How AI is charting the future of creativity

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

TARYN SOUTHERN: I don’t have a need to feel unique or special, or that I’ve worked super hard to develop this one skill set.

I think it’s super cool that a robot can do it better than me.

RANA EL KALIOUBY: Taryn Southern is an award-winning storyteller, artist, and creative technologist whose work is focused on the intersection of technology and human potential. A three-time Streamy award nominee, she has co-directed and produced an award-winning documentary on the future of the human brain, and currently serves as the Chief Storytelling Officer at Blackrock Neurotech. And as you can tell, she’s at the forefront of all things AI.

SOUTHERN: And it makes me feel like if I use this robot tool, then it’ll just elevate my work, and it’ll allow me to take on all these new skill sets that I didn’t have, and fill in the holes.

EL KALIOUBY: Taryn sees AI not just as a tool, but as a collaborator. From co-writing music with AI to making a digital twin that helps her create content online, she’s built a career by leveraging cutting edge technology to create things she couldn’t do alone. Like making history by composing the world’s first AI solo pop album. In this episode, we talk about how to best harness AI across creative endeavors. Now, to be clear, there are plenty of valid concerns around AI as a shortcut that could put people out of work in creative industries. But rather than avoid or fight the technology altogether, Taryn seeks to help fellow artists and everyday people embrace the potential of AI.

I’m Rana el Kaliouby and this is Pioneers of AI, a podcast taking you behind the scenes of the AI revolution.

[THEME MUSIC]

Hi, Taryn. Great to see you.

SOUTHERN: It’s always good to see you.

EL KALIOUBY: So excited to have you on the show.

SOUTHERN: Thank you for having me.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah, so you and I have known each other for five years or so?

SOUTHERN: At least.

EL KALIOUBY: And I am a huge fan. I think what I love the most about you is that you’re such a multi faceted, multi hyphenated person.

You’re a technologist and an artist and a creator and a storyteller and a musician. It’s super cool.

Copy LinkHow early experiments with AI unlocked a new kind of music making

So I want to talk about what you’re up to today, but first I want to take us back to 2018. And that was the year you released your music album, I Am AI. And that was a collaboration with AI to create the album. And you were very early in using AI as a tool, right.

SOUTHERN: I don’t even think generative AI was a term being used at that time.

EL KALIOUBY: It was not. So tell us, what inspired you to use AI to create your album?

SOUTHERN: I was in a Google Artist in Residence program at the time that was primarily focused on virtual reality. We were taking all of these consumer tools like Tilt Brush and Blocks and trying to create these really immersive worlds at very low cost.

And so I had basically envisioned this whole futuristic world that has my AI and my human self, and they’re merging, they’re meeting, and it was just going to be this artistic exploration of the future of human AI interaction. And I thought, okay, if I’m making this whole simulated world, how cool would it be if the music in the background was created by AI?

And I happened to have read an article in the New York Times that same year about this one music company that was making AI music, and so I reached out to them just cold turkey and said can I play with your tools, and from there it just became this kind of exploration with a number of different AI music tools, most of which are sadly not even in existence today because they didn’t make it through the winter of 2019.

EL KALIOUBY: What was that experience like?

SOUTHERN: It was so eye opening because I have always been passionate about music. I’m an OG YouTuber. So I was making content throughout my twenties, a lot of which was music based, but I never knew how to play an instrument or how to actually compose music. So I would write lyrics or melodies, but I had no way of actually bringing that to life.

And so for me, this was the first time I was ever able to just escape into my room and create a song from scratch without those skill sets. And yet feeling as though I still was exercising a huge degree of creative control, creative discretion. Same thing that so many of us are now experiencing as a result of LLMs and AI. Oh my gosh, like our creativity has just exploded.

I got that little nugget of insight back in 2017. And it was so exciting, because I was like, this is it. This is the beginning of a whole new creative landscape. But I just didn’t have a language for it at that time.

Copy LinkWhat has changed in AI creativity since the first wave of music tools

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah, amazing. So much has happened in the AI landscape, obviously, since you released the album. If you were doing the album all over again now, what would the experience be? And do you think the results would be different?

SOUTHERN: One hundred percent. For one, the tools are really different, both for better and for worse. Some of the tools that I was playing with back then, I was actually having to ingest my own data.

EL KALIOUBY: What was the data?

SOUTHERN: It was like these MIDI tracks, but you’d have to figure out what kind of song you were wanting to create, and so therefore, you’re actually creating a subset of data that will get you that kind of result.

EL KALIOUBY: MIDI tracks are data files that contain information about musical notes, timing, and other data needed to make a song. Essentially it contains the instructions for making a song without the actual sound itself.

SOUTHERN: So one of the tracks that I made was based on thousands of period pieces from the Romantic period, so 1800s.

And so to have to create a pop song from that was a really interesting process. Now, of course, all these tools, you’re not ingesting your own data. You don’t have a peek behind the curtain of how it’s generating. One of the other tools I was using was a rule based AI tool, so that’s another area where I can’t really get a peek behind the curtain.

But the tools are very different now. I think we have a lot more breadth and the quality of outputs now is much higher than what it was. So what probably took me 250, 300 iterations in 2018 would maybe take four or five iterations now, unless you want to get really into the nitty gritty. But if I were to make an album now, I would probably deviate into a lot more strange little corners of music style just for the creative exercise.

EL KALIOUBY: Do you actually still use AI to write music?

SOUTHERN: I do. I use Suno and Udio and I find myself just blown away. Those tools were not around when I made my album.

Lovesick.

Copy LinkHow to treat AI like a creative team instead of a single tool

EL KALIOUBY: I like to think of technology as a tool and AI as a tool as well. And like, say, the car, AI can take us to a whole bunch of new places. But AI is more than just a tool. It’s more like a creative thought partner or a collaborator. So can you give us a sense of what that collaboration looks like?

And how do you build a successful partnership?

SOUTHERN: Sure. Well, whenever I work on any kind of creative project with AI, and now I’ve done dozens of different creative projects, I really look at my role as no different than a filmmaker who is directing a project.

You have a vision, you sort of know what the end goal is, and then your job is to reverse engineer that vision into the final product in tiny little pieces. So you’ve got your set direction, your costume design, your acting, the composition and the musical background, the scene direction, the cinematography, and you’ve got to be thinking about all these little puzzle pieces and how they fit together and be able to impart your vision in the language that each of those areas, each of those divisions of creative execution can understand. And so I look at AI the same way. I almost divide it up into my little team members. Okay, you’re my cinematographer, you’re my writer. And I’m going to speak to each of those team members a little bit differently.

I’m going to provide very specific instruction, sets of guidelines, parameters, constraints. Let them know what the resources are. And then I let them get to town.

EL KALIOUBY: Can you give us an example? Give us an example. Yeah.

SOUTHERN: So last year I thought I actually needed to do a demo for a company and I wanted to do something ridiculous and silly.

So you remember Fyre Festival, that festival that just really caught the media by storm and has two documentaries out about it. So I imagined that I was making a new video trailer for Fyre Festival 2 because they had just announced his guy just got out of jail, he’s gonna put on another Fyre Festival.

EL KALIOUBY: Fyre Festival was a music festival that took place back in 2017. It was promoted as a luxury event on a private island with food, art, and music but turned out to be the exact opposite. Instead guests were given cheese and lettuce sandwiches for food, lodging in FEMA tents, and guests’ luggage was dumped in an empty parking lot. Now, Fyre Festival is planning a comeback in 2025.

SOUTHERN: I’m like, this is ridiculous. So I go to ChatGPT. And I actually make a few different versions. One is my cinematographer. One is my comedy writer. One is my marketer. So I’m using them for different roles in the creation of this video trailer. And with the writer, first I have to provide my objective.

We’re creating a two minute comedic trailer that is designed to sell tickets to Fyre Festival 2. Please incorporate information, facts from the previous Fyre Festival to inspire nostalgia, enthusiasm. Here’s your target audience, 18 to 35 year old influencers who don’t care if it’s a fire storm. They just want the association.

So I give it all of these detailed instructions and it writes this script for me and it’s iterative, there’s a lot of back and forth, and it was actually a pretty funny script the first time around. It was pulling in specific quotes from the previous attendees as like testimonials, it brought in the infamous cheese sandwich that everyone knew was the food of attendees at this ridiculous festival.

But there was back and forth because I have my own comedic sensibilities and my own constraints in making this video. So I’d say after about 10 back and forth, I had the perfect script. This took me probably 40 minutes in something that would have taken a couple of days.

EL KALIOUBY: Exactly.

SOUTHERN: Now I take my script and I feed it to my ChatGPT cinematographer and I say, we need to make something that is beautiful, cinematic, photorealistic, provide a shot list for me based on this script.

And I want the closeups, the mediums, the wide shots. You need to tell me which camera we are using and the lens.

I take those very specific shots and I pull that into Runway or Midjourney or any of those image or video generators to create the individual shots. And that’s just two of the roles, but of course you can expand it into music and.

Copy LinkWhy AI can remove creative limitations and widen access for more people

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. What I love about this is I’m not a creative, I don’t have a creative background. I’m not an artist, but with AI it’s a vehicle to bring that creativity to the world, right, in a way that was not possible before a lot of these tools existed.

SOUTHERN: 100%. There is no such thing as a creative limitation anymore.

One of the reasons that I was so drawn to being a content creator early in the days of YouTube was because it was a bunch of people who were just kind of taking consumer tools, breaking them, figuring out how to make content as cheaply and as efficiently as possible because that was the only way you could actually survive on YouTube.

But it meant not having to play by the traditional Hollywood rules of requiring millions of dollars and dozens of people to get something done, because that process, while it fuels beautiful art and movies, has also prohibited so many incredible ideas from ever even making it to the screen.

And so now, to see that the cost of content is virtually zero minus the human capital. It means anyone with an incredible idea and a vision can go and make that and get it done.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah, and I know you’re very passionate about this idea of democratizing access in the creator community.

SOUTHERN: One hundred percent. So many people just don’t have the resources and that can be such a detractor from even pursuing the creative field.

EL KALIOUBY: AI is allowing us to create projects on our own that used to take teams of people, or a wide-range of skills. But not everyone is on board. Concerns around IP and copyright issues have many artists up in arms. As an artist herself, Taryn has a perspective on this that may surprise you. That’s after the break.

[AD BREAK]

Copy LinkHow artists can rethink consent compensation and control in the AI era

Okay, so let’s talk about some of the concerns. Some people in the creative industry are worried about AI. For example, there are thousands of people who have signed on to a statement opposing the use of their creative work to train AI models.

Some big names include members of the band Radiohead, actors Kevin Bacon, Rosario Dawson. I personally think these are legit concerns around copyright issues and IP. How do you think about that? Like, as you create this content, how do you think about it probably being used to train some of these models?

SOUTHERN: Yeah, totally. I’m of two schools of thought, so I’m going to be a both and.

The first is, I do believe that these models should have elements of consent and control embedded into them for artists and copyright holders. Does this artist, does this copyright holder consent to the using of their data?

I think that should be baked in. Is there an ability to actually be compensated? So consent, compensation, and control, actually. Can they be compensated even if it’s fractional compensation? Just like Spotify is fractional.

And then the third is control. If the artist is consenting to the use of their material, can they have some sort of control over how that’s actually embedded and reused?

And I think once they’ve figured out those three components, you’re going to see any and all artists signing up, because that’s how you recreate the business model. I mean, YouTube did the same thing. There was a long period where you couldn’t upload a cover song of a popular band or artist.

If you did, it would immediately be taken down by the label because the label would say this person is not the copyright holder and we’re not making money off of this. And so YouTube figured out, and other startup companies developed around this, to create an industry where YouTubers and content creators could easily split revenues and rights. And it was this very easy process. And what was so funny was that a lot of these cover songs by these YouTubers were getting bigger and bigger audiences. Sometimes they were getting bigger audiences than the original artist.

​​Let’s take Ed Sheeran’s hit song Shape of You as an example.

Ed Sheeran – Shape of You (Official Music Video). The most viewed cover of his song is by JFlaMusic, which has over 350 million views on YouTube.

Ed Sheeran – Shape Of You ( cover by J.Fla ). Another cover, performed by Walk off the Earth, features weird instruments like kitchen utensils and a jack-in-the-box and that brought in 27 million views.

Ed Sheeran Cover with weird instruments!

The Rock band Our Last Night did a cover of the song that was shot solely on an iPhone and received 28 million views. Ed Sheeran – “Shape Of You” (Cover by Our Last Night).

So basically, there’s a whole ecosystem of artists that cover popular songs, and by doing so, they extend that song’s reach. YouTube decided to lean into that.

So they were making more money for the artist than the actual artist. So then of course the artists are like, hmm, we’re collecting checks, doing nothing. We’re very happy with this. And so within 10 years there was this big push by the labels to try and get YouTubers to cover new releases. So we saw a complete switch just because we figured out the consent, the control, and the compensation.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. I just invested in a company called Parada.ai, and they are trying to bring to market this idea of attribution as a service. So if your data has been used to train an AI model, whatever your data is, right?

You might be a publisher or creator, et cetera. Their algorithm can detect what percent of a prompt’s answer is due to your data piece and then you get a cut of the revenue. So it’s a new business model and I’m curious if it’ll scale and pan out. But if it does, I think it solves a lot of these issues.

SOUTHERN: But I also think the intent is in the right place. The problem, and I’m sure you already know this, is we’re talking about thousands, millions of pieces of data that are being ingested into this.

So when we’re talking about fractional compensation, artists complain about the pennies on the dollar they get for Spotify streams. I mean, this is going to be way worse.

But I think people care more about whether they feel that they’re actually being included in the conversation than what they’re actually netting out at the end of the day.

I think there’s a philosophical argument here that is a tougher one to sell to the masses and I don’t necessarily think we should be using this as an argument for tech companies continuing to use all of this data without permission. Even just us as human creatives, we’re collecting data and information around us all the time, right? Our brains do not store attribution models for all of the sources from which we’ve learned our various trades and skill sets. And so if we think about AI more analogous to the human brain, then we could just argue that it’s just a much higher capacity.

It’s like a savant who’s just pulling from all of these sources, but it’s operating much the same way a human brain does. And it’s not like we force artists to give royalties to their mentors or the people that have inspired them to do this work.

EL KALIOUBY: That is such a fascinating alternative way to think about this.

SOUTHERN: Yeah, it’s not a very popular one for an artist. But I think it’s real because this is actually how these systems are designed to mimic the human brain, how closely they actually do.

So it’s hard to say, but if we think about it in terms of that neuroscience perspective, it’s an interesting thing to chew on.

Copy LinkWhy AI challenges our ideas of authorship authenticity and human value

EL KALIOUBY: So I also think there’s a certain purity that some artists are holding on to, and they develop their skills over years and years of work and practice. And now you’ve got this AI tool that can kind of mimic that, and so this all can feel very inauthentic and a little threatening.

Do you think that’s a fair take?

SOUTHERN: I completely understand where these artists are coming from. I mean, I can’t imagine feeling like you’ve spent your entire life working on honing a craft, and then something else can generate it in under five seconds. It is threatening. For me as an artist, as someone who’s made my livelihood off of film, music, television, digital media, for some reason, I just feel the call of adventure is so much greater.

I don’t feel that we need to be special in order to still gain love and passion for our creativity and our exercise of that creativity.

EL KALIOUBY: I think a lot about this question of what does it mean to be human in the age of AI, and I think I agree with you, like, AI doesn’t have to threaten our sense of self, right? It doesn’t. We could stay grounded in the creativity and the empathy and the authenticity.

SOUTHERN: And we still get to decide how we apply these tools.

For me, I think creativity is the opposite of just doing one single thing incredibly well. For me, creativity is an exploration. It’s a journey. It’s a synergy of all of these different elements and pulling them together. And so by definition, using AI feels like the next step.

EL KALIOUBY: AI may be the next step for our creativity, but can it also be the next step in our humanity? What happens when this technology actually becomes a part of our bodies and allows us to accomplish tasks just with a thought? That’s after a short break.

[AD BREAK]

Copy LinkHow brain computer interfaces could expand human ability through AI

Next step. So, you’ve also explored a whole bunch of other creative areas. One of those I’d argue is the ultimate human machine interface: brain computer interfaces. You created a documentary called I’m Human, which explored this idea of BCI. Many people will have heard about brain computer interfaces through Elon Musk’s Neuralink.

But can you define what it is? What are some of the cool applications of it? And of course, some of the ethical concerns.

SOUTHERN: Sure. BCIs have actually been around for quite a long several decades. They’ve actually been implanted in humans since 2008. But Elon’s got a very large megaphone, so that’s great for the whole neurotech space, because now everyone’s paying attention.

Oh my gosh, there are people on this planet walking around with a tiny chip in their brain, but it’s true. So a BCI is essentially a tiny implantable device that goes inside the brain and it allows you to connect the human brain to a computer. So anything that you and I can do with a digital device, someone else can do with simply their thoughts.

EL KALIOUBY: So.

SOUTHERN: There’s approximately 43 plus humans currently implanted with the technology of the company that I work for. I think around the globe, around 55 total, 60 perhaps. The early trials around this technology are absolutely awe inspiring. You know, you’ve got people who can operate robotic arms, who can control a cursor on a screen, can type, can create art, can feed themselves with a robotic arm, can operate a wheelchair, can sense touch through a robotic arm.

I mean, all of these things are possible now through the use of BCIs.

EL KALIOUBY: And so, is the first kind of application area of the space for people who perhaps have challenges around doing these things, motor challenges or neural or sensory challenges?

SOUTHERN: It’s mostly people with motor limitations, so people with paralysis and ALS. Those are the two primary indications, but of course there are other neurological disorders that are also being explored with BCIs, and this technology is so impactful for them.

I was recently on a call with a patient who is fully locked in with ALS and uses his BCI to work every single day. He’s able to show up, because thanks to COVID and all of this movement towards completely virtual work, he can work every single day. He’s just thinking out what he wants to say and the BCI decodes those thoughts, decodes the motor intention, types it up and there it is and it’s sent through.

EL KALIOUBY: That is amazing.

SOUTHERN: I mean, that was not possible five, seven years ago.

EL KALIOUBY: And do you think the idea is eventually this will become like a consumer grade technology where I’ll be driving my car and instead of using voice, I’ll just be thinking about, okay, write the following seven emails and then it sends it off kind of thing?

SOUTHERN: It’s hard not to imagine that it will eventually go in that direction, simply because every technology goes in that direction. The question is how long will it take, and what will be the assimilation process along the way? It’s one thing for people to become comfortable with physical enhancements of their body, which we already see a lot of that happening.

It’s another thing for people to get comfortable with the idea of altering the thing that represents who they are. And so I’m very curious to see how the public will reconcile with these issues and kind of how it will be accepted.

EL KALIOUBY: Well, what are the ethical concerns — how can this go wrong? Lots of ways.

SOUTHERN: Yes, we actually established an ethics advisory board at BlackRock Neurotech, which is the company I’ve been working at for the past three and a half years.

And so we assembled ethicists, philosophers, legal experts, patients, neurosurgeons, kind of everyone in every category to sit around and talk about the issues.

EL KALIOUBY: What’s the top two?

SOUTHERN: I mean, it depends.

Are you talking about an immediate time scale or on the 30 year time horizon? Because the 30 year time horizon is what people are generally focused on in the news. They’ll say, I don’t want companies reading my thoughts and then owning my brain data.

That actually belies what’s actually possible right now, scientifically.

But in the next five years, there are other ethical concerns, such as what happens if a startup who’s raised a lot of money goes under and a patient has a device in their head that they can’t have extracted or that they can’t get updates on. I mean, those are actually the issues that matter now. But of course the media sticks to more of the Black Mirror narratives, which may be relevant 25 years from now. Where does the world of AI and BCI intersect?

It intersects everywhere. We’re using AI in a lot of different ways.

You’re using AI to decode the brain signals. I mean, you’re taking in a lot of brain data and then you’re having to convert that into sort of a digital code that computers can understand. Sometimes there are other algorithms being used to fine tune a model for like language assessment.

The ALS patient I was speaking of actually has his own voice that’s being used, and so that also has AI enabled capabilities. So it sort of depends on the patient and what the application is.

EL KALIOUBY: There’s a lot.

SOUTHERN: You actually can’t use these devices without AI.

EL KALIOUBY: Engaging with AI can be intimidating for people unfamiliar with it. So, what’s the best way to get started? And what other AI tools has Taryn used to expand her creativity? Here’s a hint: one of these tools looks just like her. That’s after the break.

[AD BREAK]

Copy LinkThe simplest way for beginners to start using AI in everyday life

So I love your posts on Instagram because you make AI accessible, and you’re always exploring these new technologies that are coming out and new use cases. If you were advising one of our listeners who are maybe not so familiar with AI and they have a fear of getting started, what would your advice be?

SOUTHERN: The most important thing you can do with any sort of emerging technology is just pick one.

I always say ChatGPT just because it’s the easiest. And just start using it to help you solve random problems. Next time you have that thought of, oh my gosh, I can’t figure this thing out, or I need to research this thing, ask ChatGPT, ask the AI system, and you’ll start to learn all of the different ways that you can apply this in your life.

So last week I was having some girlfriends over for dinner. I’m not a cook, terrible. And one of my girlfriends had come over and said, I really want you to teach me how to use AI, and I said, well, lesson number one, I’m just going to use it for the problem I have right in front of me tonight, which is that I have all of this random food, but I don’t know how to reheat it properly so that it actually tastes good. So I just took a video, uploaded it to ChatGPT. It was like, tell me how to cook all of these different food items for someone who cannot cook and burns everything, and try to make the instructions so that I know what time I’m putting it into the oven, when, so that nothing’s cold when the dinner party’s supposed to start.

I was a little more articulate when I asked the prompt, but you get the idea. It was like total dinner party for dummies instructions for my exact food items. So it’s like, okay, you’re going to roast the Brussels sprouts at this time. And then five minutes later, you’re going to put the chicken in. It made it so easy for me. I took all the work out of it. And my friend was like, what? I would have never even thought to do that.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. I just learned something. I’m a terrible cook too, but I love hosting. I’m gonna try that the next time. That is so cool.

So you also created your digital twin.

SOUTHERN: I did.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. What was that experience like and how do you put your digital twin to work?

SOUTHERN: Funny because now it’s so easy to create digital twins, which is amazing. I made my digital twin back in 2020 with a technology called our one. And back then you had to ingest a lot of data. So I think I was sitting in front of a camera for quite a while to get the necessary amount of data to create the digital twin.

EL KALIOUBY: Because now I can just do it with like a minute of video, yeah.

SOUTHERN: It’s wild. I first used it just as a fun experiment and to see if it’s possible for her to sound and look like me and released a couple videos. Now I am playing around with actually making scalable social content.

Meet My AI Clone content. Oh.

With my digital twin. It’s weird though, I have such mixed feelings about this as a creator. Because on one hand, I want to interface with people that I know are real on the other side.

However, as a content creator, the part that I like the least is filming. I never liked filming. I don’t like having to put makeup on and do my hair. As a woman, it’s super annoying, time consuming, and I’m like, I want to spend my time doing other things. I’m not a talking head. And so that part would be thrilling for me to just completely erase from my workflow. I think this is going to be one of those things where I already know a couple of content creators who haven’t filmed a single video in three months.

They have completely automated their process with their digital twins. And it looks amazing. Now that I know, I can see it. But most people, I’ve already asked certain friends and they would never be able to tell.

EL KALIOUBY: So that friend clearly doesn’t disclose that it’s an AI. Where do you fall on that line? Would you disclose or not disclose?

SOUTHERN: I would disclose. But I think once we as a society figure out how we feel about these digital twins, they’re going to be everywhere. And then at a certain point, the disclosure will become moot, I think.

Copy LinkWhat digital twins home robots and personal AI reveal about the future

EL KALIOUBY: Beyond the creator economy, what are some areas of technology or in particular AI that you’re passionate about?

I am pretty thrilled about what’s currently going on in the robotics world. I know a lot of people are terrified.

I cannot wait for my robot home assistant. Are you kidding me? I would 100%, if someone said to me right now, would you rather have a car or your robot home assistant? 100 percent my robot home assistant. I want a robot that will clean up after my messes, that will keep my closet organized at all times, that will ensure I’m taking my supplements every single day, that is making healthy food — I just bring stuff home from the farmer’s market and it chops it up and it makes it into these beautiful, easy to eat smoothies.

All of a sudden I’m getting all the nutrition I need rather than doing what I’m doing now, which is going on Uber Eats and just getting whatever is fastest. I think this will make a massive impact in our well being, and I’m just so excited. I’m so here for it.

Alright, so I want to try something with you.

I’d love to do some rapid fire questions.

SOUTHERN: No, I’m not good at these, but I’ll do my best.

EL KALIOUBY: I don’t play this.

SOUTHERN: Brain is not firing on all four cylinders right now.

EL KALIOUBY: No, you’re doing great. They’re easy. Wearable tech. Yay or nay? Yay. AI companion. Yay or nay? Yay.

SOUTHERN: I mean, like, romantic companion?

EL KALIOUBY: Okay, AI friend and AI romantic companion.

SOUTHERN: Yay and maybe yay. But, like, only with the human companion.

EL KALIOUBY: Okay. ChatGPT or Claude?

SOUTHERN: Claude.

EL KALIOUBY: You have ChatGPT write the first draft? And then you edit, or you write the first draft, and then ChatGPT edits. Both. Depends on the use case—

SOUTHERN: Use case.

EL KALIOUBY: This was so fun. Thank you so much for joining us.

SOUTHERN: Thank you for having me.

EL KALIOUBY: I love how Taryn is always experimenting with emerging technology. If you’re curious, I encourage you to follow her on Instagram where she shares a lot of her learnings! Speaking with Taryn makes me excited for the bold future AI is helping us create.

So, I want to know — have you used AI to bring a creative idea to life? Like making a song, a piece of art, or even a poem? Was the experience surprising? How did the results make you feel about creativity and the future of technology?