Episode Transcript
Don Mock 0:00
All right, episode 127 we’re back Rob
Rob Broadfoot 0:22
127 it feels like we, it feels like we just did 126
Don Mock 0:27
It feels like that Yeah, yeah.
Rob Broadfoot 0:30
it’s like almost no time has passed since we did 126
Don Mock 0:34
I know it’s, it does feel like these things are coming faster and more furious. You know, I have never seen a single faster and Furious movie. Does that make me less culturally pop, relevant, or whatever
Rob Broadfoot 0:45
I mean, well, it is weird
Don Mock 0:46
Fast and Furious, because there’s 10 of these bastards now.
Rob Broadfoot 0:49
The weird thing is that is that you are two term president of the Vin Diesel fan club. Yet you haven’t seen the Fast and Furious franchise.
Don Mock 0:58
Well, I watch strange. I watch pitch black every single
Rob Broadfoot 1:05
I haven’t either, for the record,
Don Mock 1:06
you haven’t seen a single one? I don’t even, I mean, there’s the guy that died
Rob Broadfoot 1:11
yeah, Paul walker I don’t care about that.
Don Mock 1:14
Yeah. I mean, I know, but we’ve got Momoa has been in this. I mean, everybody’s been in this thing. So I know of them. I know generally enough, you know, ludicrous, right? But, like,
Rob Broadfoot 1:26
yeah, ludacris is in that
Don Mock 1:27
but, you know, I can’t say that I’ve watched, I will say curbs, and I just watched all four Planet of the ape movies. The newer ones, yeah, you know, I did Google how to which order to watch them in, because they’re all named weird. I’m gonna throw this out there. Surprisingly good, surprisingly good. Okay, you know The first one’s James Franco, and it’s kind of how
Rob Broadfoot 1:53
I don’t know that I’ve seen it.
Don Mock 1:54
Well, obviously you’re familiar with the 1960s
Rob Broadfoot 1:56
Well, I know the old, old one but I don’t think I’ve seen any of the new then.
Don Mock 1:59
There was one in the early 2000s with Marky, Mark, Mark Wahlberg, right. Okay, he and, I think it was Tim Burton. I think I could be wrong, somebody from
Rob Broadfoot 2:08
Mark and the monkey bunch.
Don Mock 2:09
Yeah, exactly. And he, it was like, Oh, I’m an astronaut. I went into a wormhole and, boom, I came back into an alternate reality Earth, where it’s all apes, where it’s all apes, okay, well, this new, all the new reboot is, no it’s, it’s pre covid. But surprise to no one, shocker, spoiler alert. Watch out, everybody from a movie from 10 years ago, 2014 it’s, it’s a virus. It’s a virus. It is. It is. Basically the first movie is, I’m gonna ruin this for everyone. Is James Franco, his dad is played by John Lithgow, who has Alzheimer’s, okay? And he works at a he works as a geneticist at this San Francisco laboratory, and he’s working on the cure for Alzheimer’s. And basically, he creates this serum, okay, that inadvertently or purposely, I don’t you know, ends up making these chimpanzees smarter. They just, they just have better functions. Okay, right? Well, they don’t turn on, they take over. You know, disaster ensues. We end up with a simian flu. Something happens. It screws up humanity, right? Meanwhile, the apes are getting smarter. I mean, that that’s so there’s no time travel, there’s no whatever. Anyway, first three movies, totally badass. It’s surprisingly good. And then, yeah, I mean, it’s at the end there you Yeah, you’ve got chimps that are talking, riding horseback, shooting guns, it is a little too much the fourth movie eh…but, but the way it gets there, it’s surprisingly heartfelt. You know, I would say so. This is not the podcast I thought we were gonna start.
Rob Broadfoot 3:42
I feel like, having not seen those movies, I feel like and I would be curious to see if you agree, are those better to see in the theater?
Don Mock 3:53
I don’t know that matters.
Rob Broadfoot 3:54
I’m picturing Jurassic Park,
Don Mock 3:57
Yeah, we’ve got some kick ass. Who’s the guy that that played Gollum, who’s the guy that’s, like, the the he’s the behind the scenes actor who does, who wears the suit, and does not
Rob Broadfoot 4:08
I’m not come up with his name
Don Mock 4:09
Andy Serkis, okay, that’s his name. I think his name’s Andy Serkis. Anyway, he does all of the animation stuff for the apes, for, like, the main ape, whose name is Caesar, and, yeah, I mean, the animation is great, but we’ve all got like, 50 inch televisions that have..So, I mean, is it better in a theater? Maybe, you know, like, I mean, probably, you know. But also, like, we’re learning to go to the theater to watch like, Planet of the like, I don’t It’s not high on my list.
Rob Broadfoot 4:36
I can tell you, me personally, if I’m gonna watch Planet of the Apes. I’m gonna go see it in the theater.
Don Mock 4:43
I hate to break it to you, but it left theaters 10 years ago. So, yeah, yeah. Well, we didn’t come here to talk about Planet of the Apes, even though i You’ve got all four movies on Hulu right now streaming, baby. You know, do a little marathon quadruple feature or whatever that is. No in our last episode, episode 126, we had made a reference about your friend who had, has the daughter going to school animation, and the topic of AI. Now AI, we’ve talked about like, God, I mean, 100 100 times. We’re probably never going to stop talking about it, right? But we might as well circle back around to to that topic, because we kind of foreshadowed it a little bit. And I had seen this quote on blue sky, I’m a big blue sky guy, love blue sky as my Twitter replacement, right? Since that’s a Nazi bar, but that’s another conversation.
Rob Broadfoot 5:34
You mean X?
Don Mock 5:35
Yeah X, Twitter, we should call it. So the note goes like this, the bizarre idea that creative people need to use machines to help them come up with ideas and do creative stuff and generate inspiration is batshit No, that’s what non creative people do. Creative people have trouble dealing with the excess of ideas. And then the snarky line, similarly, cows buy very little milk, right? So, you know, my thought was, Wow, I agree with that. Like, you know, we’ve got AI, and we’re talking about, hey, is this an industry I should go in? My daughter’s the thing, are the machines gonna take over? Are the machine are the robots gonna do but jobs were like, you know, and I’m like, No, Bs, like, it’s a tool in the toolbox. Just like, you know, ads existed before we had computers, you know what I mean? And Adobe, right? I mean, you know, images happened before we had scanners, you know, things like that, right? I mean, AI is definitely a little freaky, a little wacky. It’s kind of going a little crazy. You know, some of it works. Most of it doesn’t, right, but it’s a tool, and it’s not going to replace they can’t come up with the ideas for you. I don’t think right if I painted a broad brush there.
Rob Broadfoot 6:43
Yeah, were talking a little bit about how, you know, how people use it, why they use it, specific to our industry. My own personal feeling is, and then we can talk about it more broadly, but, but, you know, I will use it sometimes as a, almost as a research tool, right? So if I’m concepting something, and I think the example I was thinking about was, Oh, if I, if I need a monument, right? I need some unique monument around an idea that I’m thinking about, I might go to it and say, Hey, what are the 20 most famous monuments, or just to give me a list of resources to then help further that idea. But to your point, the idea was mine. Yeah, I’m now just using it as a research tool to help accentuate that idea, right? And I know that, you know, sometimes, sometimes here in the shop, it’s good for, oh, I have the idea. I need an image of this, or I need a landscape of this or something, and then it can help you generate something that you then take and craft into the final thing. But to your point, it is not the impetus for an idea. Yeah,
Don Mock 7:56
I think, I think I kind of think about AI in three pieces, and here’s what I mean by that, but
Rob Broadfoot 8:00
there’s only two letters there’s,
Don Mock 8:02
well, I’m gonna split the A in half. We’ve got the language based version of AI, we’re not sitting around going write me 10 headlines for you know what I mean? Like, it’s not, I mean, I’m sure other people are, I mean, that’s, oh, that ties into the quote,
Rob Broadfoot 8:19
absolutely, people are absolutely doing that, clients are doing that
Don Mock 8:24
yeah, clients are doing that.
Rob Broadfoot 8:25
Agencies aren’t doing that,
Don Mock 8:26
yeah, exactly. God I hope not, I’m sure some are. But anyway, like, first prong of the of the three prongs is language based, AI, research, you know, text based, hey, I need to write a paragraph, or I need a blog about whatever, right? Then you’ve got the image based, right? Like, hey, I need, you know, make up an image of this for me, yeah, type of thing, right? Then you’ve got extension of image in terms of, like, production, that’s what I mean. So, like, the second two are kind of the same, right? So, like, like, I’ve used AI recently on, hey, I need an image of a Ferris wheel to comp something for somebody, right? I just need an image of a Ferris Wheel. Right? In the old days, you would draw a Ferris wheel, and then get a client to approve it, and then some amazing artist would, like, create that image of a Ferris wheel, you know what I mean? And then there’s your ad, right?
Rob Broadfoot 9:11
Or you go to Shutterstock and find the thing
Don Mock 9:13
yeah, then the next version is, what we’ve been doing for the past 10-15, years, is like, yeah, you go to your online stock places, your Getty Images, I need to find a Ferris wheel, you know? And, oh, yeah, okay, hey, here’s an image of Ferris Wheel. And then I buy that image, we license it, you know, we use it in the ad, whatever like that, right? Well, now it’s, oh, I, you know, I know I need a Ferris wheel, but I don’t like any of the images that I see available. Can I have, you know, these magical machines create an image of a Ferris wheel specifically at the angle that I’m looking, you know? And it kind of does it, you know. But here’s what it does. It does it well enough for a comp, for a client about something,
Rob Broadfoot 9:50
to help express an idea.
Don Mock 9:51
to help express an idea. But again, to your point, visually, that ideas already,
Rob Broadfoot 9:55
you’ve already got the idea. You’re using it as…
Don Mock 9:58
yeah, exactly, exactly. And. And that third thing, a lot of times, is just a technical aspect, is, hey, I’ve got this client provided image that’s crappy quality. We don’t, you know, clients don’t know anything about resolution, you know? And so it’s, oh, we will use AI to up res an image to be able to print somewhere, or to extend the sky, or to extend the field, or, you know what? I mean, we’ve done all that sort of stuff, you know. So that’s more production based, you know, but man, that’s, it’s bad it is. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s, yeah, the quote I like to use that I heard recently is, mediocrity is the new excellence. It’s like, everybody loves it, but we look at it and go, like, it did it but it’s not done correctly, like, still handcrafted is the best way to do it. But in a pinch, you know, you can do that for client comps and things like that, right? So, so for me, AI, is kind of a different I use it three different ways, right? Yeah,
Rob Broadfoot 10:53
And it’s interesting here’s the deal. It’s an amazing, incredible, terrifying, awesome, new technology,
Don Mock 11:02
yeah, that quasi works
Rob Broadfoot 11:04
outside of the context of our little bubble of creative and advertising. Yeah, it will do amazing things in healthcare and in a lot of industries outside of helping to make pretty pictures and write things. It just will it’s interesting now and it’s new. It’s brand new. We’ve got this shiny tool. It’s interesting just hearing the different stances that people in our industry are taking. And the example we were actually talking about this in the office earlier today was, you know, Adobe, the premier creative platform, software in our industry, they’re all in they’re fully embraced it. It’s now embedded and incorporated into all of their software.
Don Mock 11:49
You know that pot is committed.
Rob Broadfoot 11:51
That pot is committed. By contrast, procreate, which is also a tremendously popular piece of software for creatives has taken a very, very hard line, absolutely. I mean, it is on their homepage. It is FAI basically, we will never, we will never chase technology to do, to do a human job. Here’s the thing
Don Mock 12:17
long, dramatic pause
Rob Broadfoot 12:18
yeah, right. I’m trying to think how to say this. Here’s the thing, AI, isn’t going anywhere. It will be here, and it will either be a tool that you embrace or you don’t. I suppose my analogy was, I don’t know if it’s good or bad, but it’s the first one that came to mind. Was the iPhone, and it was, Oh, yeah. Now we have movies being shot on iPhone, and everybody is an amazing photographer.
Don Mock 12:42
Don’t tell my dad He will have a heart attack.
Rob Broadfoot 12:43
Yeah. And it’s, did the iPhone kill some photographers Businesses? 100% yes. Are there still amazing photographers in the world? Of course there are. And AI is going to do the same thing. It’s, it’s going to be here, whether we like it or not. Hopefully, we will, we will, you know, sooner rather than later, figure out regulations around what you can and can’t do in terms of ownership, licensing and that. That’s a whole different ball of wax with it. Yeah. But I think, as a creative, my opinion, you better embrace it one way or the other, because it’s not going anywhere. Is my personal opinion.
Don Mock 13:28
Yeah, I don’t disagree with you. The Adobe stance is really interesting. I mean, they’ve had us captivated as a audience, you know, for 30 years, yeah, for 30 years, every single advertising agency, every single design firm, every single like, everybody is bam. We are hooked on Adobe. Shoot it in my veins. We’ve been drinking the Adobe kool aid for 30 years, right? Well, you know, now we’ve got Canva and all these other weird little graphic programs that you don’t need to know the complexities of Adobe, right? You know, like the learning curve on Photoshop at one point, I think they said was like 16 months, you know? I mean, it’s, yeah, because it’s so damn complex and you can do each function three different ways. Like you want to add a drop shadow to something, there’s like 20 different ways to do it, you know. Like, it is a very robust tool. Not everybody needs that, right? Some people just want prettier PowerPoints or prettier presentations, right? They don’t want to learn the whole thing, you know? So, oh, my god, they clearly saw Canva starting to eat some of their lunch. And it’s like, oh, hey everybody. We can do simple stuff too, you know. And they’re literally running commercials. It’s like, put a unicorn in this photo. And, yeah, of course, you know, erase your ex husband from this. You know what I mean. So all of us were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Like, they’re kind of like, turning their back on image professionals kind of, sort of, I mean, I don’t know. they need to evolve as a company too. They can’t become the best, buggy whip maker. But it is interesting that they’re all in. And to your point about procreate, there’s a lot of, like, software for artists that is like, no, no, we support humans. Yeah. You know that type of thing. So. Yeah, there is a line in the sand
Rob Broadfoot 15:01
And you’re right in that for, for a long time, decades and decades and decades, Photoshop and Illustrator and these very, they were very, very specialized pieces of software. Yeah, it makes sense that over time, they’re like, wait a minute, if we can get more people to use our software our shareholders will be very happy, and with the introduction of AI, yeah, it makes sense that they, they made that decision. They said, You know what? We’re going for more people,
Don Mock 15:34
yeah. And all of us had a full blown conniption when they went subscription. And guess what? We all paid for the subscription. You know, like it’s what we need.
Rob Broadfoot 15:42
We’re cursing them a lot more than we used to
Don Mock 15:45
For sure yeah, it’s a weird you know. So anyway, I think, you know, just trying to dovetail off of that previous conversation you had with your your friends daughter
Rob Broadfoot 15:56
I don’t think our industry should feel threatened by it but I get it.
Don Mock 16:01
I think the answer is different. You know, you mentioned healthcare and other things. I mean, computers were created for computations. I mean, again, I’m simplifying history here, but it’s kind of like computers were made to do math, right? Math is hard and do computations. I mean, you know. Now we’re on the graphics side, which is, it’s full blown evolution of all sorts of different things, you know. So, you know, is there a way for AI to simplify computations and predictive analysis? Of course, there is, you know what I mean, in different industries, it’s going to crush it, you know, yeah, for our industry, I’d say we’re very, very, very far behind in terms of it, like working successfully. And then I think, to your point about, you know, there’s all the lawsuits of intellectual rights and things like that, you know, that’ll be very interesting. And it is interest not to get totally boring here. But like, you know, all the movie studios banding together, right? Sony, Disney, you know, Paramount, everybody coming together to file lawsuits for intellectual property. You know, that has weight to it, and that’ll be interesting to see how it happens to the image and we do actually have court rulings saying that anything created by a computer cannot be copyrighted because it wasn’t made by humans
Rob Broadfoot 17:15
because it wasn’t made by humans, correct.
Don Mock 17:18
I mean, if we were in the music industry right now, I’d be freaking out way more than than we would be
Rob Broadfoot 17:23
Because they are going to tell you now the AI companies that they own it because their software generated, and then you got a whole slew of problems.
Don Mock 17:32
Yeah, but, oh, write me a song in the style of blah, blah, blah, with these verses and that. And then it’s like, okay, great, like that
Rob Broadfoot 17:43
It’s not where it needs to be. But if you look at, you know, look at an image generated, you know, out of AI a year ago, versus now and it’s exponentially better. And the problem is, these days, technology moves so fast, yeah, that we humans in our court systems and things can’t keep up with it.
Don Mock 18:05
Absolutely not
Rob Broadfoot 18:06
So we’re just chasing. We’re chasing the technology to figure out how the bleep to manage it and harness it and wrangle it
Don Mock 18:13
Well, Mike and I did a podcast many, many moons ago about AI, and I was making the joke that it’s so broken that, remember, it kept adding fingers to people, but then criminals, you could buy on eBay, you could buy online, like rings that had an extra finger, so that, as a criminal, you could go out and commit crimes wearing six fingers or seven fingers, and then you could claim in court, oh no, that’s not me. That’s not me. like, oh my god, criminals. know no bound.
Rob Broadfoot 18:41
It still has a problem with hands. I don’t understand. Why are hands so messed up?
Don Mock 18:46
Hey, man, you ever try to draw a hand? Drawing hands is hard. Man, draw hands and feet. Man, they’re hard to draw. So I think they’re hard to draw for computers too,
Rob Broadfoot 18:57
I guess so.
Don Mock 18:58
But, you know, yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s that, that joke that’s going around, you know, the other day was, how many r are in strawberry, you know? And no, AI program can tell you the right number. And it’s like, you know, why can’t it figure out prime numbers? There are all these things that I’m not smart enough to understand why it doesn’t work, but, you know, a lot of times it really doesn’t work. But, you know, yeah, it’s gonna get you 30,40, 50% there, but you still needed human to bring it home.
Rob Broadfoot 19:23
I’m trying to remember the anecdote. I think it was like a year ago, and I was telling you about the I think it was a 60 minutes report where the robots taught the robots another language without humans telling the robots to teach the robots language. And it was like, whoa. It was a real like, oh my god, the robots are taking over.
Don Mock 19:41
Yeah? Well, I don’t even want to know what Boston Dynamics is. robot army, dogs, whatever else you know. Yeah, so
Rob Broadfoot 19:49
Lord help us
Don Mock 19:50
I need that. AI to work, We don’t want judgment day here, right? Yeah. T2 special.
Rob Broadfoot 19:55
So anyway, AI, I’m sure we’ll talk about it again. It’s ever evolving.
Don Mock 19:59
Give us another ten episodes, and we’ll talk about AI, you know, so and robots, we love you, even though my wife always says please to Siri, and I always tell Siri the F word, robots are coming for me first
Rob Broadfoot 20:12
I don’t use the robot, siri or alexa
Don Mock 20:14
I call her names, I tell her she’s dumb. I do all sorts of horrible things.
Rob Broadfoot 20:19
Does she say, like, That’s not nice.
Don Mock 20:22
No she doesn’t say anything. Which makes me even angrier. And I’m like, you know, like, I’m in the car right now. I can’t, you know, so silly. So anyway, all right, where can the robots find us online.
Rob Broadfoot 20:36
They already know. Yeah, of course, www.mocktheagency.com. Or you can email Don @mocktheagency
Don Mock 20:45
Yeah, please. More emails. I need more emails in my life.
Rob Broadfoot 20:48
just this morning, he was like, I don’t get enough emails. I wish people would start spamming me.
Don Mock 20:53
I went 30 econds without more unsubscribe buttons coming my way.
Rob Broadfoot 20:59
Or find us on the socials @mocktheagency we’re they are hanging out as always, and we will talk to you on 128
Don Mock 21:04
Cool, cool. Thanks, everybody.
Comments are closed.