May 28, 2025 • 35 mins
If the novelty of seeing AI-generated videos popping up in our newsfeeds has started to
wear off, Google has something new for you to feast your eyes on.
Last week, the AI giant released Veo 3, the latest version of its AI content generator. Its claim to fame? Veo 3 not only generates short video clips based on prompts from users, but also audio, syncing sound effects and character dialogue with the video.
That’s yet another step towards generating entire video clips solely with the use of prompts fed into a chatbot, and serves as a stark reminder of the disruptive power AI represents for the creative industries.
On this week's episode of The Business of Tech, Datacom’s Director of AI, Lou Compagnone, who last week hosted an AI Forum summit on AI's use in the creative industries, outlines how the creative sector can
embrace AI to enhance productivity, foster new forms of creativity, and address existential dilemmas.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Do you think we are in VO three?
Speaker 2 (00:02):
If you cannot tell, does it matter? Thank god for playback.
I have no idea what I'm doing. How does Tom
Cruise do this?
Speaker 1 (00:19):
We've got a lot of discuss here I go to
work against.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Thank god we aren't real.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Oh yes, the era of AI generated movie making is here,
and while it still sounds a bit awkward, we're just
getting started.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
The clips you just heard were.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
Generated by VO three and AI Video Generator, released last
week by Google. Like open ais Sora, it can generate
realistic looking video clips from text prompts, but it's claimed
to fit is that it also incorporates audio, including sound effects,
dialogue between characters, and even animal sounds, all lip synced
(01:08):
to the video. It became available to US Google vertexs
AI users on the AI Ultra subscription last week at
a cost of two hundred and fifty dollars US a month.
That's quite a lot for an amateur user, but for
pros that's actually quite affordable.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
You can see where this is going.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
AI generated adverts, short films, and, with enough computing power,
eventually feature films as well. It's just one way that
AI is set to disrupt the creative industries. This week
on the Business of Tech powered by two Degrees Business,
our one hundredth episode of the podcast, we're looking at
the sectors on the frontline of the AI revolution, from
(01:50):
journalism to photography, graphic design to filmmaking. I'm your host,
Peter Griffin, and on the Business of Tech, we dive
into the big ideas shaping digital future. My guest this
week is Lou Compagnoni, Director of Artificial Intelligence at Datacom,
the country's largest IT company with a significant trans Tasman
(02:11):
presence as well. Lou's based in Melbourne and she just
hosted two full day conferences, one in Auckland one in
Wellington on how the creative sector is embracing and sometimes
wrestling with artificial intelligence. I was at the Wellington events.
It was fascinating to hear from and talk to game developers, filmmakers, poets,
(02:33):
photographers and news media executives about how they're all grappling
with the rise of generative AI, which is giving people
unprecedented abilities.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
To create content.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
Lou, who joined Datacom from consulting firm Accenture Interactive and
has a background in user experience, design and publishing, has
seen firsthand how AI is amplifying rather than replacing human
crea activity. She'll also share the inside story of Datacom's
collaboration with the Melbourne Comedy Festival, where they built the
(03:06):
Funny Finder chatbot to help festival goers discover new acts.
If you're curious, cautious, or just trying to figure out
where AI fits in your creative world, you won't want
to miss this conversation. Here's my chat with Lou Compagnoni. Lou,
(03:31):
Welcome to the Business of Tech. How are you doing?
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Thanks for having me. I'm doing well.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Thanks, how are you great?
Speaker 3 (03:36):
It was great to see you in Wellington last week.
A stunning day at Datacom's Wellington headquarters panoramic views of
the Wellington Harbor. And that was the second of a
two part series that you hosted in New Zealand about
AI and the creative sector and how AI is being
(03:58):
adopted there, the opportunity and also the challenges that the
AI poses. So we're going to get into that, but
first a little bit about you. You have a creative
background as well. You did the same degree that I
did here in Wellington, the Institute of Modern Leaders Creative
Writing Masters. You were writing a novel. I was doing
a screenplay. Tell us a little bit about your experience
(04:21):
doing that.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Yeah, sure, So.
Speaker 4 (04:22):
I actually decided to Having done a number of years
in the tech industry, I decided to go back to
my roots. My undergrad was in creative writing, and I
used to work as a food riser.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
And I just wanted a chance to spend some time, just.
Speaker 4 (04:35):
A dedicated time for eight months, really focusing on writing,
because I was finding it hard to dip in and
out of a day job in tech and writing. So yeah,
it was just really a chance to work on a
story that had been circling around in my brain and
needed some airtime.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
It felt like a very luxurious.
Speaker 4 (04:52):
Experience to spend so much time in the creative world,
and I'm really glad that I did it.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
But like many people who did that course.
Speaker 4 (04:58):
I still have this ninety percent done novel that I
keep wanting to return to. I don't know if you're
in the same situation with your script totally.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
I still haven't produced my screenplay, so it's it's a
lifelong quest for some of us. But what an experience.
And I think really you could see that coming through
in Wellington, you know, the way that you've approached creativity
and you're a music maker as well, writing songs and
(05:26):
producing them to how this converging world is going to
have huge implications for people in the creative sector. You've
got a lot of people who are in the room
in Wellington from journalism outlets the likes of iron Z BBC.
(05:47):
You've got people there from game development companies like Pickpock,
and educational institutions at Massive University, the Creative Center at
a Mirramar which is right beside WET, a lot of
film students there. And the sense I got what they're
really saying all these great panelists was they see AI
(06:09):
as a tool to amplify human creativity and not replace it.
So you know, the students in Miramar are using AI,
but not to completely automate the process of creating a
short film or an animation. They're using it to maybe
iterate something to start out on that process. But they
(06:30):
actually want to be hands on, and it's not just
that they're being told to by their tutors saying you're
not allowed to use AI. They actually want to do that.
Is that the sense that you got as well?
Speaker 4 (06:40):
Yeah, I definitely felt like I was surprised actually by
just how positive people's attitude was towards AI in that session.
I thought we were going to get a little bit
of a balance between excitement about it and experimentation, but
also a lot of fear and talks about copyright, but
I actually found that it was more on the innovation
side of things. I also had some interesting conversations in
(07:00):
the break, not just about how people are using it
for part of their creative process, but how they're using
it to try and free them up from the admin
tasks that take them away from their creative process. So,
for example, one of the photographers I knew there who
was actually photographing the event, Stephen, he was talking about
how he's actually working on developing a series of AI
(07:20):
agents to help him with his photography business, so it
can help with things like triaging emails, invoicing, sending out
JPEGs of photoshoots and so on, because he wants to
spend time making and so that makes so much sense.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
Yeah, and Tyrone McCauley, one of the co founders of Pickpock,
the Great Wellington game development studio, he said they're really
using it to improve productivity, prototyping a game. You know,
that whole process has gone from weeks or days down
to hours. It's speeding up content creation, reducing repetitive coding work.
(08:00):
It's a way for them to explore new ideas. So
so that's I guess the story we've heard across industries
so far as that productivity story. That is the return
on investment for a lot of New Zealand and Australian businesses.
So that is starting to happen. The next phase is
(08:21):
going to be how do you use this to really
supercharge your business? And I was sitting next to a
folly artist, you know, who works with filmmakers to create
all the bang crash noises in the background. And that
is an art, you know, you're literally your timing has
to be impeccable, you have to have a really lifelike sound,
(08:43):
and there are libraries of those sorts of effects. But
I was sort of saying, something, what's going to happen
when when sort of AI can create some of these
sound effects instead of you in your folly studio banging
and crashing around. And he said, well, that's why I'm here.
I need to figure out what the future of my
particular niche in the film industry and he worked on
(09:04):
the Minecraft movie. You know, he's done some big productions
and since I got while there was positivity and optimism
in the room, there was also this sort of elephant
in the room as well as fear isn't going to
take my job. So I guess that is the big
question we You know, you talked about copyright, and I
think we sort of talked around that issue a little bit.
(09:26):
For instance, that Radio New Zealand was there, Glenn Scanlon,
who I was really interested to see what his take
on AI was, and he sort of said, well, we're
a public broadcaster. We like to give away all of
our content, so there's no point us actually trying to
block our content from being featured on chat, GPT or
perplexity because we want good quality information.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
To get out there.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
I guess the imperative is a little bit different for
those sorts of companies, you know, like my publisher in
znme that you know, the business model is very much
on copyright being maintained and being able to monetize that content.
Speaker 4 (10:03):
Yeah, I think the big game changer in terms of
AI with that is really generative AI. So I think
there's a difference between consuming content and using that content
to create something new. And that's really a lot of
the concent that I've had from creatives that I know,
whether they're illustrators or writers, is there's a difference between
someone finding a link and looking at what they've made,
(10:25):
or reading their work and consuming their sort of style
to create something of their own. That's really where the
concerns are coming from.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
Yeah, and there's no really good answer to that. Arguably
a lot of when it comes to journalism, a lot
of that's already been scraped, and there are some deals
being done. So if you can negotiate a deal with
the likes of open Ai, as some publishers have done,
that's a potential revenue stream. But in terms of creating
(10:53):
a movie or a song that is in the style
of a well known artist, that's a really tricky you on,
isn't it, Because where does that line blur between paying
homage to an artist that you like and literally copying
their style and in monetizing that yourself.
Speaker 4 (11:10):
Often and it can be beyond your control, Like there's
even I saw a really interesting article recently with David Sidaris,
a writer who I really like, and he was saying
what happens if after I die, my niece decides to
upload all of my content into something and anyone can
write in my style. So I kind of wonder what
that's actually going to do to the creative process as well.
Will this actually stop people from creating freely or will
(11:33):
it stop people from sharing their content with the world.
I just think there's so many big questions around it.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
One of the other interesting things that Tyrone from Pickpock
said when he talks to his staff about the you know,
the potential fears they have around AI is skill atrophy.
So there's this sense that particularly around coding, where you know,
we're seeing with the new version of Claude that just
came out this week and that apparently the coding capabilities
(12:01):
are just insane, you know. So we are seeing entry
level sort of coding jobs being automated at a very
rapid pace. So I guess there's concern that for people
entering the industry, what are they going to actually do
because some of those skills they're not going to need.
People further up who are a bit more experienced. A
(12:23):
lot of the stuff that is a big chunker off
their work suddenly might be no longer skills that are
in demand, so you're having to reskill and retrain constantly
now in the world of AI.
Speaker 4 (12:35):
Yeah, I think there's also another issue in there, because
I agree with all of that, like will we actually
atrophy if we're not using the skills that we have
and we're kind of becoming.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
More orchestrators of the tools.
Speaker 4 (12:45):
Will we ever be able to go back to be
the actual producers of that thing we did in the
first place. But then I've also seen the flip side,
which I've seen with a lot of developers, where they
used to have an undulating day, so they used to
have sort of code that they could just do in
their slow and they used to just kick back and
put some tunes on, and then they would have sort
of more harder pieces of work, which is possibly thinking
(13:05):
about the overall architecture of something or sort of creating
something new. But now because they're using these tools, they
are always in this high value fit thinking space, And
what I've seen is actually a lot of burnout from
people because it's.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
Almost the opposite.
Speaker 4 (13:19):
Rather than their brain's atrophying, they're actually in this extremely
kind of high pressure orchestration mode all day because they're
doing five days of coding in two days. Like I
heard a story about one of our developers who did
something like eighty thousand lines of code and a weekend
or something like that. You know, this is just you're
in high productive mode. So I think that's another thing
to sort of bring to the table.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
Wow, a lot of people were there from Central Government.
The government Chief Digital Officer was there, sort of laid
out where government is taking a I very much seemed experimentation,
tightly sandboxed sort of projects. Gov GPT, for instance, came
out at Callahan in a that was a project last year.
(14:03):
Actually the day that we're at that summit that evening,
they announced that they're going to work with AWS on
an all of government app for New Zealand, which sounds
pretty exciting very early days, but you know, AI may
get a look in as part of that. What was
your sense around where we're at in New Zealand when
it comes to public sector use of AI, and in
(14:25):
particular compared to Australia market, You know, so well.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
I think it's mixed.
Speaker 4 (14:30):
I think it really depends on the agency that you're
working with. I think that there's some that I've definitely seen.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
And I'm not going to name any names for obvious reasons.
Speaker 4 (14:38):
So some that I've seen that are actually doing a
lot of experimentation, They've got lots of proof of concepts.
They're now at that next phase where they're going, actually,
how do we take this further? How do we scale
what we're doing? How do we create a sort of
AI platform or repository so that we can have multiple
agents working across up business. So there's that side of things,
and they're looking at setting up a center of enablement
(15:00):
to really start to scale. But on the flip side,
there are some agencies who are really cautious and really
risk adverse, which is understandable, and they haven't even really
taken the first steps. They haven't even really switched on
co pilot within their M three six five environment, and
it's because they're sort of worried.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
They don't want to.
Speaker 4 (15:17):
Become front page news, they know that data is not
ready and so on. So I would say there's a
mixture in New Zealand for sure, and in Australia I
think the same.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
Like certainly there are some.
Speaker 4 (15:26):
Places in Australia that are sort of some organizations that
are well ahead, they've really been using AI for a
number of years. But there's also some who kind of
think that they're really ahead with it, but when you
kind of dig into it, they're really just experimenting with
one tool. And where I think that I'm not seeing
it is actually thinking more holistically about organizations, So not
(15:48):
just one tool here and there, but what could it
mean for them as a whole government organization.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
What could they shift.
Speaker 4 (15:53):
From and too as a result of AI, and what
does that mean for their future?
Speaker 3 (15:56):
Yeah, someone from the government there come into debt. We're
really only to use you know, Microsoft Copilot at the moment,
that's the only approved tool that was corrected by the
government Chief Digital Officer. Any government agency has autonomy to
choose what AI tools that they want to use. But
I think it definitely showed that concern particularly about government
(16:18):
data going being fed into larger language models and potentially
exposing sensitive information. I know having talked to people that
that is a huge concern. But you know, they're laying
the groundworks. They've done the public sector guidance on use
of AI. They've got an AI roadmap for business and development.
Ministry of Culture and Heritage was there they were about
(16:40):
to do a consultation on use of AI in the
creative industry. So it feels like in New Zealand they're
sort of laying the groundwork, going through all of those
processes to make this a responsible approach to doing AI.
I guess the question is is when are we because
this is moving so quickly and other countries are adopting
it to really good effect, when are we going to
(17:01):
start accelerating our use of it? And I guess that's
where you come in with Datacom. You've got the confidence
and the people and the experience with twenty plus years
of developing AI to help them do it.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Yeah, certainly.
Speaker 4 (17:14):
And I think that that's what we're trying to help
to balance within government organizations and all organizations. Really is
that balance between governance and having the right guard rails
in place, but also experimentation and innovation. And I actually
think it's possible to do both at once, and I
think that one can help the other. So, for example,
when we're helping people to think about governance develop policies,
(17:38):
I think actually is really helpful to also be developing
something creating a proof of concept at the same time,
because it's in creating that that you actually uncover some
of the challenges and blockers within your organization and you
start to you start to understand where the data is,
where some of the restrictions are, what other systems you're using,
and so on. So I think you're almost thinking about
having too parallel works. Streams within organizations can be.
Speaker 3 (18:01):
Helpful, and there's a lot of organizations work with data
com But interestingly, you know, in the creative space, you've
worked on a project recently in Australia with a comedy
festival using AI to help attendees or people interested in
going to the comedy festival engage with the content figure
out exactly what shows they wanted to go to.
Speaker 2 (18:25):
Took us through your.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
Approach to that because that, potentially comedy could be quite
a touchy subject there. You know, we've had lots of
discussions about freedom of speech and what's appropriate and people
being canceled in comedy and all that sort of thing,
So putting AI into the mix sort of high risk.
Speaker 4 (18:43):
It was, yeah, and we definitely had some moments, so
there was a lot of considerations with that. I guess
the reason it came about was the comedy festival. We're
getting to a point where I just had so many
events that even the big acts everyone was able to
find their comedy, but the sort of new and emerging
ones weren't necessarily getting the airtime that they required, and
people were just kind of going to all of.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
The usual shows.
Speaker 4 (19:05):
So they just wanted it as a way a different
way for people to explore what they could possibly see.
But we definitely had a lot of considerations along the way.
So one was to your point, you know, the nature
of comedy, it's not always the most PG content, So
what was it going to surface and how was that
going to reflect on both the Melbourne Comedy as a brand,
(19:25):
but also us Startacom as a brand as well. We
also really needed to consider the comedians, so we needed
to consider like were we giving sort of fair exposure
to all comedians or was it going to favor some
And we also had to be very explicit about the
role of the Funny Finder, what was it meant to
do and what was its persona And so we actually
(19:46):
did a really good co design process with comedians and
the Melbourne Comedy Festival and obviously the Data com team
to really explore that and we asked questions like, is
it funny, Should it be funny, should it be telling
jokes or should it actually just be really in formative?
Speaker 1 (20:00):
Is it a comedian as a persona?
Speaker 4 (20:03):
What we actually landed on was, I don't know if
you've been to the comedy show, but at the town
hall they have these sort of booths where you can
talk to people who know about the comedy show and
ask for advice about shows to see. They're really fun people,
They're really upbeat and really friendly.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
So we decided that is.
Speaker 4 (20:19):
Exactly the persona that we wanted it to be. They're
really nice, but they're not comedians, So we kept going
back to that thing.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
The job of the Funny Finder is not to tell jokes.
Speaker 4 (20:29):
However, given the nature of AI, there were moments when
the Funny Finder tried to become funny, and when we're
in the development and testing process sort of started to
become its own sort of comedian. So there was a
moment when we were doing some testing and it actually
started to make up comedy shows. This was obviously before release,
(20:52):
so we had to be very much going back to
that whole guideline of No, your job is to just
give information about the comedy show. We had to turn
the temperature down of the model and get it back
to its original intent, which is just to be informative.
So yeah, there was some really interesting issues to explore
on that project.
Speaker 3 (21:10):
Wow, that's fascinating where it's literally starting to it's so
powerful and innovative in its own way. It's coming up
with comedy routines and I guess you're going to get
naturally enough people prompting it to do all sorts of
crazy things. So you know that is a real risk
of alienating and you know an audience and comedians go
(21:31):
into blurry territory around racial matter and sexism and all
that sort of thing, so potentially go wrong. But it
seems like it went really well. What was the sort
of engagement with the Funny Finder, Like, well.
Speaker 4 (21:44):
We had around seven thousand queries per day. I mean,
given that this was actually quite early on, we thought
I think it was overall it was around four hundred
thousand queries that went through the Funny Finder, which we
thought was actually for a first year, quite good. We
also had really good visibility of how people were using it,
so we've got really good stats on what were the
kind of prompts that people were putting into it and
(22:06):
what was it offering in terms of information, So that
in itself is really interesting. Like we kind of expected
it would be more like I like this kind of
comedy and my friend likes this, so can you recommend
a show? But people were using it for all sorts
of things, including planning second dates, which was a surprise use.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
That's fantastic.
Speaker 3 (22:25):
So I guess you know that is that's a creative
sector example of that. But that sort of thing is
going across all the industries that you're working in, and
it's been going on for a while. It's getting better
and better the results, the information that you get from
these sorts of chatbots. I guess you know, as we
enter the agentic world, we're hearing so much about you know,
(22:48):
what's going to come next is you know, I'll be
able to tell that chatbot okay, I like the sound
of that. Book, me a couple of tickets and we'll
go off and do that on your behalf.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker 4 (22:57):
We even talked about that kind of thing as a
future faith So we kind of just wanted to deliver
the first year on just actually making sure it was safe,
that it didn't do anything Kooki that we weren't expecting,
and it just delivered on explaining the comedy show. But yeah,
in the future, we've talked about actually the ability for
it to become almost your travel planner, so it could
even have agents that go beyond booking your ticket. It
(23:17):
could also book you a restaurant that's nearby the comedy
show and audio an uber and just become sort of
your whole kind of concierge for the night. I definitely
think there's lots of ability to do that. It's just
a matter of I guess, investment and time and like
I said, just actually testing just to make sure that
everything is safe before you do.
Speaker 3 (23:35):
So that's sort of sense when you look at the
creative sector as a whole, that because creativity is seen
as the secret source of that industry that you know,
they're sort of doing peripheral things with AI around productivity
and the like, speeding things up, but are they actually
using it for the core purpose of creating new and
(23:58):
novel things. Are you seeing examples across the tasma there
off creative agencies, maybe advertising agencies that are using AI,
if not for the actual creation of the end product
that's going out on radio or TV. But that really
difficult process of coming up with interesting ideas. Are they
augmenting that process with AI?
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Yeah, I'm definitely seeing it sort of all throughout.
Speaker 4 (24:22):
You know, as designers, we think of the double diamond process,
so there's the kind of like discovery and then the
define and then the design and deliver. So I'm definitely
seeing it all throughout. So I'm actually seeing people doing
it in the research process as well, So everything from
coming up with ideas to looking at doing a discovery process,
to working out where problems are that need to be
(24:44):
solved and there's opportunities, so using AI to help with
speeding up those sorts of processes as well as actually
using it as a tool to create as well. And
some of the people that I know who are creative
are using it for amazing things. So I know someone
who's a jewelry designer and she describes the way that
she designs jewelry now like creating with words or painting
(25:05):
with words to do some of her designs. So she's incredible.
If you weren't a jewelry designer, you wouldn't even know
how to come up with the prompts that she comes
up with. But she's shown me some of the designs
that she said just would merely would not have been
possible even to draw previously, that she's come up with.
I've also seen some interesting things with creatives where they're
actually giving creative voices to large language models, which is
(25:28):
a really cooky twist. So I mentioned doctor Michael Kollo
when I spoke at Creative Industries because he does a
lot of experiments with large language models, and one that
he sent me last night which was quite interesting, was
he got clawed to do a spoken word poem about
its own identity.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
It was actually really beautiful.
Speaker 4 (25:45):
It was quite disturbing at times, but I thought that
was a really interesting twist on creativity that you can
actually give voice to models themselves, so that opens all
sorts of new questions.
Speaker 3 (25:55):
And that beautiful example that might have been You showed
a video off of the British Talco that invented the
AI granny to talk to scammers on the phone to
waste their time.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
I love that.
Speaker 4 (26:12):
I think that's brilliant because it is such a problem.
I know that that's something that my mum experiences a lot.
She gets lots of people scamming her, and it's really
difficult to discern for her whether it's.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
A scam or not.
Speaker 4 (26:21):
And I think it took a really creative person to
flip that on its head and to go, actually, we're
going to go after the scammers. Yeah, actually, And it
was quite funny. It was a playful way of dealing
with a problem. So I think that was one of
the things that I most liked talking about at AI
and creative industries, not just how you can use AI
as a creative tool, but also how creative mindsets are
(26:44):
needed to design AI and to think of new use
cases and innovations with AI, because I do think it
is such a different way of thinking.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
Linear thinkers sometimes struggle with it.
Speaker 3 (26:55):
A number of people commented there, and I think this,
in my experience, is so true. They see AI as
democratizing sort of some of the functions of creativity. And
you know, I've just finally just created a new website
for my own content thousands of articles over the years.
(27:15):
I've been putting it off for years because I hate
wrangling WordPress websites and getting into content management systems. And
I was just the other day, just waiting for a
conference to start. I went onto this app called Replet,
and it's an agent generator AI agent creator and was
(27:35):
able to create within two minutes just by prompting the agent.
There a website that does everything I need. It's just
a matter of porting over all of my content. And
apparently i'm reading up replet can do a bit of
code to actually automate that process as well. That just
blew my mind. So that democratization, if not off the
(27:58):
kernel of creativity can all be great novelists and songwriters,
but all the stuff that goes around it and allows
people to be more creative than they otherwise would be.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
Yeah, I definitely think.
Speaker 4 (28:10):
I mean, that's a really good side that I think
is coming out of this is really democratizing creativity. And
I think that's particularly good for small businesses who may
not have the budget to get professionals to do everything,
and they're able to get professional quality materials without hiring
a professional designer or a photographer or web developer. I
think what's interesting about that is what that means for
(28:32):
the role of creatives who are otherwise doing that work though,
And what I'm saying is a bit of a shift
in the way creative people are working and the new
roles that are emerging. So some people who are more
makers and creating things themselves are actually moving more into
creative direction. And similar to what I talked about with
developers becoming orchestrating the tools themselves, they're actually doing that.
(28:56):
So they're more doing content, actually using AI to generate
content themselves to do the editing, and they've been quite
transparent about the.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
Fact that they're using it in their processes.
Speaker 4 (29:07):
I'm also seeing people who are sort of moving into
roles like AI art directors, and I've heard this new
term recently. I'm not sure if you've heard this, called
a promptographer. That's a bit of a tongue twister, isn't it,
And so that emerged from there was a German artist
who entered a Sony photography exhibition and he actually entered
a AI generated photograph and the reason he did it
(29:31):
was not to try and sneakily win. So he won
the competition and when he was accepting the award, he
actually was transparent and said, actually, I will not take
this award.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
I used AI.
Speaker 4 (29:43):
There's a role for promptography, but we really need to
think about actually how we are transparent about what's human
made and what AI made in these processes. So I
think interesting lots of things around that democratization, but also
the impact of that on the creative industry.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
And just finally, Leu, I think you were probably talking
to and I was there, and a number of people
who are at these conferences sort of sitting at the fence.
They know they need to upskill around AI and figure
out what it means for their business. They haven't really
progressed any further yet, which sort of surprised me. In
the creative sector, I thought there would be a lot
(30:19):
more sort of jumping in feet first, what do they
need to do and what can they do to sort
of get that at least get that experimentation going, while
they're also looking at the potential to transform their business,
which is what we really want. That's where the productivity
gains and the new features and products are going to
come from. How do they sort of approach that with
(30:43):
keeping in mind it's got to be a return on
investment on this. They can't just be buying widgets and
subscriptions and it's not going anywhere that it actually needs
to stack up financially.
Speaker 4 (30:52):
I think there's almost two things to be thinking about
there's probably more than two to come to mind. So
one is just to start experimenting now rather than later.
So rather than going I'm waiting for the perfect AI
tool to help me do this, actually just to dive
into the current tools that are available and just start
playing around with what they can do. So you know,
things like if you're a designer, you might be thinking
(31:14):
about things like mid Journey, or then there's the kind
of big Swiss army knife ones like chat GPT, Gemini
is pretty amazing and Claude as well, and I think
just spend time playing with these tools every week, both
in the sort of admin things that they do as
creatives to try and make it commercial, but also even
in their own creativity just to see what's possible and
(31:35):
whether there is an opportunity for them to amplify what
they do.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
But then I also think it's.
Speaker 4 (31:41):
Important to look more at a future horizon as well,
and to sort of stay across what actually is changing
with AI and what they could shift from and to
as a result of AI. So I think that goes
to your point of actually how might it transform them,
and seat of starting from that point of well, this
is what an ideal future would look like for me,
this is how it might transform me, and then go
(32:02):
back to.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
Actually like how do I get there?
Speaker 4 (32:04):
If it is going to change, I am going to
completely pivot what I do now? What do I need
to do to get in to protect myself really to
set that in motion that ideal future.
Speaker 3 (32:14):
Excellent good advice there, Lou and hey, thanks for hosting
those sessions.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
That was.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Really thought provoking, I think.
Speaker 3 (32:23):
So hopefully we'll see our creative sector adopts dot really
get that experimenting going, and I'll put a link to
It's funny.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
Fine, it's still going.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
It's not.
Speaker 4 (32:33):
Actually we took it down at the end of the
Comedy Festival, but we may well do the same thing
next year. Not the same thing. We might even do
a slightly different thing next year. Who knows how.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
Much the technology will have moved on then.
Speaker 4 (32:45):
So yeah, not available too, But we are working on
a lot of other sort of conversational AI tools for customers.
That I mean is a use case that could be
used for so many different things as well.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
So absolutely, and I haven't seen anything like that for
a festival on this side of the TASM bit they
festival or the film festival or whatever. So I think
that whole space how you engage with and try and
get an audience convert them to buying a ticket that's
about to be revolutionized with the use of AI. Thanks Lou,
thanks so much for coming on the Business of Tech.
Great to see you, and we'll talk again.
Speaker 1 (33:14):
Great to see you too, Peter, thanks so much.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
That's a wrap for today's episode.
Speaker 3 (33:23):
If the Business of Tech are one hundredth episode, thanks
so much for tuning in and supporting the podcast over
three seasons. Off the Business of Tech really appreciate it.
Huge Thanks to Lou Compagnoni for sharing her insights and
stories from the creative optimism she's seeing on both sides
of the Tasman to the behind the scenes challenges of
(33:46):
building an AI for comedy fans. I think her advice
is pretty clear, don't wait for the perfect toolstart experimenting
now and imagine how AI could transform your work. I'm
definitely doing that. But at the Wellington AI conference, at
the cautious approach people are taking to using AI, which
I think says a couple of things. You know, there's
(34:08):
real genuine concern over quality with hallucinations, odd looking images,
you know, frankly AI slop where everything looks mass manufactured
and generic. You know, our creatives do not want to
be part of that. They're very sensitive to the feedback
from customers, which is that they don't really want AI
generated content. They value the human touch, so that's fair enough.
(34:31):
On the other hand, the using AI in their processes
to become more efficient and to boost productivity, which is
a good thing I think is the quality of AI
improves and as competitors here and abroad adopt it, the tech,
which is improving at an accelerating rate, will play a
greater role in the creation aspects of advertising, video making,
(34:55):
music making, and the like. That clearly has huge implications
for artists, for journalists, and anyone in the creative industries.
If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe and
leave us a review on iHeartRadio or wherever you get
your podcasts. I'll be back next Thursday with another episode
of the Business of Tech. Until next time, keep exploring
(35:16):
and keep creating.
Do you think we are in VO three?
Speaker 2 (00:02):
If you cannot tell, does it matter? Thank god for playback.
I have no idea what I'm doing. How does Tom
Cruise do this?
Speaker 1 (00:19):
We've got a lot of discuss here I go to
work against.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Thank god we aren't real.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Oh yes, the era of AI generated movie making is here,
and while it still sounds a bit awkward, we're just
getting started.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
The clips you just heard were.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
Generated by VO three and AI Video Generator, released last
week by Google. Like open ais Sora, it can generate
realistic looking video clips from text prompts, but it's claimed
to fit is that it also incorporates audio, including sound effects,
dialogue between characters, and even animal sounds, all lip synced
(01:08):
to the video. It became available to US Google vertexs
AI users on the AI Ultra subscription last week at
a cost of two hundred and fifty dollars US a month.
That's quite a lot for an amateur user, but for
pros that's actually quite affordable.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
You can see where this is going.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
AI generated adverts, short films, and, with enough computing power,
eventually feature films as well. It's just one way that
AI is set to disrupt the creative industries. This week
on the Business of Tech powered by two Degrees Business,
our one hundredth episode of the podcast, we're looking at
the sectors on the frontline of the AI revolution, from
(01:50):
journalism to photography, graphic design to filmmaking. I'm your host,
Peter Griffin, and on the Business of Tech, we dive
into the big ideas shaping digital future. My guest this
week is Lou Compagnoni, Director of Artificial Intelligence at Datacom,
the country's largest IT company with a significant trans Tasman
(02:11):
presence as well. Lou's based in Melbourne and she just
hosted two full day conferences, one in Auckland one in
Wellington on how the creative sector is embracing and sometimes
wrestling with artificial intelligence. I was at the Wellington events.
It was fascinating to hear from and talk to game developers, filmmakers, poets,
(02:33):
photographers and news media executives about how they're all grappling
with the rise of generative AI, which is giving people
unprecedented abilities.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
To create content.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
Lou, who joined Datacom from consulting firm Accenture Interactive and
has a background in user experience, design and publishing, has
seen firsthand how AI is amplifying rather than replacing human
crea activity. She'll also share the inside story of Datacom's
collaboration with the Melbourne Comedy Festival, where they built the
(03:06):
Funny Finder chatbot to help festival goers discover new acts.
If you're curious, cautious, or just trying to figure out
where AI fits in your creative world, you won't want
to miss this conversation. Here's my chat with Lou Compagnoni. Lou,
(03:31):
Welcome to the Business of Tech. How are you doing?
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Thanks for having me. I'm doing well.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Thanks, how are you great?
Speaker 3 (03:36):
It was great to see you in Wellington last week.
A stunning day at Datacom's Wellington headquarters panoramic views of
the Wellington Harbor. And that was the second of a
two part series that you hosted in New Zealand about
AI and the creative sector and how AI is being
(03:58):
adopted there, the opportunity and also the challenges that the
AI poses. So we're going to get into that, but
first a little bit about you. You have a creative
background as well. You did the same degree that I
did here in Wellington, the Institute of Modern Leaders Creative
Writing Masters. You were writing a novel. I was doing
a screenplay. Tell us a little bit about your experience
(04:21):
doing that.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Yeah, sure, So.
Speaker 4 (04:22):
I actually decided to Having done a number of years
in the tech industry, I decided to go back to
my roots. My undergrad was in creative writing, and I
used to work as a food riser.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
And I just wanted a chance to spend some time, just.
Speaker 4 (04:35):
A dedicated time for eight months, really focusing on writing,
because I was finding it hard to dip in and
out of a day job in tech and writing. So yeah,
it was just really a chance to work on a
story that had been circling around in my brain and
needed some airtime.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
It felt like a very luxurious.
Speaker 4 (04:52):
Experience to spend so much time in the creative world,
and I'm really glad that I did it.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
But like many people who did that course.
Speaker 4 (04:58):
I still have this ninety percent done novel that I
keep wanting to return to. I don't know if you're
in the same situation with your script totally.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
I still haven't produced my screenplay, so it's it's a
lifelong quest for some of us. But what an experience.
And I think really you could see that coming through
in Wellington, you know, the way that you've approached creativity
and you're a music maker as well, writing songs and
(05:26):
producing them to how this converging world is going to
have huge implications for people in the creative sector. You've
got a lot of people who are in the room
in Wellington from journalism outlets the likes of iron Z BBC.
(05:47):
You've got people there from game development companies like Pickpock,
and educational institutions at Massive University, the Creative Center at
a Mirramar which is right beside WET, a lot of
film students there. And the sense I got what they're
really saying all these great panelists was they see AI
(06:09):
as a tool to amplify human creativity and not replace it.
So you know, the students in Miramar are using AI,
but not to completely automate the process of creating a
short film or an animation. They're using it to maybe
iterate something to start out on that process. But they
(06:30):
actually want to be hands on, and it's not just
that they're being told to by their tutors saying you're
not allowed to use AI. They actually want to do that.
Is that the sense that you got as well?
Speaker 4 (06:40):
Yeah, I definitely felt like I was surprised actually by
just how positive people's attitude was towards AI in that session.
I thought we were going to get a little bit
of a balance between excitement about it and experimentation, but
also a lot of fear and talks about copyright, but
I actually found that it was more on the innovation
side of things. I also had some interesting conversations in
(07:00):
the break, not just about how people are using it
for part of their creative process, but how they're using
it to try and free them up from the admin
tasks that take them away from their creative process. So,
for example, one of the photographers I knew there who
was actually photographing the event, Stephen, he was talking about
how he's actually working on developing a series of AI
(07:20):
agents to help him with his photography business, so it
can help with things like triaging emails, invoicing, sending out
JPEGs of photoshoots and so on, because he wants to
spend time making and so that makes so much sense.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
Yeah, and Tyrone McCauley, one of the co founders of Pickpock,
the Great Wellington game development studio, he said they're really
using it to improve productivity, prototyping a game. You know,
that whole process has gone from weeks or days down
to hours. It's speeding up content creation, reducing repetitive coding work.
(08:00):
It's a way for them to explore new ideas. So
so that's I guess the story we've heard across industries
so far as that productivity story. That is the return
on investment for a lot of New Zealand and Australian businesses.
So that is starting to happen. The next phase is
(08:21):
going to be how do you use this to really
supercharge your business? And I was sitting next to a
folly artist, you know, who works with filmmakers to create
all the bang crash noises in the background. And that
is an art, you know, you're literally your timing has
to be impeccable, you have to have a really lifelike sound,
(08:43):
and there are libraries of those sorts of effects. But
I was sort of saying, something, what's going to happen
when when sort of AI can create some of these
sound effects instead of you in your folly studio banging
and crashing around. And he said, well, that's why I'm here.
I need to figure out what the future of my
particular niche in the film industry and he worked on
(09:04):
the Minecraft movie. You know, he's done some big productions
and since I got while there was positivity and optimism
in the room, there was also this sort of elephant
in the room as well as fear isn't going to
take my job. So I guess that is the big
question we You know, you talked about copyright, and I
think we sort of talked around that issue a little bit.
(09:26):
For instance, that Radio New Zealand was there, Glenn Scanlon,
who I was really interested to see what his take
on AI was, and he sort of said, well, we're
a public broadcaster. We like to give away all of
our content, so there's no point us actually trying to
block our content from being featured on chat, GPT or
perplexity because we want good quality information.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
To get out there.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
I guess the imperative is a little bit different for
those sorts of companies, you know, like my publisher in
znme that you know, the business model is very much
on copyright being maintained and being able to monetize that content.
Speaker 4 (10:03):
Yeah, I think the big game changer in terms of
AI with that is really generative AI. So I think
there's a difference between consuming content and using that content
to create something new. And that's really a lot of
the concent that I've had from creatives that I know,
whether they're illustrators or writers, is there's a difference between
someone finding a link and looking at what they've made,
(10:25):
or reading their work and consuming their sort of style
to create something of their own. That's really where the
concerns are coming from.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
Yeah, and there's no really good answer to that. Arguably
a lot of when it comes to journalism, a lot
of that's already been scraped, and there are some deals
being done. So if you can negotiate a deal with
the likes of open Ai, as some publishers have done,
that's a potential revenue stream. But in terms of creating
(10:53):
a movie or a song that is in the style
of a well known artist, that's a really tricky you on,
isn't it, Because where does that line blur between paying
homage to an artist that you like and literally copying
their style and in monetizing that yourself.
Speaker 4 (11:10):
Often and it can be beyond your control, Like there's
even I saw a really interesting article recently with David Sidaris,
a writer who I really like, and he was saying
what happens if after I die, my niece decides to
upload all of my content into something and anyone can
write in my style. So I kind of wonder what
that's actually going to do to the creative process as well.
Will this actually stop people from creating freely or will
(11:33):
it stop people from sharing their content with the world.
I just think there's so many big questions around it.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
One of the other interesting things that Tyrone from Pickpock
said when he talks to his staff about the you know,
the potential fears they have around AI is skill atrophy.
So there's this sense that particularly around coding, where you know,
we're seeing with the new version of Claude that just
came out this week and that apparently the coding capabilities
(12:01):
are just insane, you know. So we are seeing entry
level sort of coding jobs being automated at a very
rapid pace. So I guess there's concern that for people
entering the industry, what are they going to actually do
because some of those skills they're not going to need.
People further up who are a bit more experienced. A
(12:23):
lot of the stuff that is a big chunker off
their work suddenly might be no longer skills that are
in demand, so you're having to reskill and retrain constantly
now in the world of AI.
Speaker 4 (12:35):
Yeah, I think there's also another issue in there, because
I agree with all of that, like will we actually
atrophy if we're not using the skills that we have
and we're kind of becoming.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
More orchestrators of the tools.
Speaker 4 (12:45):
Will we ever be able to go back to be
the actual producers of that thing we did in the
first place. But then I've also seen the flip side,
which I've seen with a lot of developers, where they
used to have an undulating day, so they used to
have sort of code that they could just do in
their slow and they used to just kick back and
put some tunes on, and then they would have sort
of more harder pieces of work, which is possibly thinking
(13:05):
about the overall architecture of something or sort of creating
something new. But now because they're using these tools, they
are always in this high value fit thinking space, And
what I've seen is actually a lot of burnout from
people because it's.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
Almost the opposite.
Speaker 4 (13:19):
Rather than their brain's atrophying, they're actually in this extremely
kind of high pressure orchestration mode all day because they're
doing five days of coding in two days. Like I
heard a story about one of our developers who did
something like eighty thousand lines of code and a weekend
or something like that. You know, this is just you're
in high productive mode. So I think that's another thing
to sort of bring to the table.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
Wow, a lot of people were there from Central Government.
The government Chief Digital Officer was there, sort of laid
out where government is taking a I very much seemed experimentation,
tightly sandboxed sort of projects. Gov GPT, for instance, came
out at Callahan in a that was a project last year.
(14:03):
Actually the day that we're at that summit that evening,
they announced that they're going to work with AWS on
an all of government app for New Zealand, which sounds
pretty exciting very early days, but you know, AI may
get a look in as part of that. What was
your sense around where we're at in New Zealand when
it comes to public sector use of AI, and in
(14:25):
particular compared to Australia market, You know, so well.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
I think it's mixed.
Speaker 4 (14:30):
I think it really depends on the agency that you're
working with. I think that there's some that I've definitely seen.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
And I'm not going to name any names for obvious reasons.
Speaker 4 (14:38):
So some that I've seen that are actually doing a
lot of experimentation, They've got lots of proof of concepts.
They're now at that next phase where they're going, actually,
how do we take this further? How do we scale
what we're doing? How do we create a sort of
AI platform or repository so that we can have multiple
agents working across up business. So there's that side of things,
and they're looking at setting up a center of enablement
(15:00):
to really start to scale. But on the flip side,
there are some agencies who are really cautious and really
risk adverse, which is understandable, and they haven't even really
taken the first steps. They haven't even really switched on
co pilot within their M three six five environment, and
it's because they're sort of worried.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
They don't want to.
Speaker 4 (15:17):
Become front page news, they know that data is not
ready and so on. So I would say there's a
mixture in New Zealand for sure, and in Australia I
think the same.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
Like certainly there are some.
Speaker 4 (15:26):
Places in Australia that are sort of some organizations that
are well ahead, they've really been using AI for a
number of years. But there's also some who kind of
think that they're really ahead with it, but when you
kind of dig into it, they're really just experimenting with
one tool. And where I think that I'm not seeing
it is actually thinking more holistically about organizations, So not
(15:48):
just one tool here and there, but what could it
mean for them as a whole government organization.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
What could they shift.
Speaker 4 (15:53):
From and too as a result of AI, and what
does that mean for their future?
Speaker 3 (15:56):
Yeah, someone from the government there come into debt. We're
really only to use you know, Microsoft Copilot at the moment,
that's the only approved tool that was corrected by the
government Chief Digital Officer. Any government agency has autonomy to
choose what AI tools that they want to use. But
I think it definitely showed that concern particularly about government
(16:18):
data going being fed into larger language models and potentially
exposing sensitive information. I know having talked to people that
that is a huge concern. But you know, they're laying
the groundworks. They've done the public sector guidance on use
of AI. They've got an AI roadmap for business and development.
Ministry of Culture and Heritage was there they were about
(16:40):
to do a consultation on use of AI in the
creative industry. So it feels like in New Zealand they're
sort of laying the groundwork, going through all of those
processes to make this a responsible approach to doing AI.
I guess the question is is when are we because
this is moving so quickly and other countries are adopting
it to really good effect, when are we going to
(17:01):
start accelerating our use of it? And I guess that's
where you come in with Datacom. You've got the confidence
and the people and the experience with twenty plus years
of developing AI to help them do it.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Yeah, certainly.
Speaker 4 (17:14):
And I think that that's what we're trying to help
to balance within government organizations and all organizations. Really is
that balance between governance and having the right guard rails
in place, but also experimentation and innovation. And I actually
think it's possible to do both at once, and I
think that one can help the other. So, for example,
when we're helping people to think about governance develop policies,
(17:38):
I think actually is really helpful to also be developing
something creating a proof of concept at the same time,
because it's in creating that that you actually uncover some
of the challenges and blockers within your organization and you
start to you start to understand where the data is,
where some of the restrictions are, what other systems you're using,
and so on. So I think you're almost thinking about
having too parallel works. Streams within organizations can be.
Speaker 3 (18:01):
Helpful, and there's a lot of organizations work with data
com But interestingly, you know, in the creative space, you've
worked on a project recently in Australia with a comedy
festival using AI to help attendees or people interested in
going to the comedy festival engage with the content figure
out exactly what shows they wanted to go to.
Speaker 2 (18:25):
Took us through your.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
Approach to that because that, potentially comedy could be quite
a touchy subject there. You know, we've had lots of
discussions about freedom of speech and what's appropriate and people
being canceled in comedy and all that sort of thing,
So putting AI into the mix sort of high risk.
Speaker 4 (18:43):
It was, yeah, and we definitely had some moments, so
there was a lot of considerations with that. I guess
the reason it came about was the comedy festival. We're
getting to a point where I just had so many
events that even the big acts everyone was able to
find their comedy, but the sort of new and emerging
ones weren't necessarily getting the airtime that they required, and
people were just kind of going to all of.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
The usual shows.
Speaker 4 (19:05):
So they just wanted it as a way a different
way for people to explore what they could possibly see.
But we definitely had a lot of considerations along the way.
So one was to your point, you know, the nature
of comedy, it's not always the most PG content, So
what was it going to surface and how was that
going to reflect on both the Melbourne Comedy as a brand,
(19:25):
but also us Startacom as a brand as well. We
also really needed to consider the comedians, so we needed
to consider like were we giving sort of fair exposure
to all comedians or was it going to favor some
And we also had to be very explicit about the
role of the Funny Finder, what was it meant to
do and what was its persona And so we actually
(19:46):
did a really good co design process with comedians and
the Melbourne Comedy Festival and obviously the Data com team
to really explore that and we asked questions like, is
it funny, Should it be funny, should it be telling
jokes or should it actually just be really in formative?
Speaker 1 (20:00):
Is it a comedian as a persona?
Speaker 4 (20:03):
What we actually landed on was, I don't know if
you've been to the comedy show, but at the town
hall they have these sort of booths where you can
talk to people who know about the comedy show and
ask for advice about shows to see. They're really fun people,
They're really upbeat and really friendly.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
So we decided that is.
Speaker 4 (20:19):
Exactly the persona that we wanted it to be. They're
really nice, but they're not comedians, So we kept going
back to that thing.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
The job of the Funny Finder is not to tell jokes.
Speaker 4 (20:29):
However, given the nature of AI, there were moments when
the Funny Finder tried to become funny, and when we're
in the development and testing process sort of started to
become its own sort of comedian. So there was a
moment when we were doing some testing and it actually
started to make up comedy shows. This was obviously before release,
(20:52):
so we had to be very much going back to
that whole guideline of No, your job is to just
give information about the comedy show. We had to turn
the temperature down of the model and get it back
to its original intent, which is just to be informative.
So yeah, there was some really interesting issues to explore
on that project.
Speaker 3 (21:10):
Wow, that's fascinating where it's literally starting to it's so
powerful and innovative in its own way. It's coming up
with comedy routines and I guess you're going to get
naturally enough people prompting it to do all sorts of
crazy things. So you know that is a real risk
of alienating and you know an audience and comedians go
(21:31):
into blurry territory around racial matter and sexism and all
that sort of thing, so potentially go wrong. But it
seems like it went really well. What was the sort
of engagement with the Funny Finder, Like, well.
Speaker 4 (21:44):
We had around seven thousand queries per day. I mean,
given that this was actually quite early on, we thought
I think it was overall it was around four hundred
thousand queries that went through the Funny Finder, which we
thought was actually for a first year, quite good. We
also had really good visibility of how people were using it,
so we've got really good stats on what were the
kind of prompts that people were putting into it and
(22:06):
what was it offering in terms of information, So that
in itself is really interesting. Like we kind of expected
it would be more like I like this kind of
comedy and my friend likes this, so can you recommend
a show? But people were using it for all sorts
of things, including planning second dates, which was a surprise use.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
That's fantastic.
Speaker 3 (22:25):
So I guess you know that is that's a creative
sector example of that. But that sort of thing is
going across all the industries that you're working in, and
it's been going on for a while. It's getting better
and better the results, the information that you get from
these sorts of chatbots. I guess you know, as we
enter the agentic world, we're hearing so much about you know,
(22:48):
what's going to come next is you know, I'll be
able to tell that chatbot okay, I like the sound
of that. Book, me a couple of tickets and we'll
go off and do that on your behalf.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker 4 (22:57):
We even talked about that kind of thing as a
future faith So we kind of just wanted to deliver
the first year on just actually making sure it was safe,
that it didn't do anything Kooki that we weren't expecting,
and it just delivered on explaining the comedy show. But yeah,
in the future, we've talked about actually the ability for
it to become almost your travel planner, so it could
even have agents that go beyond booking your ticket. It
(23:17):
could also book you a restaurant that's nearby the comedy
show and audio an uber and just become sort of
your whole kind of concierge for the night. I definitely
think there's lots of ability to do that. It's just
a matter of I guess, investment and time and like
I said, just actually testing just to make sure that
everything is safe before you do.
Speaker 3 (23:35):
So that's sort of sense when you look at the
creative sector as a whole, that because creativity is seen
as the secret source of that industry that you know,
they're sort of doing peripheral things with AI around productivity
and the like, speeding things up, but are they actually
using it for the core purpose of creating new and
(23:58):
novel things. Are you seeing examples across the tasma there
off creative agencies, maybe advertising agencies that are using AI,
if not for the actual creation of the end product
that's going out on radio or TV. But that really
difficult process of coming up with interesting ideas. Are they
augmenting that process with AI?
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Yeah, I'm definitely seeing it sort of all throughout.
Speaker 4 (24:22):
You know, as designers, we think of the double diamond process,
so there's the kind of like discovery and then the
define and then the design and deliver. So I'm definitely
seeing it all throughout. So I'm actually seeing people doing
it in the research process as well, So everything from
coming up with ideas to looking at doing a discovery process,
to working out where problems are that need to be
(24:44):
solved and there's opportunities, so using AI to help with
speeding up those sorts of processes as well as actually
using it as a tool to create as well. And
some of the people that I know who are creative
are using it for amazing things. So I know someone
who's a jewelry designer and she describes the way that
she designs jewelry now like creating with words or painting
(25:05):
with words to do some of her designs. So she's incredible.
If you weren't a jewelry designer, you wouldn't even know
how to come up with the prompts that she comes
up with. But she's shown me some of the designs
that she said just would merely would not have been
possible even to draw previously, that she's come up with.
I've also seen some interesting things with creatives where they're
actually giving creative voices to large language models, which is
(25:28):
a really cooky twist. So I mentioned doctor Michael Kollo
when I spoke at Creative Industries because he does a
lot of experiments with large language models, and one that
he sent me last night which was quite interesting, was
he got clawed to do a spoken word poem about
its own identity.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
It was actually really beautiful.
Speaker 4 (25:45):
It was quite disturbing at times, but I thought that
was a really interesting twist on creativity that you can
actually give voice to models themselves, so that opens all
sorts of new questions.
Speaker 3 (25:55):
And that beautiful example that might have been You showed
a video off of the British Talco that invented the
AI granny to talk to scammers on the phone to
waste their time.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
I love that.
Speaker 4 (26:12):
I think that's brilliant because it is such a problem.
I know that that's something that my mum experiences a lot.
She gets lots of people scamming her, and it's really
difficult to discern for her whether it's.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
A scam or not.
Speaker 4 (26:21):
And I think it took a really creative person to
flip that on its head and to go, actually, we're
going to go after the scammers. Yeah, actually, And it
was quite funny. It was a playful way of dealing
with a problem. So I think that was one of
the things that I most liked talking about at AI
and creative industries, not just how you can use AI
as a creative tool, but also how creative mindsets are
(26:44):
needed to design AI and to think of new use
cases and innovations with AI, because I do think it
is such a different way of thinking.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
Linear thinkers sometimes struggle with it.
Speaker 3 (26:55):
A number of people commented there, and I think this,
in my experience, is so true. They see AI as
democratizing sort of some of the functions of creativity. And
you know, I've just finally just created a new website
for my own content thousands of articles over the years.
(27:15):
I've been putting it off for years because I hate
wrangling WordPress websites and getting into content management systems. And
I was just the other day, just waiting for a
conference to start. I went onto this app called Replet,
and it's an agent generator AI agent creator and was
(27:35):
able to create within two minutes just by prompting the agent.
There a website that does everything I need. It's just
a matter of porting over all of my content. And
apparently i'm reading up replet can do a bit of
code to actually automate that process as well. That just
blew my mind. So that democratization, if not off the
(27:58):
kernel of creativity can all be great novelists and songwriters,
but all the stuff that goes around it and allows
people to be more creative than they otherwise would be.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
Yeah, I definitely think.
Speaker 4 (28:10):
I mean, that's a really good side that I think
is coming out of this is really democratizing creativity. And
I think that's particularly good for small businesses who may
not have the budget to get professionals to do everything,
and they're able to get professional quality materials without hiring
a professional designer or a photographer or web developer. I
think what's interesting about that is what that means for
(28:32):
the role of creatives who are otherwise doing that work though,
And what I'm saying is a bit of a shift
in the way creative people are working and the new
roles that are emerging. So some people who are more
makers and creating things themselves are actually moving more into
creative direction. And similar to what I talked about with
developers becoming orchestrating the tools themselves, they're actually doing that.
(28:56):
So they're more doing content, actually using AI to generate
content themselves to do the editing, and they've been quite
transparent about the.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
Fact that they're using it in their processes.
Speaker 4 (29:07):
I'm also seeing people who are sort of moving into
roles like AI art directors, and I've heard this new
term recently. I'm not sure if you've heard this, called
a promptographer. That's a bit of a tongue twister, isn't it,
And so that emerged from there was a German artist
who entered a Sony photography exhibition and he actually entered
a AI generated photograph and the reason he did it
(29:31):
was not to try and sneakily win. So he won
the competition and when he was accepting the award, he
actually was transparent and said, actually, I will not take
this award.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
I used AI.
Speaker 4 (29:43):
There's a role for promptography, but we really need to
think about actually how we are transparent about what's human
made and what AI made in these processes. So I
think interesting lots of things around that democratization, but also
the impact of that on the creative industry.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
And just finally, Leu, I think you were probably talking
to and I was there, and a number of people
who are at these conferences sort of sitting at the fence.
They know they need to upskill around AI and figure
out what it means for their business. They haven't really
progressed any further yet, which sort of surprised me. In
the creative sector, I thought there would be a lot
(30:19):
more sort of jumping in feet first, what do they
need to do and what can they do to sort
of get that at least get that experimentation going, while
they're also looking at the potential to transform their business,
which is what we really want. That's where the productivity
gains and the new features and products are going to
come from. How do they sort of approach that with
(30:43):
keeping in mind it's got to be a return on
investment on this. They can't just be buying widgets and
subscriptions and it's not going anywhere that it actually needs
to stack up financially.
Speaker 4 (30:52):
I think there's almost two things to be thinking about
there's probably more than two to come to mind. So
one is just to start experimenting now rather than later.
So rather than going I'm waiting for the perfect AI
tool to help me do this, actually just to dive
into the current tools that are available and just start
playing around with what they can do. So you know,
things like if you're a designer, you might be thinking
(31:14):
about things like mid Journey, or then there's the kind
of big Swiss army knife ones like chat GPT, Gemini
is pretty amazing and Claude as well, and I think
just spend time playing with these tools every week, both
in the sort of admin things that they do as
creatives to try and make it commercial, but also even
in their own creativity just to see what's possible and
(31:35):
whether there is an opportunity for them to amplify what
they do.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
But then I also think it's.
Speaker 4 (31:41):
Important to look more at a future horizon as well,
and to sort of stay across what actually is changing
with AI and what they could shift from and to
as a result of AI. So I think that goes
to your point of actually how might it transform them,
and seat of starting from that point of well, this
is what an ideal future would look like for me,
this is how it might transform me, and then go
(32:02):
back to.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
Actually like how do I get there?
Speaker 4 (32:04):
If it is going to change, I am going to
completely pivot what I do now? What do I need
to do to get in to protect myself really to
set that in motion that ideal future.
Speaker 3 (32:14):
Excellent good advice there, Lou and hey, thanks for hosting
those sessions.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
That was.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Really thought provoking, I think.
Speaker 3 (32:23):
So hopefully we'll see our creative sector adopts dot really
get that experimenting going, and I'll put a link to
It's funny.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
Fine, it's still going.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
It's not.
Speaker 4 (32:33):
Actually we took it down at the end of the
Comedy Festival, but we may well do the same thing
next year. Not the same thing. We might even do
a slightly different thing next year. Who knows how.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
Much the technology will have moved on then.
Speaker 4 (32:45):
So yeah, not available too, But we are working on
a lot of other sort of conversational AI tools for customers.
That I mean is a use case that could be
used for so many different things as well.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
So absolutely, and I haven't seen anything like that for
a festival on this side of the TASM bit they
festival or the film festival or whatever. So I think
that whole space how you engage with and try and
get an audience convert them to buying a ticket that's
about to be revolutionized with the use of AI. Thanks Lou,
thanks so much for coming on the Business of Tech.
Great to see you, and we'll talk again.
Speaker 1 (33:14):
Great to see you too, Peter, thanks so much.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
That's a wrap for today's episode.
Speaker 3 (33:23):
If the Business of Tech are one hundredth episode, thanks
so much for tuning in and supporting the podcast over
three seasons. Off the Business of Tech really appreciate it.
Huge Thanks to Lou Compagnoni for sharing her insights and
stories from the creative optimism she's seeing on both sides
of the Tasman to the behind the scenes challenges of
(33:46):
building an AI for comedy fans. I think her advice
is pretty clear, don't wait for the perfect toolstart experimenting
now and imagine how AI could transform your work. I'm
definitely doing that. But at the Wellington AI conference, at
the cautious approach people are taking to using AI, which
I think says a couple of things. You know, there's
(34:08):
real genuine concern over quality with hallucinations, odd looking images,
you know, frankly AI slop where everything looks mass manufactured
and generic. You know, our creatives do not want to
be part of that. They're very sensitive to the feedback
from customers, which is that they don't really want AI
generated content. They value the human touch, so that's fair enough.
(34:31):
On the other hand, the using AI in their processes
to become more efficient and to boost productivity, which is
a good thing I think is the quality of AI
improves and as competitors here and abroad adopt it, the tech,
which is improving at an accelerating rate, will play a
greater role in the creation aspects of advertising, video making,
(34:55):
music making, and the like. That clearly has huge implications
for artists, for journalists, and anyone in the creative industries.
If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe and
leave us a review on iHeartRadio or wherever you get
your podcasts. I'll be back next Thursday with another episode
of the Business of Tech. Until next time, keep exploring
(35:16):
and keep creating.
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