the stuff that you're producing on AI, do you think that's kind of the differentiator maybe?

Simon Needham: 00:25:31

I would say that people put more value in the idea that you were there taking a real photograph of a real animal.

Lena Robinson: 00:25:39

Yeah.

Simon Needham: 00:25:41

Because there, there is, you know, there, there's a substantial amount more effort going into a...an international, two international flights to get there and then spending 14, 15 days on the road to find those particular shots and going through challenges that you go through, and the time that you sit on your arse in the dirt waiting and, you know, all the rest of that stuff, there's absolutely, like, a value in that. And I think we. We recognise and respect that. I think with regards to fine art...I...I think AI has a place in fine art as a column.

It's like, you know, Cubism or whatever else. It's a...you know, we've got this column that's...that's AI Art. And I...and I don't sort of discount the value of that because I think, you know, and again, I don't being so predictable, but, you know, it's in the eye of the beholder. Right. It's like if you get a joy out of looking at a piece of content, irrelevant of what it is, it can be a blue canvas. I'm struggling to understand that, but it can be a blue canvas. Right. If that's your joy and you take, you know, absolute pleasure from looking at it and you feel something from it, then there's, there's no...I'm not sure that you...you know, I always...I always question how somebody can define something good from something bad in art.

You know, it's sort. I mean, apart, but saying that, you know, I mean, I want to say apart from like a kid's sketch, but if you flip that and said it was by so and so, all of a sudden, it's a magical piece of art. You know what I mean? I don't know whether there's, there's really a way of sort of determining good from bad.

Unless, I mean, from my perspective, if somebody can paint a real, a photograph of you, paint you, and it literally looks like a photograph of you, and...and they can do that. To me, that's just a level of talent that's unbelievable. At the same time, somebody would turn around and say, well, no, this is better. And it's a few splashes of paint on a canvas.

So I think AI has a place in art, but it's a column along with all the other columns.

Lena Robinson: 00:27:55

I'm in agreement with that. Because you may have, I think we've had this conversation. I have an artist in my art gallery that is an AI artist.

He knows how to do the other mediums, as many other mediums as well. But I definitely agree with you in that it's what's being produced that is whether or not it's outstanding, not how... it is just a tool.

Just like a paintbrush or a sculpting knife or whatever the thing is that's being used to create art. I do think that is a column.

Simon Needham: 00:28:32

Yeah, for sure.

Lena Robinson: 00:28:34

Definitely a column.

Simon Needham: 00:28:35

Does it bring joy? Is it emotive? Is it something that you want to look at every day? You know, I mean, I'm not sure it's that simple, but certainly it's...what is it that turns you on in terms of art? And if, if that, if AI art turns you on, then that's great. I don't...why would we, why are we so sort of, you know, it's almost like political, you know, the politics about, you.

Lena Robinson: 00:29:02

I know, and it's just fear. Yeah, definitely fear.

Simon Needham: 00:29:07

And I, and I obviously, through my journeys continually get those comments from people, you know, and the, I think that the criticisms a lot of the time are fear based criticisms.

I understand it, but like I said at the same time, I mean, for, if I could encourage people that are not sort of looking into this at this point, I think that from the point of view of if you want to, if you want a career in, in commercial advertising, in design and so on, you really don't have an option but to get your head around the tools that are out there, you know, and then ultimately there's a lot of tools that are, that do have copyright that you, you can use, that are commercially viable and they will stand behind you if there was any trouble. And again, it's not, it's not a sort of a one stop shop. It's kind of like the tools are there to help you be innovative yourself.

It's not necessarily like you just press a button, you get a logo and you move on. It's kind of like, okay, you press a button, you get a bunch of logos of those, one might inspire you just the way you were looking through Pinterest to come up with an idea for yourself. It's not always just sort of a start to finish process, you know, it's a tool within that process at the moment at least.

Lena Robinson: 00:30:29

Which kind of is an interesting thing that the tool point I think is one that I've talked to so many of the people, guests coming onto the show and people that I've, you know, know in both the commercial creative industry and, and the, in the fine art side of things as well. And it comes down to also which is about upskilling, I think the, the need to learn the craft of the prompt.

You know, like what, what's that gonna, I mean that's gonna impact hugely on the creative industry. What does that look like in sort of like three to five years time?

Like what is, what's the industry gonna look like when it comes to things like prompting and where are the artists coming from and like employing people like what is it, three to five years out? What's that looking like, do you think?

Simon Needham: 00:31:28

I mean, certainly talking from a commercial perspective in the creative industries, it's obviously it's already having a large impact on the agencies.

You know, it's starting to, if I can do, if I can produce a film in one hour and a client wants a film that's kind of similar whatever they were looking for and we can do that in one hour and then somebody else is like, well, it's a three month shoot and we're going to travel the world and we're going to do this, this and this. You know, it starts to sort of question how profitable can agencies be moving forward and where is the opportunities to make money.

And so I think that there's a lot of questions that are floating in the air right now and everybody's kind of running around going well, "where are my windows of opportunity?"

Because right now, you know, some agencies are still, for example, in branding terms, still designing logos as we designed them ten years ago, five years ago.And other agencies are way ahead of the game and they're knocking out, you know, 100 logos, getting, pulling 10 that they like, getting into the client with those. And again in a morning, client going well, "I like the way this one's going" and then digging into that one and creating a logo from there.

And it's taking them, instead of it taking them two months to create, it's taken them, I mean, I'm being generous when I say two weeks, you know, and so there's an opportunity to charge the two months but only work the two weeks, you know, so then it becomes absolute, actually more profitable for agencies in the short term, longer term. I think that there's going to be, obviously there's going to be an enormous shift.

I think as the tools get better, the, the content is going to get better and then it's going to come down to...and it already is I think, a great art director from a not so great art director. And we are going to be art directing a lot more than creating.

Yeah, I'm sure we'll still be dragging stuff into Photoshop and tweaking it and messing around with it, but then you're dragging into Photoshop and you're using the AI tools in Photoshop, then, you know, so it's almost like that whole process is potentially from start to finish going to be AI enhanced at least.

And then you're going to be, you know, I mean, we're noticing now that strategy is starting to sort of take a little bit more of a backseat and planning than it used to. I think clients are more savvy, getting to be a little more savvy now, and so that's becoming more of a challenge.

So I think three to five years....the question to me is as a...commercially at least, is how do agencies make money in this world, in this new world, where are the opportunities, where's the money? How are directors going to work in this new world? As you mentioned, how are photographers going to work?

And I think that it's going to be a really good question because if I can produce an image for a client with their product on a model in any environment that they want it to be shot at, for example, a bikini, a bikini line that wants bikinis on a beautiful girl on a, on a, you know, a stunning paradise beach, even today we can do that without leaving the computer. In three to five years it's going to be like a push of a button almost.

So that means that these photographers that are doing product photography, I'm not sure there's going to be necessarily a need for that.

Only because the cost of that shoot, flying to Hawaii, for example, taking three, four models with you and it's a, you know, 10 day shoot and all the stuff that goes with it, make parts and everything else that's involved, the travel, the accommodation and everything, you know, you're talking about a few hundred thousand dollars and all of a sudden, you know, you've got these guys that, that are AI guys that can basically knock out that same shoot in. Let's just be generous again say, let's say it takes them a week just of their time. One guy, two guys maybe.

It's like, what does that mean for the industry in general?

And that's why I think that it's going to be really important for all creatives to stay on the front edge of this, you know, to stay in the front edge, because what, you know, there's going to be less and less opportunities for almost what we might define as 'real work'. 'Real', you know, certainly as a photographer, director. It's going to get more and more challenging.

You know, we can, I think at the moment, even, even celebrities now, if we're doing like, for example, we've been developing some stuff where we can take a celebrity, let's call it 'Brad Pitt', for example. And at the moment, when you go to Japan, you know, 'Brad Pitt' might do a quiet shoot in Japan with a, you know, watch or something, some brand, and obviously he's flying to Japan or they're flying here, they're taking him to studio and they're doing all that stuff. Don't need 'Brad Pitt' anymore to do that. We got it. We can do that.

We can have 'Brad Pitt' with his knuckles under his chin, looking cool, with a cool watch on, in whatever background we want. And honestly, you wouldn't know it wasn't 'Brad Pitt'. There's just no difference today.

You know, it takes a little more work today because it's a lot, there's a lot more of a workflow involved in that. Yeah, but you asked three to five years. I mean, I think it's, it's a, it's done. I don't, I don't know. I don't see how it's not just going to be inherently AI, you know, I mean, obviously there are going to be opportunities and circumstances where you do need to do things for real and, you know, experiential events and so on are going to be, you know, still a thing.

I think there'll be more reasons for brands to be going out to people and showing product and experiencing the product and connecting with the product. You know, think that those types of areas might expand still and, you know, with the technology, it might be that those, those events could be more and more and more exciting, you know, because of VR and so on.

And, you know, at that point, maybe they're handing out what are essentially basic simple glasses that you can wear and in this amazing environment, I mean, who knows what's coming, you know, three to five years from now. But I think VR/AR are certainly two areas that are just going to continually push out and just be more and more amazing.

I mean, we're in the, we're scratching the surface. What we've, I mean, from my perspective, what we're five years in on AI and what...imagine projecting five years from when...five years ago, the, that we could produce films in AI that you wouldn't know the difference. It's like "holy shit". You know, what does that mean? In fact, you ask in five years from now? Well, it's almost like the sky's the limit in some sense.

And I don't think it's for people to be fearful. I think it's for people to be proactive and to actually make a move into it and understand that it's...what it is and what it can do, and add it to your arsenal of tools, add it to your arsenal of skills to be able to actually have that in your back pocket. As agencies shift and grow and change that you are at the front end of that, just in the same way as if you're a great typographer, you can design amazing fonts, then design amazing fonts in AI, do whatever's the front edge of that to remain relevant.

Lena Robinson: 00:39:21

I think the keeping on the front foot with it all and learning more and being curious, I think is going to be key. And your point that you made about the increased need of art direction, and I think curation is part of that as well.

Like you're talking about Pinterest. Pinterest is a place where things are being put together and curated to come up with ideas and thoughts and what have you.

And I think roles within the commercial agency industry, the creative industry. I think, I suspect that they're going to move. Like, who was important before is possibly not going to be as important moving. I mean, you and I have worked in that industry a lot. We understand that the hierarchy of who's important, you know, the creatives are always the people that are. Um...but at the same time, I think there is going to be those people that can, you know, there'll be people that will come out of the woodwork that are just great at being able to create the prompt. You know, those people that were good...like, I was talking to somebody about this yesterday and I'm loving using it. I'm not, Not using it for any artwork, but I'm definitely using it for thoughts and ideas and creativity. Particularly with ChatGPT. I'm getting really good at the prompting.

The reason I think I'm reasonably good at it is for years, having to brief creatives on exactly what it is that I want has actually set me up to be really reasonably okay at doing the prompting. And it's like, will there be a...I don't know, will there be a shift or a movement of people within the hierarchy? What do you think?

Simon Needham: 00:41:11

I think you're bang on, on that. I think that the way you communicate, the way that we communicate with LLMs, is is...and the results that we get from those comes down to great briefing. You know, like you said, like the way that a creative director briefs his creative guys is 100, you know, has a substantial result on the outcome.

So if, if he's giving the creative guys great direction, he's maybe even giving a mood board, he's maybe giving them sort of like "imagine if it was this" and just setting that scene for the creative and the designer, then the outcome tends to be much more on the mark in terms of getting the result that they were looking for and potentially even inspires the creatives to be even more creative.

So to that I think the guys that can communicate well and instead of talking to a group of creatives or a creative or whatever it is that you're briefing, you're now briefing an LLM to be able to knock out the content that you're looking for. And if you give the LLM a great brief, you're going to get a great result more and more as, as we develop O3, which is coming out from OpenAI is. I mean I can't even imagine what that's going to be like to play with. But certainly, you know, this idea of getting good results.

I, I'd been advised working with a few companies in marketing companies, design companies, branding companies, company called co op.

We would been working together for a while and you know that that was one of the things that we, I experienced with them in the early days was just one of the, one of the guys there was like, well I just asked it to give me a ?? I can't remember exactly now, but it was just, I just asked it to give me a description of a project, of us, of an idea. And I just gave it a sentence and it came out and it was rubbish. Well, if you gave me that sentence I'd come out and give you something rubbish.

You know, this guy just never been on an LLM. He didn't know. He had not played the ChatGPT, he didn't understand how to communicate with it.And you know, after a couple of back and forths now this guy's a master at it.You know, I mean he really is, you know, he's a, he really is able to communicate at high level with chat, which is one of his tools now, and get phenomenal results because it's kind of like there was a "aha!" moment where you're like "oh, I get it".

So the more I communicate with it and give it really clear instructions and even inspire it because you know that's where we're at right now, we can inspire these LLMs to give us phenomenal results and even the tone that we communicate with then will change the results.

So you know, I think that to your point is talk the creative directors, if you like, the people that have an ability to communicate clearly and add inspiration and creativity to their prompts, are going to get better results.

Lena Robinson: 00:44:34

Yeah, I think so. I think kind of ten years out, I think it's. I, I was going to ask you about what does 10 years look like?

You know, so five to 10 years, I'm not sure we can predict. Do you. What's your thoughts on that? Far out. I mean it's going to be...

Simon Needham: 00:44:53

I think ten years from now, I mean the world's going to be a different place. That's that. I mean that I think we can feel fairly confident that ten years from now the world's going to be different place.

I mean I, I extend out into things like robotics, which you know, even now are starting to sort of like show their face a little bit. Ten years from now we're gonna, there's gonna be so much involved in robotics agent. I mean we're projecting agents this year as one of the big things that that's coming out. So you have your own personal agent that can book travel for you as they use as a great reference tool to what an agent might do for you. I think by the end of this year we probably might have legitimate agents that can actually do these things for us.

It's almost like having your own personal assistant that knows everything about you and is able to do things just from a prompt, you know, like, "build me a website", "book me a flight", whatever it might be, you know, basically a personal agent. It's not there yet. Everybody's talking about it right now, but it's not quite there yet, I don't think.

But in ten years from now, I mean there was a projection last year about this idea that, you know, you better get good at pickleball because there's really not much else to do. And it's kind of scary because first of all can't stand pickleball.

Lena Robinson: 00:46:15

I don't even know what it is.

Simon Needham: 00:46:17

It's basically tennis with less, less activity. I just always imagine old people playing pickleball. I know, I know some people are going to be like "that's it's the best game since Sliced Bread". But anyway, the point is, you know, we're going to have a lot more free time on our hands and, and I think that is, that is feasible, you know. There's going to be less jobs in general. So what do we do? You know, it's a really good...

Lena Robinson: 00:46:48

Which is interesting for creativity because one of the things, and hopefully you'll agree with me on this, is that, one of the things I personally feel as a, as an artist, a creative photographer myself, I need head space to be able to be truly creative.

No matter what the tool is that I'm using, whether it be my camera or my phone camera or I'm painting or I'm using pastels, whatever, to truly be creative, I need headspace. And I'm wondering if clients are going to really find this difficult.

But paying for our downtime is what gets the right creativity, the right prompt, the ability to ask for what it is that we want to. Like, if you're under stress, writing a creative brief is really difficult because part of it is the way in which you, you know, put it together and prompt it, but also the vision that you need to have in your head in the first place of what you're trying to get to. Because writing a creative brief with no vision is really difficult. Yeah, it's really difficult.

Simon Needham: 00:47:50

I think definitely there's, there's going to be, there's always going to be space, I mean, certainly for the next ten years for creative people with creative vision.

You know, it's certainly always going to be an opportunity for those people to continue to have that. And originality is, you know, essentially...although, again, that's another conversation I've had about originality is, you know, there are innovators and there are individuals, humans that can, do just come up with great ideas, just outstanding ideas, you know, whether that's just that it's the right mix of previous ideas that have put together to inspire a great idea. And they're just great at connecting the dots, you know, whatever it might be.

I think there's always going to be that requirement, certainly in the next ten years for that type of person.

Lena Robinson: 00:48:40

But, yeah, I mean, there's always going to be, I think the outliers, like the Salvador Dalis that pushed innovation, you know, even Disney, like when Disney and Salvador Dali came together and created a film, One of the most amazing things.

I think what is interesting about those kind of people is they're on paper and what has gone before is what the AIs and the LLMs are working on. Right. The interesting thing about the outliers is they're the ones that will come up with something that somebody has never, ever done before.

The crazy, the weird, the odd the whatever. Those type of people, I think will always keep pushing the originality boundary, I think.

Simon Needham: 00:49:30

So that's a great statement and a great sort of conversation piece because I would suggest possibly that you just mentioned Disney and Salvador Dali coming together and creating a film. I mean, given the LLMs are going to be, you know, doctorate level, they're going to be, you know, smart, hellishly smart. What I mean, what if you put your prompting "Imagine if Salvador Dali and Disney came together and we wanted a film", you know, I mean, Salvador Dali is, you know, left field for sure, and he's got like wacky creative stuff, but, you know, five years from now, can't LLMS necessarily, if we ask him to go that direction, imagine if you were slightly mentally, you know, slightly. Imagine that you're on drugs and you were mentally disabled and you were. Whatever...and, and, and then put that with Disney and what, "Write me a script for a film relating to Mickey Mouse", you know, like, maybe in five years time that LLM might kind of get what you're trying to say and just go off on a tangent and do some wild crazy, you know, I mean, I think that's the thing is we...I don't know whether I'm...maybe I'm overestimating the future and how LLMs might pan out, or maybe it might be the case where, you know, once we've got ASI, which is basically this idea that we've got AI, that is superior knowledge, intelligence to humans, then at that moment, what do we do then? You know, once we've got these?

Once we've got these technologies that can sort of outperform humans in every single aspect, you know. And I know it's very hard for humans because, like, well, we're the best. You know, there's nobody smarter than us and we created this thing, so we must be smart.

But then if this thing becomes smarter than us, are we ever going to accept that? You know, and if it, you know, it's a reality. I just find it...I'm not, I'm not pro/against whatever. I just, I love the...how exciting that think, that thought is. How dangerous. Of course, yeah. But certainly how exciting that is that a machine can outsmart us in every way, shape or form.

Lena Robinson: 00:51:56

I think because I was thinking about this the other day and one of the things that I, I find...and I haven't come up with the answer for this yet or not. The reality is, is that everything to date that AI is using has come from the humans. So, technically, all it's able to do is collect all the stuff humans have come up with. They're not making better, they're making what came from the humans in the first place. They're just doing it faster, aren't they?

Well, or are they just collating or are they doing the...I mean, effectively it's crowdsourcing, isn't it?

Simon Needham: 00:52:41

Well, I know what you're saying, but here's the thing, right?

So if I....what, what we can start, what AI can do now is it can process, you know, a super intelligence will be able to process things at the speed of light. You know, we'll have, we'll have come up with solutions to age old problems in a matter of a month or weeks or something like that. Because it's able to process so many different aspects of, of mixes.

So if we've got like a whole bunch of ideas, it, why can't it develop new ideas from those ideas just by mixing all those things together and pointing out things? It's the same as biology. Biology, I think, is going to be one of the big changes in AI, you know, because you know, it is able to process all these biological questions or challenges that we've had for years where they keep talking about, you know, it take us 30 years to just test if this would work out as opposed to 30 days, which now AI is capable of doing. So it is developing new theories and new solutions which we have been unable to achieve.

Like super intelligence is just so exciting in terms of what could happen. So if it can do that in biological areas, why couldn't it do it in creative areas too?

Lena Robinson: 00:54:10

Yeah, that's true. I mean it takes us off onto an area that obviously isn't for creators of the AI, but the health, you know, health and wellbeing.

There's going to be so many areas AI is going to be able to help us with. But I think AI I think is one of those things that it is hard to predict in a lot of ways what the future is going to hold.

But at the same time, to your point, it's an incredibly exciting future. Kind of rounds up our conversation.

I guess today we're kind of heading towards, I was just looking at the time, we're heading towards the end of our, of our catch up.

But is there anything that you're looking forward to in the next few years that you think like that's where I'm going to be heading with what I'm doing with photography and AI. Is anything specifically that you're kind of moving towards?

Simon Needham: 00:55:12

I mean, I say I've been thinking about that. Certainly a question that is like, well, "what the hell I'm going to be doing in the future?".

I think, you know, as much as I can, I want to continue the path that I'm on. I like running two paths.

I like the idea of being able to, you know, continue to try and improve my abilities with the tools that are available at the moment.

Although as they get more complex, it gets more challenging for me because I certainly, as much as I consider myself a creative, I don't necessarily consider myself a technically smart individual. So that, that's starting to be a bit more challenging as, as things develop.

The idea of travel and so on is certainly something that I'll continue to do, go on these crazy adventures and experience some of the worst, have some of the worst experiences in my life and some of the best ones, and the definitely both sides of that coin.

But in terms of like the few, I mean I'm, I would say that I'm very lucky to be my age when this stuff's coming where it's not my life, or livelihood, doesn't depend on it. And that's, I don't know, that's selfish, but I don't.

It's concerning for a 25 year old to have a sense of what I don't know whether you, unlike 40 years ago, you could pretty much predict the rest of your life. You know, you could certainly say, "oh, I'm gonna, I'm in advertising now, I'm gonna work my way up and I'm gonna end up being, you know, the creative director of the agency and I'm gonna be running these accounts so on". And I think that these days...I'm not sure that that's a path anymore. I'm not sure what the path is.

I don't know whether any of us know what the path is.

And as a photographer, I really just think, because of economics, we are going to be producing more and more AI content for companies because they won't need to pay the money.

There's one thing we know is companies love making money and if they can save money by not spending big bucks on big photo shoots for automotive, for the automotive industry where they're shipping cars to another country to shoot them on top of a mountain, but actually just put a car on top of a mountain in an office and you would not know the difference. Product correct material. We've done this as well.

We've already produced product correct vehicles that we can sit on top of the mountain and you wouldn't know the difference and certainly today you wouldn't know. And certainly by the end of this year you won't know the difference.

So I think that there's a lot of scary scenarios coming up for production companies as well that are like, well, are we still film company and we're still directing. And it's like, absolutely, keep doing that, but for the love of God, run.

Start running some of this concurrently because you, you need to sort of have this in your back pocket as things shift.

Yeah, gonna be bidding things, you know, they're going to be bidding things at 50k, not 500k because, you know, and then it's not even going to be production companies per se. It's going to be AI creatives that are now directors, if you like. Yeah, storytelling is a big deal.

I think that's going to be, you know, for the time being, a really key area that people can really benefit from still, you know, if you're a great storyteller, I think you've got great opportunities to succeed. But it's not. I don't want to create fear, but I want to create an understanding that we need to retrain or up our train...up -train or whatever.

You mentioned the terminology is upskill.

Lena Robinson: 00:58:52

Upskill, yeah.

Simon Needham: 00:58:53

Moving forward.

Lena Robinson: 00:58:55

Agreed. Well, look, that's a really good place to end. A good piece of advice on, on getting upskilled. It's been a fantastic conversation.

I knew it was going to be. It was really good. Thank you. We've covered a lot of topics and subjects.

I've got one tiny question left to ask, which we're starting to ask all of our guests, which is "if you were wanting to see one particular guest on our show, have you got somebody in your mind that you'd love to see on Creatives WithAI?".

Simon Needham: 00:59:27

Well, the people I like to listen to are the guys that lead in the big industry, AI companies such as Sam Altman at OpenAI, because to be honest, those are the only people, I think that really can genuinely predict some sense of what's coming. And therefore, to me, those are the guys I love to hear because they are, they are visionaries.

Some of them, you know, video another one that's, you know, those guys are doing some amazingly visionary sort of production on tools that'll help production in the future. But for me, I just love to listen to those types of individuals that are actually within.

Like, if you guys could get somebody within OpenAI, you could get somebody within Google or whatever the large corporation it is, DeepMinds, whatever it might be, then those, those would be absolutely fascinating. To listen to. Specifically, if they're talking creative industries.

Lena Robinson: 01:00:31

I would definitely like to try and get those people on for sure. Well, look, thank you so much for your time today. It's been thoroughly enjoyable.

Thank you, Simon, so much for, for being here, giving your experiences. I think it's been really quite fascinating.

And I just say, like to say thank you to all our listeners for being here today and for to make sure that you get out there and stay curious. See you later.