Will AI in film solve the 'Monkey problem' with Tim Carter

00:00 - Lena Robinson (Host)

Good morning everyone, or good afternoon, depending on what time you're listening or viewing. We are kicking off my second recording with Creatives WithAI, with Mr Tim Carter. Good morning, Tim.

00:15 - Tim Carter (Guest)

Good morning Lena. How are you?

00:17 - Lena Robinson (Host)

I'm very good, thank you. You and I met through my lawyer, actually the lovely Alison, and we hit it off straight away because we're quite in our own world, even though we've worked in the corporate world ourselves. We're both non-conformist mavericks and I'd really like for everybody to get to know you today. So give us a little bit of background on who you are, where you've come from, the work you've done leading up to now and, yeah, tell us about you.

00:53 - Tim Carter (Guest)

Okay, well, I come from originally Cambridge, and I guess I've ended up doing the work I'm doing primarily influenced by my parents. So my mum is a nurse. My dad was sort of an entrepreneur by mistake, and in fact, he and my mum started a business together when I was a kid, and that really inspired me. I was under 10 at the time and I loved the process of building that business. Watching them, I also saw the extreme hard work and the stress of starting your own business, and then their business was effectively stolen from them by an investor who withdrew his money and restarted the company and then offered my dad a job in his own company, and so that was quite an instructive experience as a background, of having watched them build something which they were passionate about and had done really well, to then losing everything, facing bankruptcy, and so I thought, well, I want to do that, but I want to protect myself from being taken advantage of in the way that they were. Some of it was circumstantial, some of it was bad advice, some of it was bad people, but anyway. So I also loved problems and picking things apart, so I ended up deciding at the age of 10 that I was going to be a lawyer and then, having learned how to look after myself as a lawyer, I was then going to be an entrepreneur. And I have done that and I have done that. I sort of surprised myself when I look back at it. So I did train as a lawyer in the city. I trained at a firm called Allen Overy which is now, because it's merged, the third biggest firm in the world and got a great education as a lawyer.

02:41

I looked at the life of being a lawyer and decided that was absolutely not for me. I didn't want to be being a private practice lawyer. To me, the way I was feeling about it was like being at the end of a conveyor belt and your clients are putting all the stuff on their conveyor belt and you have no influence over what order they're putting the stuff on the conveyor belt, whether they've packed it properly. I kept wanting to go to the beginning of the conveyor belt, whether they've packed it properly, and I kept wanting to go to the beginning of the conveyor belt and tell them to do all the things that they should have done in the first place, so that the end of the conveyor belt was much more easy for the lawyers to deal with and they weren't getting themselves in such a mess. So I moved in-house and I had specialised in intellectual property law because for me that was the most interesting mix of technical kind of tricky, esoteric legal thinking but also attaching to real world stuff like brands and products and technical things.

03:35

So I moved in house to a software company that needed intellectual property trained commercial lawyers, which is what I'd become, and that was a company called Symbian.

03:44

and since then, which was in: 2005

04:53 - Lena Robinson (Host)

We don't want short clip dancers in a podcast recording. I think what's interesting, uh, and quite telling about who you are, is that switch going from, and it's going to be quite telling. Interesting points are going to come out, I think, around the IP question. With regards to creatives with AI, the Google stint is quite what's the word, transforming in some ways of your career, because you went into that big world and in some ways, google it's about creative thinking, not just being the person that sits there creating the things, and that's what I want to delve into a little bit more with you, because from there you then went consulting. You've consulted in the film world. So tell us a little bit more about Google, which I think will be of interest to our audience, about google, which I think will be of interest to our audience. But then tell us which is what I want to delve into mostly because ai and film is an interesting area that you've been working in. Tell us a little bit about the film side as well.

06:15 - Tim Carter (Guest)

m yeah, so I joined google in: 2007

07:19

nd, um, by the time I left in: 2015

07:43

And you know, depends on how you define employees and contractors and whatever, but you know, as far as I was concerned, if you're working at Google, you're working at Google, and so it was a massive privilege to be in a business at that point in its growth and one of those unique, exceptional businesses that has achieved so much influence in the world. And I was very influenced by a couple of things. I'd come from a very strong engineering business. Symbian was was, despite many of the frustrations its users had with its product, that wasn't always Symbian's fault and they'd done a brilliant job of hiring really fantastic technical people, and Google had focused very much on technical people. It was built by technical people. It had strength in other areas as well, obviously, but the one thing that I never had any concern about was whether Google could build something that it said it was capable of building. It was always at the bleeding edge and it gave me such confidence to work in a place like that with such brilliant people. So that was one major privilege. The other was seeing the attitude for the first time of the Silicon Valley entrepreneur this extremely naive and arrogant in combination. Presumption that you can just do whatever you think of as a good idea as long as you are aggressive and punchy enough to put yourself in the position to do it and you're able to bring sufficient numbers of other very smart and capable and committed people to work hard with you to put it in place, you can just try stuff. It's a permission culture.

09:20

Now the company itself is actually very top-down management. It has this perspective or reputation of being meritocratic. That is not my experience in terms of on the commercial side, at least. If you're an engineer, maybe you had a different experience, but if you're not an engineer, it was very much a do, as you're told, don't think sort of culture, um, and but but nonetheless, within that, larry and Larry and Sergey and the whole culture and the execs at Google at the time were very much an expression of that permissioned culture and that's really empowering conceptually, even if in your role you might feel quite constrained, which I did, and I think many people at Google, even now much more so feel very constrained. But that was really nice because it was. There's lots of strong positive things about American culture compared to British culture. Not all of them, but some, and I think that's one of them, this self-confidence, this kind of gung-ho, let's have a go, sort of thing, and Google did that in spades and I took that confidence.

10:19 - Lena Robinson (Host)

Can I ask a question on that? Sorry to interrupt you.

10:22 - Tim Carter (Guest)

Yeah, go for it.

10:22 - Lena Robinson (Host)

As to the self-confidence, and I guess we'll dive into this a little bit later in more detail, but do you think because I was having a conversation with somebody about this the other day, anna, in fact, like the culture how much impact do you think culture is having on that creativity and what the uptake on AI is looking like it's going to be? Do you think country and culture is going to have an impact?

10:51 - Tim Carter

Yeah it's huge. I mean, to me, it depends on your definition of culture. I always define culture as an output of behaviour. It's not an intended thing. It might end up looking like something that you wanted it to be, but it's just an output of the collective behaviours of people and the. It's interesting.

11:09

So, having been in tech for a long time now, for the last year or so working within the film industry in a film technology business, um but, and a film technology business that is using ai to help creators create better product, we're founded by a film director and our approach is very much to provide tools that are useful to creators, and if it is useful to use AI, then we do use AI, and it does enable us to do things that we couldn't do or couldn't have done before.

11:41

The role that I have here is very much focused on handling the responsible and ethical use of that ai and building a business model around that um set of principles, not just for ourselves but for other people in the industry to participate in, and so I therefore talk to an awful lot of people around the film industry Hollywood and UK primarily producers, directors, studios, the unions, equity and SAG-AFTRA, individuals, large companies, independents on the talent side, agents, like the whole gamut, as well as technology companies and the culture of all of those different sorts of people and their different roles, and you see kind of micro, like the culture of directors, which in itself is split into different types of director, but then you've got the culture of actors, culture of studios, the culture of tech companies.

12:36

These things are all expressed when you have a big shift that affects everybody. And AI is this potential massive automation of a whole bunch of things that have not been as automated or automated at all historically, so that, by definition, changes how people conceive of doing their jobs, conceive of doing their work, which are obviously different things, and so I think, and then you talk about national culture- or you think about national culture, like the US national culture is.

13:11

if in doubt, do it, which is pretty much what the British national culture was, when we went around marauding around the planet and sticking flags in places and saying, oh, you forgot to put a flag in, we did it, thanks very much. We have in my lifetime and saying, oh, you forgot to put a flag in, we did it, thanks very much. We have in my lifetime, and probably before the 20th century we have. The British culture has become much more self-critical and anxious and we've lost, I think, a lot of that aggressive confidence, which is probably better for the world and worse for us. So you know, we'll just have to deal with it. We're doing all right relatively, but the Americans.

13:49

Yeah, the American culture, though, is more, you know, sort of let's do it. And so, from an AI perspective, the American legal system, copyright and freedom of speech are handled differently. Those issues are handled differently in the US to the UK and Europe and the rest of the world, and there's more of an aggressive. Well, let's just build it and then create the rules that need to be created once it's been built and we know what we're dealing with. And, yeah, some people are going to lose out and some people won't. And then you know, within that, there's a fight about how creators and creative industries and ip-based industries get affected by this. But, um and I'm not advocating for one solution or the other I don't think anybody has it exactly right, and it's a transition, so it's messy, by definition yeah, I think.

14:38 - Lena Robinson (Host)

Um, that leads us really nicely on to the first big question that I like to ask during any podcast is how is AI impacting? I want to say, your business, but really your business, but the industry you're currently finding yourself working in, like what you know. Are you utilising it day to day? It sounds like in some ways your business is, and for which specific tasks and all those kinds of things. So, in the world that you're currently mostly working in, which is film and AI, I'd really like to dig deep into the impact on that. Sounds like you're talking to different sections within that. So, yeah, tell us more.

15:23 - Tim Carter (Guest)

Ai is well, we should give a definition to it, at least as it as it applies to the film industry. Um, I see ai as just a form of automation. It's just software allied to a particular type of using hardware. It's not in any way connected to the marketing hype of intelligence in the machine.

15:47

Humans don't actually have a clear definition of what we mean by intelligence, which leads to questions of consciousness and independence of thought and all these things, and you can spend many interesting evenings in a pub discussing all these questions. And they are leveraged. These ideas and questions are leveraged hugely by marketing and reporting on quote-unquote ai. So the first thing to say in the film industry, computers, computer automation, um, have been used for 40 years at an evolving and increasingly more complex rate for different things, and ai is being applied to many of the same things and some new things. So AI is just this new level of speed and complexity of automating stuff with computers and visual things, sound things, visual effects. There are many, many steps in making a film, thousands of steps, obviously often including thousands of people. And because there are so many steps and it evolves very rapidly, even if the blueprint of making a film is broadly the same get a script, get a cast, get financing maybe not in that order Spend between one and 20 years trying to get those things together, then go and actually film it um, adapt the script on the way, lose cast members, uh, replace cast members, then get into post production and then try and take all of this footage and actually fit it together like a jigsaw puzzle and turn it into something that is maybe resembling your first idea, maybe something completely different, maybe tests really well with studio executives and badly with audiences, or vice versa. It's quite chaotic, but there is broadly a structure to it and there is a huge amount of space within all of that activity for computers to do repetitive tasks much better than humans or faster than humans or at a greater scale of parallel activity. And so drawing stuff, rendering stuff, organising information, making it ready for humans to make decisions on Everything from cameras going from physical film, which needed chemicals and space and time, to digital capture and the transfer of that information from the camera to then the editing software, which became moving from machinery that you could have knobs and twiddly-dobs and screens to a laptop on set. Ai is just part of that whole evolution and it's an adoption of current technology, specifically generative AI, which is this sort of sub-brand of AI, which is where software is taught the patterns in existing data in order to replicate those same patterns to create synthetic but realistic stuff that is like the stuff that it was trained on, so that stuff might be text, images, video, sound, and you just keep repeating that at scale and get more and more complexity built into the knowledge that you've put into the machine, you can end up doing things like creating realistic sounding text, voices, realistic looking images, etc. And so AI machines are being used a lot to produce images, to produce voices, and these are finding their way incrementally into adverts, tv shows and movies. So the specific example that you know, I work at a company called Flawless AI.

19:18

We focus on faces and lip sync, so we have a bunch of software that ingests, let's say, a movie. So a two-hour movie. It goes through a series of steps to build a mathematical model of the face of each of the actors who end up talking in the film and then we feed it new audio, so recorded by actors in a new language, say for dubbing, and we use the software to redraw the faces of every actor in every frame to make it look, you know, to move their mouth, movement, so it looks like they're speaking this new language. So the output is a cinematic quality, render, super, you know, ultra hd, um in dolby, surround sound, um of the new voice in the new language which has been spoken by an actor, matched frame by frame by the computer, composited into the original footage so it now looks like the actor is speaking fluently in that new language. So rather than dubbing, being this language over the top right so you're not getting that disconnect.

20:27 - Lena Robinson (Host)

I remember in the 80s watching dubbing of different movies. I think monkey was one of the worst ones where I know I know right, if you're old enough you'll all understand what that means. We'll put something on. We'll put something in the thing. I'm putting a note here now. Monkey, anyway. It was a funny show and it's been reproduced more recently, but the old one, the timings were so far out, like somebody would stop talking but their mouth would keep going, or the opposite, their mouth, would you know. It was hilarious. So it's stopping that and it's making sure that if it's done in polish, for example, from english you can see the face is matching up with what's being said in polish. Oh, that's amazing exactly that's a huge impact.

21:16

Is that a? So I'm going to ask a controversial question there. Do you think that's a good thing or a bad thing? Oh, that's probably not the right question, but you know, I'm going to ask a good thing or bad thing for the? Oh, that's probably not the right question, but anyway I'm going to ask it. Good thing or bad thing for the actors, the creative people? How are they feeling about that happening?

21:32 - Tim Carter (Guest)

It's a good thing, and when we explain and demonstrate what we're able to do, people love it the actors you know, actors and producers and directors, writers they love it because this is tools in service of a human intent, um, and I think that's the way any technology should be. You don't make hammers in order for people to get their fingers squashed. You make hammers in order for people to hit nails, and so you make ai in order to solve problems that need solving, and the problem might be a one of speed or scale or repeatability, or it might be a problem of cost, or it might be a problem of complexity. It's like, in theory, you could get a whole bunch of human artists and you could repaint every frame of a film, um, so that you make actors look like they have been speaking french, when actually they were filmed speaking german. So you could, in theory, do that. It's just not practical. You can now use a computer to do a pretty good job of doing that, um, and that's all we're doing, and so, from a creator's perspective, you can put all of your work into what you want to do, which is the script in your native language that you're filming in the performances of your actors in the language that you're capturing and then you can retain all of that work, all of those creative choices and the skill delivered by everybody involved in making the film and, first and foremost, from this perspective, the performers themselves and the script that they're telling and retain that so that the audience in another language gets all of that benefit without the barrier of this jarring of the voice, not matching the face.

23:12

All you're doing is making the new language, which has been translated by humans, to do a good job. You can you know machines can translate language, but, as a voice translator will tell you, translation is not just converting words to other words. You've got to convert idioms and meaning and sense and humour and all these other complexities. That's why translation in many cases needs to be done by humans, not by machines. Same with a script. So then you get humans in the new language to perform that script and, because of the way that our technology works, the performers in the new language can give a better performance than they do for dubbing because, to your point about monkey, in dubbing traditional dubbing it's an incredibly difficult and highly skilled job and the output of it still feels dissatisfying, which is really frustrating, but it's more funny yeah, in monkey's case. But if you look at it, you know dubbing is not as simple as just record a new language and slap it over the top of the original video.

24:13

There's a huge amount of work that goes into choosing words in the new language that fit the space in time where the original language, where your mouth is moving. They try and keep the script into that. So they solve the monkey problem basically. And then the performers have to perform that language in a way that fits the physical movements of the original performance. But you can imagine a Swedish film being performed in italian.

24:35

The cultures and the performances are quite different and they're having to constrain their whole face and their whole tone and everything is to be as realistic as possible to these two conflicting requirements. So we don't solve all of that. But when you have the stage we go through, you have a blank face or a non-speaking mouth that the voice actor is then performing to, knowing that whatever they perform can be completely rendered onto the face of the original actor. So you get the benefit of the original actor's performance. It looks much more fluid, it looks exactly like they're now speaking this second language and it's seamless.

25:18

But the second language has been performed with much greater freedom and depth, so you actually get a much better creative experience and the audience is involved in the end result to a much greater degree.

25:29

They're not having to distract themselves reading subtitles, their brain isn't receiving the kind of the incongruence of lip movements in one language and sound in a different language.

25:40

And when we communicate, and when we receive communication in particular, we're looking at all of these things subconsciously, so they jar you and they wear you out when you can't just fluidly go with them. So this is a long-winded way of saying that the creative possibility of this application of AI is really positive, and you can end up with a point in the future when the technology is faster and more complete, a any-language-to-any-lang language, perfect visual translation of any piece of content, and then you've got the. You know what you're doing is unleashing the stories of Uzbekistan to be sold into the US market. Or you know, um, a filmmaker making films in swahili, no longer just being a nice curio from a Hollywood perspective, put into the Oscars foreign film category. But if they've got a great story and they've shot a brilliant film, that can now be translated into other languages. And languages are barriers to communication and you don't want all things to be communicated in one culture, in one language.

26:51 - Lena Robinson (Host)

But having a mechanism for those different cultures to interact more completely feels like a really positive thing. The conversation that we kicked off at the beginning about culture is actually quite pertinent to what your what is happening in the industry, particularly through flawless at the moment, what they're doing. That impact means that they're broadening audiences massively for those that are, as you say, recording in non-English for want of a better word the audience that can then go to multiple different languages. It's quite extraordinary. So it sounds like what you're saying positive impact yeah, that's positive.

27:33 - Tim Carter (Guest)

Now there is I. I will be transparent. Not everything is not everything is sweetness and light and roses in terms of the reaction and the concerns, because what I've just described to you is one application of our technology. There is different way, there are different ways of using the technology. So, for example, because we've got this facility to effectively change what an actor looks like, they said, and we can use another actor to provide the voice for it, and you can do that in another language, but you can do it in the same language. So there's a process in filming called ADR, so Alternative Dialogue Replacement or Automated Dialogue Replacement, depending how you define it.

28:12

But the point is a lot of the language that you hear in a film, in a finished film, the dialogue was spoken in a studio after they actually filmed the footage, because either they changed the lines or the audio quality wasn't good enough, or for a number of different reasons. And most of the time that new dialogue is recorded in the studio with the original actors that you shot the film with. On some occasions it's different actors and that might be because you're changing one line or one word in one line and maybe you're saying you're not changing the word, you're saying the same word, but you're just getting a better sound quality for it. There's all this unbelievable finessing of the sound and vision of a film which, as a normal moviegoer, you have no idea how many hours are spent colour matching and grading and getting everything just so. And the same is true in sound. And so we're able to use our technology to help that process. So actors can provide this alternative dialogue in non-sound booth, non-high-res recording situations, or because we can composite their mouth movements into a shot where they weren't previously speaking.

29:26

And if the director or the scriptwriter and editor think actually in this shot we now need the actor to have said this line at the moment, your choices are either to go back to set at ridiculous expense, rebuild the set, repay all the same actors to be there, all the cast and crew, just to capture one line of dialogue, but if it's that crucial for the script, you might end up having to do that or you just do it in the edit room, where you take existing footage and you can't. You don't have a shot of the actor saying that line because it didn't exist, they didn't say it, so you have to get a shot, a different shot of them, like the back of their head or over the shoulder, it doesn't have the same impact. So you can get the line into the film, but you don't get the actor being seen saying that line, performing that line. Well, now, if you've got a shot where they're performing some other line, you can change what the line is that they said, and so you don't have to make those compromises.

30:16

But obviously, if you're an actor, that immediately exposes you in theory to the fact that now you give a performance, you, you agree to a script, you perform that dialogue, and now somebody in the edit suite in the post-production phase of the film can change what you said and change your performance, and that is obviously an extremely controversial and worrying thing as an actor.

30:37

It's like, well, I'm now just an empty vessel and you're putting other performance choices onto me, and that was discussed very much during the American SAG-AFTRA strike last year. The Actors Union in the US and they put safeguards in their contracts with the studios that prevent this and seek to prevent this and saying, look, if you're going to change somebody's performance in a material way, so if you're doing it just for translation, that's fine, because people already agree, saying, okay, you can dub my performance into another language, but if you're materially changing the script or how they perform the script or what they do in the film, you've got to ask their permission, because it's no different doing it in a digital realm, as it would in reality.

31:20

And actors invest a huge amount of their time and skill set into delivering the performance that they do, and when you try and create voice or visual performing software, you realise how complex human beings are and how good the job of being an actor is, how difficult it is it is incredibly difficult, and therefore we, as intending to create tools for creators, fully immerse ourselves in that rule book and say, yeah, of course, actors should retain control over their performance, and so my job in the company is to help build a bunch of tools that help that happen in practice. So collaboration tools, protection tools, licensing tools that enable all of that common sense to happen and protect people who would otherwise be made vulnerable by these new technologies.

32:14 - Lena Robinson (Host)

It's good to hear that those protections are being put in place, because I know that's a big question, that a lot of the as you're saying, the actors, the directors, everybody's questioning what's happening with that. So creating the tools to safeguard, I think is quite important, because I know that is an area that I think they're all massively, hugely worried about. Obviously, because they brought it up during the strikes and everything. It was obviously quite a big question mark that they were all having.

32:50

I think you've talked about the areas of what's impacting and a specific task that it's been and what it's been useful for and what also there's a bit of worry about, which is what you're sort of creating the tools for um, looking ahead, so how do you envision AI shaping that specific industry, the film industry, over the next three to five years? Like it's kind of it is still in its infancy in a lot of ways, although I know that what your organisation, flawless, has been doing is quite sort of. They've been doing a little while now and it's rapidly evolving. Like three to five years in some ways feels like a long time, but it really doesn't in another way.

33:35 - Tim Carter (Guest)

So what's your view on that sort of three to five years around, ai shaping the industry the trends that I expect to continue are automation of the creation of material, which allows either the experts who already make that material whether it's images or sounds or scripts or whatever to be able to be more flexible in how they do their existing jobs. It will also introduce these skills or these opportunities to people who are not professionals, or maybe professionals in a different domain. So, for example, what's already happening now is, if you're a writer, if you're a script writer, you may also produce storyboards or gather together some visual art to explain the scene, the style of the script. You know the characters, this is what they look like, or you work with an artist to produce these sorts of visuals to go along with your script. Now, AI tools Generative AI that can produce visuals or even video clips based on your text inputs. Where your script is a bunch of text inputs and it's describing stuff, scenes, characters and those can be used to create visuals automatically using ai tools, so that you can create a much more rich and complex draft or pitch for your script. You can, as a writer's room, each writer who is contributing to that writer's room can use these tools to express visually as well as in text and talking to each other what's in their head and what their vision is for that scene or that script or the overall show that they're working on. So those are examples, or that is an example of where existing professionals can, in one domain script writing can access the tools to express another domain visual artistry and videography and sort of cinematography and rather than replacing those other professionals, it's a medium for them to communicate better with those other professionals.

35:42

So AI tools enable a script writer to produce a visual where your set designer, for example, isn't just relying on the scriptwriter's words, they're also seeing their visual and there'll still be a collaboration on that and the set designer will still design the set. But there's a confluence of ideas that's just increased by more media passing between the two, and it's just done because it's now becoming much more possible and convenient for the script writer to produce those images, to communicate their style. And equally, visual designers are going to use Gen AI tools to do visual design, to sketch things out, to try different alternatives. So you can see computers just adding speed to creating many more drafts. Now there is an extension of that, which is well, couldn't you just get a computer to automate the whole process so you just have a script writer who ends up also being the director, the set designer, the costume designer, etc. Etc. Etc. And all of those skills are taken on by a piece of software or a collection of softwares. And yes, in theory you can, and I'm sure, just in the same way as, let's say, a synthesiser comes with a. You know trumpets and guitar sounds and orchestra. If you are a very skilled musician, you can make even a pretty basic synthesiser sound amazing, because you can compose brilliant music using a fairly limited set of tools.

37:16

So brilliant artistic people will adopt AI and somebody somewhere will produce quote unquote an entire AI film from start to finish, maybe even just on their phone or on their laptop, without filming a single thing. That will become possible. So that will be a new type of film media. That will become possible, but I think it's additive. Now I always talk about advocating for the future rather than predicting it, because there are so many unknowns, there are so many complexities involved. Then well, okay, so you've got one version of the future where AI tools are just helping people do what they currently do, but do it better. You've got another version where our AI tools replace everybody and you just have one person doing the jobs of previously thousands. The truth is probably not going to be limited to just those two extremes, it's going to be everything in between.

38:15

So, in the same way as if you look at music again, you know you, you can now have. It's very, it's very, very common for producers and music makers, musicians, to have a laptop as their primary music making device and they're sequencing the rhythm section, melodies, background, the sampling stuff, vocals can all be done using computers, but you still need actually collaboration between different skill sets and points of view to create great music. And so, even if you have a, I know a billy eilish or a, before that, a justin bieber who come up through what is currently the kind of the well, justin bieber's, I guess old now, but billy eilish is still current enough. I think you know she came up through youtube. Is it her brother? I think that is her producer. So there's a collaboration. They have been able to expand the sound and create the music that she's created using digital tools.

39:13

Um, but you still like, the reason it's her and not a million other people is partly to do with she's got amazing skills, she's worked really hard, she's been persistent, she's got a certain charisma. She's got an opinion. She's you know, her lyrics and her songs are relevant. So all of these things that create what is a piece of work, a piece of art which is really humans expressing stuff to other humans, that's, that's how I see what art's job is.

39:41 - Lena Robinson (Host)

Um then, as long as the audience are humans and not machines, then you still need humans at the production side, even if they're collaborating in different ways and using different machines yeah, it's interesting when you think about and it seemed it's only my second podcast recording, but already there seems to be a theme around collaboration and that, no matter how good the technology is going to become, it's the combo of the human and creativity and the tech that is going to make okay or good. So the interaction, the thing that makes the difference, is the human, because tech is tech. That's the even playing field and the difference is the artistic introduction from the human.

40:37 - Tim Carter (Guest)

Yeah, I think. I think it's as with every you know, ai can be seen the current version of what we call ai, and let's not maybe delve too much time into the. Well, that is just a marketing term, it's not one type of technology, but anyway, there's a bucket of stuff using computers that's come at the moment is called AI and that represents enough of a change that I think you can see it as a technical paradigm shift, not just in in creative industries, but across all sorts of ways of doing business and making things. In the same way as the internet was a paradigm shift, the personal computer was a paradigm shift. So you move from paper to people having computers on their desks and writing. Typewriters go away, calculators become spreadsheets Well, you know that was a big paradigm shift and that took decades to work through, in some cases still working through to different industries. Then you connect all those computers together over the internet and that takes another two decades to shift businesses. Now you and I can be both sitting in London recording a quote-unquote radio show, but we're in different parts of London. We're connecting through personal computers using the internet. So, um, you and I still need to be having the conversation for this to be really of any value, but we don't have to be physically in the same place. So you're adding a certain amount of utility and maybe quote-unquote productivity. That's debatable, but anyway. So AI is just another version of that. It's just another step. And so the thing that technology disrupts most is business models, not people. Now, obviously, business models are what pay people money. So this is not saying that it's irrelevant, um, that technology is irrelevant to people's well-being. It's absolutely relevant. But the inter, the bit between the technology and the people is the business model. So if ai was coming along with a business model that said anybody with a creative skill set is going to get paid three times as much as they were in the old world, creative people would be accelerating. Ai, like you couldn't believe, because of course they would.

42:53

The problem that people face with something like ai is that it changes things over a period of time that is long enough, and it changes them most likely in a big enough way that there's a huge amount of uncertainty, and it's uncertainty about their business model. How am I going to get paid? Will my skill set be valued in the new world? How do I adapt, even if I can see the bright green sunlight, sunlit fields on the other side. When this is all settled down, I'm entrenched in my current business model of how I sell my services or make money as an employee or a freelancer, and I can see the end point. But I don't know how to transition between the two without falling down the canyon between those two, and that is completely rational. Anybody who feels that anxiety is being smart and rational because they're dealing with uncertainty.

43:52

We're all dealing with uncertainty, some of us so, like me, for example, I'm taking present advantage out of that uncertainty because I'm helping. I'm working for a technology company that is beginning to make money out of selling this technology. I am not being disrupted personally, so it's very easy for me to sit back and say that it's it's just a business model disruption. But I'm super conscious and I've been in this position at other technology companies. I mean having chosen to end up working in technology companies over the last 25 years.

44:24

There's been a number of these disruptions the internet, mobile, now ai and I've been on the lucky side of those disruptions. I haven't been disrupted myself. I've been on the, on the, on the optimistic or the upside of that, but I've always been in roles where I've interacted with the people who have been disrupted, and so I'm very keen and interested in working out well, what's the best way for human beings to adopt this the upside, without creating downsides and without losing all the stuff that we've spent the last few thousand years valuing and creating value with. We want to retain all of that, and then AI should just be a little sliver of value on top. It should be an incremental step. It shouldn't be something that dismisses those things, and that's what is interesting Intellectually. That's what's really interesting. How do you make a good use of all this stuff? How do you change the business models?

45:16

And that's why, for me, it all comes back to collaboration, and that's why, I love working on, and that's why I love working on projects where a technical platform forces or requires or enables different types of stakeholder to interact with each other using that platform and in this case, it's AI and how do those interactions change, solidify, what are the opportunities to fix things in the past? So at the moment, you have big gatekeepers like studios and record labels who, on the one hand, themselves feel under threat but, on the other hand, have a long history of being the power brokers and making individual creators and artists second fiddle. Well, is there a range of different ways that ai presents that artists can take more control? They can be more directly in control of the things they want to be in control of. And how do you create things where you know, if I just want to be a script writer and I don't want to have to run a script writing business, well, okay, how can this new paradigm help create that?

46:17

So, yeah, the three to five year vision, in my understanding, has these trends more automation, more accessibility to a wider range of functionality to more types of people, enabling more collaboration, but also enabling more individual creation of a much bigger suite of things and outputs, and changes in business models that accommodate and make use of those things, and it's up to all of us to create the society that uses those things in the best way that we can I think what came out of that for me is, um, the opportunity, which brings me on to the question that I also like to ask, which is looking even further ahead and, I think, the impact on sort of roles and the sort of rise of new senior professionals.

47:10 - Lena Robinson (Host)

What are your thoughts on the industry's development even further out so five, ten years time? You know, the rise of AI is potentially going to change the handling of junior roles. It's going to have us seeing new senior professionals emerging and I'm sort of curious about what those areas are going to look like in your mind in five to ten years time. With regards to younger roles and those sort of new, where do you see those new emerging roles coming from?

47:47 - Tim Carter (Guest)

it's a good question. What do I think the answer to that question?

47:51

is I think so in terms of younger people over the next 10 years coming into the workforce or people who are already in the workforce in their next 10 years if you're in your 20s now, let's say by definition you are going to be the ones that pick up the new tools more than your bosses on average. You're going to be doing the sorts of jobs where you can take advantage of those tools. You'll also have the appetite to learn and to establish, establish yourself and your knowledge and skill set in the world as it is now. When you're in your 40s and 50s. You've done that and you're now trying to sweat your assets of your experience.

48:33

Yes, you want to keep learning and I think the best advice for anybody at any stage in their career is just stay curious and keep learning.

48:41

But you don't have to be a master of this week's latest technology fad and then next week's you can take a slightly longer view. So I think over the 10 years, the junior roles will, as with email and digital tools, be the ones that pick it up on average most and they will therefore end up setting what the paradigm is for the next 10 and 20 years after that, and the senior roles will need to harness those changes, understand them sufficiently, but from their perspectives, as the business leaders, the managers, the strategy formers, the employers, and work out well, how do these things add utility to what we're doing collectively, as a company or as a bunch of freelancers? And again, it's about collaborating between perspectives. If you, I've got junior people on the team who can tell me stuff that about I know, tiktok and distribution and the creation of media personalities and and the value of ip in um the world today, that's great. I don't have to spend my time on tiktok. I've got people to do that for me.

49:48

Fabulous, I can you know, listen to a vinyl, as the kids call it these days oh, there's so many words I don't even understand anymore.

49:58 - Lena Robinson (Host)

Um, I think what's uh a learning that you and I of the age that we have been Dave and I have talked about this as well is that we have gone through some of those iterations, like when I first started working, I think the internet probably technically existed, but we certainly didn't use the internet. I think where I was working we were using DOS computers. When I first started doing things, old school Microsoft came along a little bit after I was working. We were using DOS computers when I first started doing things. Old school Microsoft came along a little bit after I started working. But the world has changed, you know, with the coming along of the internet, the dot-com boom which I was working in and lived through, that was weird. And then seeing what's happened with social media and now with AI, you know, I think there's some patterns that we've learned.

50:46

I do agree with you. You either and I think the stay curious thing is really important you either keep up or you are left behind. But I think this I think the smart people will continue to stay the smart people. You know, age shouldn't be an issue. I mean with the whole uh area of diversity, equity and inclusion. I think people still forget the age one and how the power actually there's power of younger and older coming together, my, my, my business that when I first started at FTSQ, that started with a seven, was he 17, 18 year old and a 45 year old working together and there was power in there and I think those two things, I think the learning is those two, keeping, keeping things together.

51:39 - Tim Carter (Guest)

I think um sorry, I was gonna say it's an interesting point you make about connecting it to diversity, because I start thinking of collaboration, and actually the strongest collaborations are between diverse people rather than like minded people.

51:54

Do you want diversity or monotony? Well, a monotonous thing in nature is usually very fragile. Your ecosystems exist in nature because you've got loads of different things coexisting and relying on each other and making use of each other, often in unconscious ways or at least non-planned ways. So you know, a jungle or a desert ecosystem is diverse, you've got a range of different things, and human thinking and human behaviour is no different. So monotony is generally weaker, shorter-lived, less valuable than diversity, lowercase d diversity. And so the opportunity of a technical disruption which, at least in its initial stages, disrupts everybody equally. Yes, some people are richer and more secure away from it or more insulated from it than others, but it also has.

52:51

You know, two things can be true. It is also true that people who have been less advantaged in many ways in the prior world now have an opportunity to take advantage. It's like okay, so now the young woman in Kenya who is a budding film director can realistically shoot something on her phone which she can buy for $100, which she can save up for. She can use software tools and it's not going to be a Hollywood blockbuster from a phone, but it's going to be a hell of a lot better than she could have achieved. It's a a gateway in if she is skilled and lucky, which, you know, the two prerequisites of everything, and there's nothing luckier than being born rich, white and male so she hasn't had those advantages this mythical kenyan filmmaker, but um?

53:41

technology presents an opportunity for more diverse, inclusive voices to collaborate together. Now, there are lots of forces acting against that, as we know, systemic forces promulgated by people like me, primarily because of historical benefits that we've inherited and we don't justify individually. So I'm conscious of that. I'm not claiming this is a panacea, but I think that's another opportunity for you know, every day is a new day. Every day we can make better decisions.

54:18 - Lena Robinson (Host)

I think that is something that I hadn't really thought about until we were having this conversation, particularly when you were talking then about well, and even previous, when we were talking about the translation thing, and that there are going to be opportunities because of AI that people in different countries, different nationalities, different socioeconomic situations that prior to this shift, this paradigm shift that the AI is causing would not have had. I love the fact that that's opening up opportunities to hugely creative minds, thinkers, purely because the technology is going to allow that. It's pretty cool. It's pretty cool. It's pretty cool.

55:06 - Tim Carter (Guest)

Yeah, it's one of the really joyful aspects of working in disruptive places and disruptive times. It's very important, in my opinion and experience, not to treat those things for granted or to imagine they're more, they're bigger opportunities than they are. They're, they're, they are opportunities within a much bigger world, and you know this, a young kenyan female filmmaker. Even if she has access to ai enabled tools and a powerful smartphone and an internet connection, she's still got to climb and smash through a thousand barriers.

55:47

That someone like me, doesn't even know exist. So I'm not claiming this is a panacea, but it does add some opportunity and it's not. It's not a foregone conclusion and that's why I guess another thing I would say for anybody with AI or anything else if you're facing that fear and anxiety and practical reality of disruption to your livelihood, to your job, to your skill set, I can't offer you a perfect solution, but I can tell you that the best way to finding a solution is to be curious, to look into it, to lean into it. Be curious to look into it, to lean into it and find your collaborators that you collectively can help decide how it is used in your domain. And when talking to SAG-AFTRA, when talking to equity and individual committee members and members of those unions who are feeling very at risk of disruption, I've always said to them look, a lot of the value that you can generate is by you coming up with ideas for how you want AI tools to work for your benefit.

56:53

What are the things that you as an actor do today that should or could be made easier? Is it getting paid quicker? Is it getting more jobs? Is it being able to do more jobs in parallel? Is it being able to record stuff at home. Do you not want to be at home, do you? How do you want to collaborate?

57:09

Think you know, think of all the things that are currently in the old world not great or really harmful to you, and then collaborate with other people who can work out? Oh well, if there was a product that enabled me to record my stuff um, maybe not my big performances, but the annoying stuff like the ADR that I don't really have to commit a huge amount of intellectual horsepower to. But it's inconvenient to go into London for a day as long as I get paid the same amount of money because I'm putting the same artistic effort in and they're still using my name, image and likeness to do the thing. But I can record it at home or some other convenience. Okay, fine, well, collectively, somebody somewhere is going to make money out of that. So work with them and build it or at least create a market for it. So everybody has some agency, even if you are not in the tech side of the business.

58:00 - Lena Robinson (Host)

I think everyone has some agency. I think that's a really good way to end our conversation. I could carry on talking to you for hours you and I have done this many times anyway but I've really enjoyed our chat today. You've made me think about some things with regards AI and creativity that I hadn't really even considered before. So thank you for the chat today. I've really really enjoyed it. Uh, it's wonderful. We will at some point, uh be putting and I always do this, don't know where it's going to go, I think it's below um. There will be access to your social medias.

58:38 - Tim Carter (Guest)

We can find you generally on which platforms linkedin seems to be my home of choice at the moment. So yeah, what's my LinkedIn handle? Tim Carter the hat man. I'm not wearing a hat because I'm inside, but Tim Carter the hat man.

58:54 - Lena Robinson (Host)

And we will put any other connections, contact things there as we go. But thank you so much. I love the fact that you said stay curious, because at the end of our podcast recordings we always say thank you everybody for listening. Tim Carter, thank you for being on as our guest and everybody thank you. Stay curious.