The Brain Sludge Experiment

I attended SXSW as a speaker for the first time this past March, and almost a month later whilst on holiday, I was finally taking in what the complete experience helped achieve. My brain needed vacation mode. In the midst of a festival where the convergence of media, creativity, film, music and technology abound, it's easy to get caught up in hype.? As an independently owned creative sound company existing in a changing landscape with advertising and technology, part of my (many) mission (s) as ECD was to understand where the lines between creative and tech influence how the future of our little corner of the business will begin to blur.??

After several client projects interested in integrating sound and podcasting into their brands had come to us, projects had gotten killed as the brands could not immediately identify ROI.? A conversation I had over one year ago with PRX CCO Jason Saldanha and myself, resulted in us taking the stage at SXSW to discuss the very thing that we had stumbled upon. Thus began a journey of how PRX and Sonic Union collectively wanted to impact advertising through sound and podcasting, why the medium of human storytelling should be adopted into media buys, and how to do so effectively.? During our presentation, we urged an audience to consider how a brand’s story had to come from a place that could authentically engage an audience through human experience, social cause, and narrative with sound.

Furiously evolving technology, and what is actually beneficial, remains a key take away from SX. The reality is, all that was discussed with AI at SXSW will become obsolete within the next 6 weeks. Within the next 5 years, this technology will be 100,000 times faster and stronger. All those extra hands and fingers you see on Sora will be the least of our worries. AI is already influencing not only our creative work, but our daily workloads.? By next year, it is said 89% of Fortune 500 companies will have workers utilizing AI in some capacity.? A staggering idea for how some of the systems we have in place will change.?

Yet technology is merely a seed in a layered garden, especially for creative purposes, especially with sound. The intimacy of sound is incredibly nostalgic. Our ears have an innate sense of identifying truth and authenticity.? Human memory, contextual and emotional experience are at the core of this creative ideation.? AI is already used to create voices, full up podcasts, as well as aid in music creation and mix production. The tech ingests materials and recapitulates ideology, but not always with insightful emotional context. Emotion will always remain the essential human component, and expertise (as well as assets) in any given space is still a core competency for what those building AI platforms seek. ?

As SXSW speakers, we were guided with an encouraged approach to attend panels and speak to as many people outside one’s industry as possible. Instigate and inspire ideas outside of the normal vernaculars vs. acknowledge what one may already be influenced by. It occurred to me, this is kinda like my brain on vacation!? In vacation mode, we speak to new people, actively engage in unknown maps to new destinations, and get out of our comfort zone, even if just to relax. We exist in perpetual discovery, algorithms and routine left far behind.?

In a NY Times Op-Ed on March 29, a neuroscientist wrote that as AI generates media, content, books, music, even scientific papers - and continues to flood our human lives, a 2023 research term has emerged for a risk affecting AI training: Model Collapse.? Meaning, our human culture could become so inundated with AI, that future AI creations are only trained by previous generations of AI, therefore leading our consumption on these platforms to ultimately become “brain sludge.”? He wrote on the importance of “cognitive micronutrients” - cohesive sentences, narrations and character continuity - all things that developing brains need. So when AI generated synthetic videos for toddlers appear on YouTube, AI now presents potential “developmental experiments.”? Ethics aside, the impression of creativity is now at risk. Art mimics life, so what happens if art begins to only imitate AI?

The absence of inundation - daily life, work, stress, weekly intellectual discourses, personal relationships, and the very NYC cultured consume every day - the absence of these things creates needed space. It was in the quiet that my resting brain began to feel creative ideas.? We do not teach AI to rest.

A recent meme quoted a woman saying “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”

The originality of ideas - be it show, film, song, story, or even technology - and the resulting intellectual properties created from these ideas, remained king at SXSW. Until AI has achieved emotional context and experience, it may not fully create our narratives or our music, but will be used as a tool to influence, instigate, support and give advantage to allow original IP to flourish. The question remains, at what cost and from what source? Check back with me in two weeks.