What Now? Navigating the Creative Currents and Technological Tides in Animation with Ben McEvoy

Prepare for a journey through the weaving lanes of animation and technology with the remarkable Ben McEvoy, a paragon of creativity with a techno twist. He comes to us with tales of his escapades in the animation industry, giving a peek behind the curtain to show where art meets the boardroom. As co-founder of the TAFFI Animation Conference and a partner at Friends+Enemies , Ben brings a deep understanding of how true innovation is fostered and flourishes at the crossroads of artistic talent and executive acumen.
Hold on to your butts as we discuss and try to navigate the ever changing future that AI has created in the animation industry. Luckily Ben McEvoy has been around the block from being a co-founder of TAFFI to a partner at Friends+ Enemies; he has a wide and diverse view of the entertainment industry.  He talks  about his experience in the animation industry; and what artists might need to do to survive the changing landscape.

Dive into discussions that venture beyond the frames and into the realm of possibility, where artificial intelligence is reshaping the very fabric of the creative process. Ben shares how early access to groundbreaking software ignited his career, intertwining his progress with advancements like AI that are now sending ripples across the animation landscape. With our guest's expert lens, we explore the challenges and triumphs faced by studios and independent artists alike as they navigate this digital renaissance, from the financial pressures to the ethical quagmires of AI appropriation in art.

So take a deep breath and take the plunge, as we dive deep into the possible future.


Ben McEvoy Socials:

The Smartist: https://www.thesmartist.com/

Friends+ Enemies:  https://www.friendsandenemies.co/


Kowh Socials:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kowhpethiess/

Website: https://kowhpethiess.com/

Youtube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQkong1ADl266quZAdp-5u5lcMJ2LwxfP&si=TpYCBn1QwdzyTjAT

Chapters

• 0:20 Begin
• 0:40 Ben McEvoy
• 8:02 Adapting to Change in Animation
• 20:53 AI Impact in Animation Industry
• 29:10 AI's Impact on the Creative Industry
• 34:30 Art's Existential Threat From AI
• 41:48 AI Ethics and Copyright Challenges
• 48:45 Copyright Protection in the Age of AI
• 52:58 Exploring the Future of Creativity
• 1:05:23 Preparing for Success in Changing Industry
• 1:12:56 AI in the Animation Industry

Transcript

alex: 0:20

Alright, we got a very busy schedule today, so we're just going to dive right into it. So he is a techno enthusiast as well as a partner at the Friends and Enemies Company and a co-founder at the TAFI Animation Conference in Toronto. I want to welcome today to Anime Universe Machine Ben McAvoy.

ben: 0:39

Alex, how, are you Good? You, I'm good, I'm sick. So, as I mentioned in our pre-chat, I'll try my best not to sneeze. No problem, no problem.

alex: 0:49

Social distancing. We're all good. So before I dive in deeply, I want to know, I want to tell all the viewers and myself how did you get into the animation industry?

ben: 1:01

Okay. So first of all, thank you for doing this podcast. It's funny. I've been doing a few talks and I've had people say, have you watched Animator vs Machine? I'm like actually, yes, I have. And so just to give you a bit of like, maybe wind in your sails, you're getting out there and nothing was negative, at least in the conversations I've had. So good for you and it's great that we're having these sorts of conversations. So I'm really glad I get to be a part of it with you.

ben: 1:30

My background is pretty diverse so it's funny. I was in the showers when I'm like, okay, doing the podcast, I got to keep it short. I don't know why I mentioned the shower part, but it gives you a sense of my surrogate consciousness. Sure, at the setting it's fine. Okay, I'll sort of bleep that part out. So I've been in and around animation for 20 years. I'm older than I look. I graduated Sheridan in 2002. I actually, like almost probably 90% of the people 95% of the people, I'm sure who are in the industry, have the same story of love, drawing, love comic books.

ben: 2:05

I didn't actually get into animation because I loved cartoons as much as I just loved, I loved the act of drawing and when I had the opportunity to go into college or university, much of my parents' sugar and I actually was going to go into music. I'd been playing cello and piano and guitar for 15 years at that point. So I was like I'm going to go into music. My parents were like, yeah, okay, maybe not. So I kind of threw around a couple of other options and at the time I'd been part of a semester-long focused program in Kingston which was focused just on the arts. This is 1998. Sheridan College was just like all over the news. I was like, yeah, people are just getting hired and getting portions right away. And I'm like, yeah, it seems like a pretty viable option. You want to be creative, I'll go in animation. It's like the way you make money as a creative person. So I actually got into animation, partly as a function of wanting to just have a career. I wasn't super, super passionate about animation much like I discovered. Many of my peers were in that program where people just loved it. But I still loved animation a lot because, as a creative person who had been acting, who had been performing music, who had been creating ideas for years with toys and comics, it was the amalgamation of all these things I loved in one form you could do all of it and it wasn't just being a director on the set. You could literally do all of it and be that person. So to me, I found animation to be truly one of the most rewarding disciplines that I'm quite fortunate to be able to practice while I was at Sheridan.

ben: 3:29

Oddly enough, I didn't ever really work as an animator. I've never been. I mean, I do animation for clients and just to give you a little correction, so Friends and Enemies is actually my agency. I work creative and production agents. Okay, because I've also got a podcast coming out which should be called Friends and Enemies, because it's a great name. But it's sort of the culmination of my 20 years of working is we do integrated production. So integrated production is where you get to do any type of production that works for the client, because we work with brands primarily and we do content for a TVO. But that's probably the closest I ever get to doing animation. Like, I open up After Effects, I do motion design. I haven't done character work.

ben: 4:08

I never really found myself passionate about it towards the end of my studies and as a teacher now I see there's always about 5, 10% of the class, who's like? I'm not sure actually. So I was in that group. But during my studies at Sheridan I had joined the Student Union as a part of like a student project early in my art fundamental year. So I became very involved with student governance.

ben: 4:31

Eventually I became a governor on the board of governors for Sheridan College as a student representative, which was transformative. I got to sit at the table with the president of the college, all the vice presidents in C-suite. I got to hang out with and learn from people who are like VPs, evps, svps at banks, the city manager from the city of Mississauga. I was meeting with politicians. It was very unique experience for me and what I learned early then was this is where I have interest, is that kind of world. But I didn't want to stop and go to finance or commerce or any of those places. I said I still love animation, I still love the idea of creation. I mean, I'm intensely in love with the idea of creation. But I knew that my value when I go back to the classroom and I see these people who are just like drawing, like this, is, you know, pre-digital stuff they're drawing and my friend Nick is showing up with, like Conte up his arm.

ben: 5:25

And you know people are just like we do these group sessions until like 2 am or like talking about stories. I'm like my role in this world is to be the person who understands the business side so we can create, and that's kind of an early insight I had was I'm going to be the guy who creates a studio. That was my goal, ok, and then I spent 20 years not creating studios, not doing anything close to that, but just like literally chasing any opportunity that felt like it would get me closer to that, and what it ended up doing is just introducing me to so many different facets of not just the animation and the industry of animation, but, you know, education industries completely adjacent to the entertainment industry Industries are completely outside of anything close to the entertainment industry and a lot of it ended up being digital. So I was working in digital production for like websites. I was helping create flash animated websites, but they were like you know, the websites you'd interact with games like video games, apps, all kinds of weird things like that.

ben: 6:24

I ended up teaching for a year and a half in India. I set up an animation college, actually with Centennial in New Delhi, which was also formative, because then I started getting exposure to a much bigger world and India is a very, very different place than Canada when it comes to everything. But you know education, animation, so that kind of blended into consulting for the colleges where I was going to Singapore and China helping figure out you know, relationships with colleges between Sheridan or Seneca or Centennial. I started teaching at Seneca as a result of that part time and then literally I just I'm a dilettante, you know I'm. My joke is I know enough to get into trouble and not enough to get out. And that's because I've dabbled in so many things and eventually realized that my role as a business side of the creative was best defined as a producer. And so I started producing and I produced posts.

ben: 7:16

I've done, you know, you name it. I've done work on, you know, tv shows, some films, some documentary work. I started producing live action for clients and for private, like for content, content, independent work, and it's just kind of all just blended together. But really the big focus and probably relevant to our conversation is it is almost always had a foothold in the digital world, and when I think of digital I'm talking, like you know, a computer is involved, right, our computer, you know, like some sort of device. Technology is not analog. Yeah, and I think a big part of that. I'm sorry I told you I talked forever, so it's fine no it's great.

ben: 7:55

A big part of it was I was quite fortunate to have parents who were very entrepreneurial, even though they both have full time jobs. When I was a kid, my mom decided to leave her job when I was like maybe 14, because she was just unsatisfied when pursued a graphic design. She was a computer engineer, computer science engineer and my dad's biomedical engineer. So like neither of them are creative in their profession, but they're creative people, she decided to stop started. She started Emotion Graphics Studio in 1995, using things like video toaster. So my mom had started a commercial studio in our living room in 1990s which to me was like I was astonished they had done like a. They did a commercial for a mall.

ben: 8:39

I was like so proud of them. I'm like you guys did this amazing commercial. But what was most interesting, alex, is they did it in their living room. Yeah, they didn't set up a studio. This is the 90s, they had Amigos and they had video toaster and they did some bit of shooting with someone and they figured it all out and I got to work for them over the summers, just kind of getting into it, and eventually their work transitioned to multimedia Because my dad's background also kind of leveraged that. Well, they were doing interactive textbooks on CD-ROMs and all kinds of really novel weird things with macro media director and Splash before Flash was even Flash, oh I forgot about Splash, so by the time I got into college.

ben: 9:17

Right by the time I got into college I was actually really really close to that already. Like the projects I succeeded in were when we started using early versions of After Effects. And when I got a job out of college, my first creative job sorry was working in a multimedia studio doing websites. So I've always had this thread through my life around technology. I was one of the first kids to have computers. We were pre-internet computer family, so FlashForge where we are now oh my gosh, 30 years later, truly 30 years later it's interesting and I think what I've realized is I've always carried a very strong interest in being technologically savvy and curious and all of my work has always had some sort of marriage of are we trying a new technology, are we? You know, I've worked at a very successful studio where we were doing work for Google and we were doing work for, like, I won a Webby Award doing like something with Google Streetview.

ben: 10:13

Where you could look is for Independence Day, you could blow up someone's house, but you know the alien mother's share, and that was to me. It's like this has always been. What's exciting me is what next, where else? What else could we do? Almost always because I feel like it's, I'm an opportunist, I'm like where else can we make money?

ben: 10:32

Where else can we be successful? Where else can I find success creatively?

alex: 10:36

Okay, now I've gone totally off the rails, so you know it's not all your, it's good, it was about to transition, it was perfect, like, all right, here we go. Okay, good, we're good.

ben: 10:44

It's like all right, it's like she's running out of air. We should be okay. So, alex, I'm very, very quickly Sorry, yep, just I'm going to interrupt you Because there's a salient piece in there. My animation industry career also includes being one of the co-founders of Taffy, the animation festival. So it's important to note that that is a big part of why I'm connected to the animation industry today, because I don't actually do work in the industry specifically.

ben: 11:07

But TAFFI was my big wedge. You know the thin edge of the wedge to creating a relationship in the industry writ large, and I've now focused outside of Friends of Enemies my time. I've left TAAFI now. We've kind of handed the keys of the kingdom over to a wonderful group of people there.

ben: 11:24

But it gave me a lot of insight into the larger world of animation, not just in the trenches but even at the studio level, the market level, and I've always felt and I mentioned to you this early on that my my opportunity to help introduce my curiosity around the future of creativity to a group of people who I think Are fantastic creators like I just love the animation community for what it's capable of creating and the passion itself is remarkable. But I'm always worried, and this is probably where our kind of our transition work really nicely here. In that the animation industry, the attitudes within the industry, having been around it now 20 years and being sort of an inside observer, not an outside observer, inside observer to just the various dynamics, I get worried that people are entrenched in certain modes of thinking, in certain expectations. Even the industry I'm not talking the animation workers with- the industry itself do that stuff.

ben: 12:22

But everyone is sort of, hey, yeah, it's always going to be like this, it worked in the 80s, gonna be like this in the 90s, and we know that that's not true. So when I was part of taffy, my hope was to say, hey, like, I work in your industry, but I'm not touching a character model or like a rig or Even like 11 minute series episode. I'm doing motion design work, we're doing interactive work. Hey, there's billboards that need animation, I'm working with brands who need character animators and I'm just a sliver of another opportunity. So For me, my, my entire career has been around what else and what next? And a I Is sort of like a giant burning meteor that just came to earth and everyone's like yeah, it's hit the ground.

alex: 13:03

everyone's like what do we do with it?

ben: 13:05

We're all picking it up and all of a sudden, like our bodies are getting hotter, like it's a superhero movie also. Oh, maybe I'm a superhero, but we don't know yet right.

alex: 13:15

Yeah, you're totally right. Like the industry has a problem with not adapting very well, because they're like all it worked 10 years ago or 15 years ago. Why would we change? And it's like well, because you kind of need change, or things are gonna happen that you're not gonna like. Like, it's just if I can piggyback off that, yeah, go for it.

ben: 13:32

Go ahead, no, go for it. Sorry, I mentioned in my first podcast, so I'd like I don't want to talk over you like it's a zoom meeting. I would challenge that particular statement only to say I think the industry is incredibly adaptive.

ben: 13:47

I just don't think people want to adapt because it's it's hard, not that it's hard, because people are. I know so many people who are willing to do hard things right. This industry is full of people to do hard things all the time. It's scary as hell to think I spent 20 years learning a skill and that skill may not be needed, and I think that, to me, is the probably the underlying Challenge that we all face is facing a fear of that change. But when I challenge what you're saying about the change thing, it's that we have changed.

ben: 14:20

You know, when I graduated, it was all pen and pencil or pencil and paper and scanning, and then literally within two years, flash wiped everything out and I had teachers were like I, this is what's happening, and other people like I just learned skills are no longer useful, like, but we didn't just adapt, we exploded. Yeah right, like it became something new. And I think this is that threshold and it's like. This is why I'm I think we don't want to have the narrative that the industry isn't willing to change. It's that it doesn't want to change, and that's understandable because that reflects hardship that's just human, very human.

alex: 14:58

Alright, so let's start speaking about the industry. I wonder if you can explain to me, for those animators or people in the industry that just don't know how the nature of it works, if you want to explain the nature of the animation industry and how I could help change or how I could change it.

ben: 15:15

Okay, so very quick preamble. I I've been teaching at Seneca College for, I want to say, almost 18 years, but maybe wrong 16 long time, and I actually teach in what was originally portfolio development class and we transitioned it to a professional development class Because my view was portfolios are very important tool to career advancement, but it's actually like it's sort of midway through what's most important, which is career development and where I start with, that class has, and that you know, my kind of my transition point is there tends to be, especially in the colleges, and attitude that we're doing art and I'm using capital A art. And it's true we are, we are doing art. The challenge I see and I'm speaking now specifically to anyone who's listening, who's like a first to third year program and any of the colleges, universities, is you are an artist and you're fortunate because you get to do art in industry, where you get paid right, and it's not fine art where you have to hustle and grind to really make a name for yourself, which is a very different world than what we do. Instead, you're learning a skill set much like anyone else, like you could. You know contractors or plumbers or you know the skill trades. You're learning a skill set. You just you happen to really love that skill right and you get to take that skill home with you and do things with it that make you feel good. But the attitude I've noticed in the colleges is often this is a self expression of who I am, which is a yes, but also a really big problem, because the animation industry is an industry and we're doing commercial art and I'm not talking about commercials on TV, we're talking about there's commerce involved. You're learning a skill, trade. That trade is useful to someone who runs a studio.

ben: 17:04

That person runs a studio is running a studio for probably two very good reasons. Number one they probably love the art as much as you do and I've no most of the major animation studio heads in Ontario and I can attest to their passionate group of people who often come from animation themselves. In fact, the kind of the common pairing I've noticed is you get really passionate, creative person and a really savvy finance person and they go, hey, let's start a studio and that's great and you know Ontario release has great reasons for people to start studio. But there's it's important to remind people that the studio heads are often very creative people themselves but they've also decided. They see the opportunity to make money. They're very entrepreneurial and the industry, of course, is about making money. We're getting paid to do the work we do so we can put food on the table where big glasses and you know have money to live life.

ben: 17:53

And that's the exchange is, as a worker use you know as a talent is nice, friendlier word you are bringing value to the table to help a studio make money. They're gonna pay you for that effort and they're gonna make money. And often the studio, if they're smart, is doing it in a way where they take a bunch of risk of front to say, hey, I'm gonna pay all these people, take on a bunch of, you know, work. It may, it may tank, as we've seen, like Netflix, but if it works and I'm gonna carry a bunch of overhead, I'm gonna carry rent insurance and all these things, equipment, if it works, I get to make a bunch of money. And it's like, yeah, okay, let's the exchange. But that's the industry.

ben: 18:29

And then the bigger industry is hey, we really need things to put on our screens, on our televisions, on our Theater. You know our theater screens. It's not because everyone's like we need art in the world Is a part of it again, like there's a reason good movies are made, great TV is made because there's art artists involved, but it's because these larger studios are like, hey, we can make a bunch of money to because audiences love going to see this and they'll pay. I don't even want to think about what I have to pay at Cineplex these days, but it's like they'll pay twenty dollars a person to come sit in the theater. We can sell them concession and we can make money. We can sell them shirts and toys and we can make money. And the television, you know, a broadcasters are what's put shows on the air. Why not? Because we love these shows. I'm sure there are people within those organizations love them. But it's more important that, hey, we can put ads against these right. And then I'm probably speaking in obvious terms here, but I'll just finish the thought for the people who are very young to this. Even the advertisers are like we want to sell products and where are we gonna sell these? Probably need, where is everyone? Like this is the world we live in, is it's all about?

ben: 19:35

When I ask my students what drives the animation industry and typically it's a leading question that typically someone, some passionate, lovely soul goes Creativity and I said no, it's like it's a part of it drives our industry, is money. And this is important starting point for me as we talk about AI, because when we look at the work we do In the commercial side as the job, the professional job that you are a part of, not the thing you're doing on your own, although that's also related we have to remember we're doing this within an ecosystem that is about generating money and that's not a bad thing, right? We just don't need to make money to pay you to do the work so you can also live like there is a virtuous ish cycle or in ecosystem of generating money and Once we, once we kind of like, once we can kind of hold this one hand, go get it right. And I can not like selling out and this is the biggest beef I have with any creative Practice like you're not selling out by making money. You need money to live. There's no purity test here. Now we can start understanding what is the implication of a I realistically and that's the talk I've been given a fortune to give a few talks around the subject I'm. We talk about a is impact.

ben: 20:53

You know, with my curiosity around technologies, my joke is always been not joke. My kind of operating principles been I wish I figured out how valuable you was fifteen years ago so I could be a youtuber right cuz it's like the people who figured that out Crushed it and I know people are doing great in you. To break down, it's like good, what's the next you to? What was like crypto, and so you know when I, when I get excited about things like crypto and about a I, I'm not like yeah, it's more like I'm just very curious about is there something here? And a I of course triggers that big time, and then I start teasing out a I as okay, well, what is it? And I've been very fortunate to be around much smarter people with me who really know their shit about a I. Are you allowed to swear in your podcast?

alex: 21:36

yeah, it's fine. It's past the ten minute mark. You're fine, rock on.

ben: 21:41

Oh, yeah, okay yeah, okay, um, you can believe it. It's one of the things where it's like, oh, this is gonna be big right, cuz I'm using the tools. I'm like, what's interesting, what can I type in the mid journey? Whoa, I think I can show you very quickly. Turn off, it's on here. Uh, no, it's not on here. My, my screen.

ben: 22:00

My background, yeah, for a year and a half, two years now was I went into wambo dreams, which is probably just not a thing anymore at least it's probably transitioned dramatically, but it was like mid journey style. It was a stable diffusion, ask Type in something, and you got just this blob of visuals and my daughter and I typed in like bird flying through a subway, bright pink, just to see what it would get, and it was just spectacular, abstract, kind of like very hard to describe it kind of the expression of a bird but not a bird, and I remember looking at that, going holy crap, that this is incredible. And I still do that. By the way, today, two years later, I'm using these tools and I'm very active about like our agency uses these tools. I'm still blown away by what they can do, and so, as someone who's thinking about what's the impact on all this, thinking about my larger kind of perspectives on the industry, start talking to studio heads and start asking myself how will this happen? Like I'm looking at the twitter feed of influencers you know, this is gonna kill Hollywood it's like, yeah, not gonna kill Hollywood, but wow, it is still pretty crazy. What's what the stuff can do? And I start asking myself, well, what is the realistic implication here? And when we go back to the idea that Animation industry is an industry and there are studios who need to make money and there are broadcasters who need to make money, whether or not they're doing it the right way. By the way, I'm not really sure I've got a whole other podcast, but late stage capitalism, sure, very, very deep use and it'll probably come up here, but I'm not gonna go down that rabbit hole. I still I got very deep use.

ben: 23:35

The truth of it is when we are in twenty twenty four is there was a boom period in the pandemic, surprisingly, where you know it went whoa, my god, everything's stopping, especially live action, the animation. Just, it was already picking up with the streaming, and the streaming itself is a whole other topic, because the streaming was just like a mass. Everyone is a land grab all the, all the various kind of like Content distributors and providers and creators is a land grab. And so everyone's like we need stuff, we need to own land as fast as possible. And so Netflix and Disney and Discovery knowledge people just throwing money like putting it into a turbine and just firing at people and that was great because I mean two years ago is doing talks for case. So everyone's like where this is not enough, people need to like your train children to help us, like it was just people like I need, I need to take this opportunity. It was a crazy amount of opportunity in Toronto, in Ontario, and then, a year later, everyone I'm doing I do all these talks with animation studios of Ontario, okay, so those same students are like we did the set up. It's like, okay, it's hard right now because a lot of work is dried up yet.

ben: 24:44

So it's actor strikes are part of the writer strikes, but also just the dynamics of the industry had changed quite substantially. Netflix had massive earnings like a massive Drop in earnings at one point are not massive, but substantial enough where they, their stock, just went off a cliff for a period, and when you look at factors like this, where, when the money stops rolling, it's something's got to happen, right, it's. You know, eventually things kind of peer plateau, maybe even drop, which is now where we are. And then you, you, so you look at what's happening in that side of the world. Well, the money's gone, so the students have to cut back. And when the students have to cut back, they have to find other ways to be competitive when the money comes back.

ben: 25:24

And fundamentally, these businesses need to think about if I'm given, like you know, use very small numbers, just make sure like a million dollars to create a series and there's other people willing to for nine hundred thousand dollars and the service work. This is a creation, creating your own work. You know the there's a kind of a cost dynamic in here where it's like well, maybe I need to lower my cost right To compete, and that's, I think, where we may find ourselves for a number of service providing studios, not content creators themselves. How do I lower costs? And I mean, let's step outside of animation for a quick second here and let's talk about late stage capitalism.

ben: 25:59

I just had a really awful experience at Best Buy returning a gift and it just like put me into the stratosphere, okay, and what I realized is a lot of large companies have two options really, I'm simplifying here, but two options to make money. One is find new lines of revenue, which is typically if you're like a Best Buy consumers, or lower your costs to operate, which is, hey, look at these self checkouts, they're great. We don't need a whole bank of cash years, let's just have one person with a phone. They can do everything. Yeah, and you can kind of see this.

ben: 26:29

We all know, we all see this happening, and this is kind of where studios have the same kind of considerations not that they all have to, but if there's not more work out there which is kind of where we are right now you gotta think about, well, the work I'm gonna get. I need to be profitable to degree, and that's a whole thing that they have to figure out. But then I also have to look for, well, how do I? You know things are harder to come by or there's lower budgets. I need to find another way to make this work without basically paying To work on the work itself. That makes sense. Like I'm not making money on the work that we're getting in the studio, why am I doing it? You gotta be making money. So they look for ways to save, which is, you know, natural at.

ben: 27:10

There's a huge conversation. We're gonna have room, the ethics of this idea, with the morality of it, but that to me is a bit of a red herring. The fundamental is, as a studio owner myself, if I want to keep the lights on, I need to make sure I'm making money and I need to look at all the various means that allow me to do that. The reason flash became so powerful Was you could do entire series of shows with a tenth of the crew, because now, instead of having people do line by line, page by page, we're going to win threes, win fours and says, like, don't need it, we have a model that gets moved around, interpolated by the computer, and that's faster. And we don't have a paint anymore, because once you made it to symbol, we're done. So you're getting rid of roles, you're making new roles, but often in the name of efficiency and so that efficiency exists already and that kind of like Desire for efficiency.

ben: 28:04

Pre-ai was there. You have production teedies who are looking at ways to Make renders go faster or all kinds of lighting systems. Like, are we doing real time rendering? Versus the whole group of studios who've been exploring things like real time production, and a lot of this is, you're either trying to boost quality to make your work more valuable, or you're trying to reduce the cost of work, whatever means without affecting quality, ideally, and so that's that's kind of the ongoing. Yeah, that was a big ramble.

ben: 28:32

Let's get to the side of things. Sure, ai does this at an exponential level, and that's the thing that matters is Ai, and I know your next question is probably at least here, so I'm gonna dot, dot dot this really quick. Ai is just like it's this. When I think of Ai, by the way, it's just maybe from a nomenclature standpoint, for I'm sure you do this with your other speakers I'm not talking about, like, mid journey. I'm not talking about Dolly or chat GPT they are part of it. I'm talking like Ai in everything that we're gonna be doing, which includes it's like I did my talks automations within the production pipeline.

ben: 29:10

There, it's like it's astonishing what it can do and it's like I'm not that. I'm like it's amazing, like these fanboys I see on Twitter. It's breathtaking, because I'm like I just can't. I can't believe how strong it is in certain cases, and you have to look at that. Go. If it's, if it gets production ready like it gets good enough production studios are gonna want it because they need to be competitive and they need to find ways to Maintain the quality but also work within an ecosystem that is right now really low and slow, and so those tools start becoming appealing. Of course, there's impacts and implications as a result of that, so let's, I'll kind of stop here for a second, cuz I can keep going forever, but it's like Ai is the one that's gonna make the most sense because, yeah, it just it makes sense financially and that that is not a small thing in our world right like.

alex: 30:05

that's the harsh reality. I believe, where it's like, ai can help lower costs, but lower costs without sacrificing Artists or work. If you do it correctly, potentially, hopefully that's the goal, but go ahead with with.

ben: 30:24

Well, take an analog for the second year, cuz everyone you know this is the big worry. Yeah, it's like my talks I show here's some tools are not production ready, but look at this tool. This is like a repology, ai automation. Right, let's think of it as automations. This AI is automated Service will or solution can take a model that you made and I tried modeling. It's absolutely I'm talking about respect for people have patients for it like, oh my god, my topology is wrong. It's like someone's gotta go in and fix it before you rig this thing. Yeah, it's like, well, yeah, I can do this really really well now. And it's like, holy smokes, that that is that is a job. Yeah, right, that's someone's job and it's not gonna be like we done, cuz we have no other choice. We've done so much brute force in our world for decades forever right, it's like the AI down, just like it doesn't need it.

ben: 31:14

so it's like, yeah, it's, that's a job and so studios are gonna have to look at that and go there's a line here, right? I, you know people may have to get laid off because why? Why would it make sense for me to pay someone the tool? Do it in an hour? Yeah, right, like it's not that. This is like I don't need people now. It's like that is a pretty yeah different.

alex: 31:38

Like I heard. I'm talking to my friends in 3D and they're like I was, like I put on. The idea was like alright, everything Everyone hates painting skin weights on a 3d model. It's the bane of everyone's existence. It sucks, it's always unpredictable and it's always like hidden things. You're like where's, why is there weights on his crotch? I'm doing his hand. That doesn't make sense and it's like it's just an annoying.

alex: 32:03

It's an annoying puzzle so like what if AI did that? Like it could just systematically go through. You're like these are the weights I want you, based on one thing like oh, yeah, that'd be great.

ben: 32:11

I'm like right, so you know, that'd be, that'd be a useful tool, and I go oh, oh, maybe four years ago, people would have been like, yes, yeah, I mean, if we didn't have mid-journey and all these things Looming around us now with, like, the narrative that goes with it, it's, that's the part that's really freaking everyone out, yeah, it's. If one of these things had come out four years ago, five years ago, I guarantee you there would have been people in that department going, oh, thank God, this made it so much easier. Right, right and same, like, yeah, like any number of these. I'll call them mundane, not to diminish the work, but mundane jobs, right, where we've had to use brute force, like skin weights. This is where the AI thing becomes crazy, though, because it's like, yeah, this is all happening at once. Right, it's like the word, the singularity I'm sure you've talked about. It's like this is not the singularity, but, wow, you understand what a singularity feels like. Yeah, it's not one revolution, it's a hundred at once. Yeah, and that's where it gets crazy. Yeah, it's your black swan event. You're like, oh shit, everything's good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, alex, if I can, just yeah before. I try to think in analogs a lot, yeah, and also to kind of say, like when I have conversations now with anyone in the animation industry or the creative industries at this point, so it's a lot of them. I Try to use adjacent Examples of like this is a problem now because it's happening to you, right, or us, yeah, right, and not to say like you didn't care when it happened to people. But let's look at Historically, what we're talking about in our industry has happened in other industries for decades, yes, and the best example I can come up with is automotive Manufacturing, where in the 90s and the 80s, all these people were being replaced with robots on factory lines and it was a problem and people were really, really upset, and Rightfully.

ben: 33:58

You know workers being like people working blue collar jobs for 40 years, being let go and replaced by robots. Like there's movies where it just became a trope and it happened and the automotive industry continued. We still buy cars, other people found jobs, people did lose jobs and you know there was problems, like there's negative consequence to that, that kind of revolution in that space, and yet the industry, you know people find new work, hopefully, people find new roles, etc. Etc. We just weren't expecting it to happen like this in the creative space and I think that's the that. It the other problem, like I talked about the colleges where we, you know automotive workers.

ben: 34:34

I don't know many and my, my, my brother-in-law, used to work at the GM plant out in Oshawa and it's like these are not people who you go like I'm so excited to do this job. It's reflection of who I am doing this job. I mean, there are certainly elements of that, but the but in the arts, the creative side of our world, we really do view what we do is who we are in a different way, and so that's that's the scary parts. Like this is special, this is art. You can't replace that with machines. It's like I think we need to. We need to kind of tease that apart a little bit and say like yes, but also like this is commerce, this is business, this is like we're not really different from a think about a production pipeline Is an automotive pipeline? It's just for creative things, right, not for vehicles. So anyways, I'm gonna.

alex: 35:21

Go on. You've probably better question no. No, a very good example, like the Bane of my existence as a parent, is to show Cocoa Mellon on Netflix.

ben: 35:30

I managed to avoid calling and I'm sorry for anyone who worked on it. Yeah, I'm not doing it for work but like that's, I know what.

alex: 35:35

I know it. It's a perfect example of like I wouldn't call that art. It's commercial art, right, it's designed to sell something and you know, keep your kids entertained while you get five minutes in peace, Sure, but it's like, yeah, that's what it's for and you know exactly what for, but you're not. You're not like, oh, that is pure artistry. You're like no, no that's, that's bullshit.

ben: 35:55

I watched Dino Train with my kids and I distinctly remember seeing like an eye blinked but the pupil stayed outside. I'm like, how did this get? Yeah, the technical glitch, Like come on, yeah, but this is just it. Like we know that that work is there, yeah, and that you know, I would guarantee you half the people listening to this podcast are probably working on a show that when they were in college or you know deep into their arts, they probably would have been like I'm not loving this show. Yeah, I'm gonna show you. You just like getting paid.

alex: 36:22

Yeah, you work on it. You're paid week by week. Walk it. It's paying the bills and I'm sure you're proud of the work.

ben: 36:29

There's a great book by an author named Dan Pink Okay, he was like my favorite author back in like the early 2000s. He has a book called Drive. For anyone who's like interested in people management and things like that. It basically talks about what motivates us. Right, it's this whole like Maslow's hierarchy, but we rethought for business owners and a big part of it is money, is table stakes in the professional environment, more or less.

ben: 36:54

So you know I come from a lot of advertising work, so you know people working the advertising agencies get paid quite well and yet they still leave in droves because while the money is great, the satisfaction isn't there, or the growth or the things that matter to people. Once money has been taken care of because that's not everything, and in the animation world, once you're paid properly, that typically kind of gets you through the door and in the. You know that's, that's a good start. But you still need the sense of community, the sense of accomplishment, sense of growth and there are other things that actually really matter to people and I have a view that because I know tons of people who work on these shows right when people who would like oh, I directed like a short horror film on my off time.

ben: 37:32

But now I'm working on this thing with a you know a bunch of like stuffed animals that talk to each other, and then I see them post on LinkedIn like I'm so proud of my work on this show and I'm like, yeah, I know you are, because, while you may not have wanted to create it, you did something meaningful. So even on Cocoa Melon, it's like you did something meaningful. Yeah, yeah. Still, the benefit of our world is you get to do something that you can turn around and go. I did something and different people will respond different ways to that, but I feel like that's like yeah, yeah, you find meaning, you find the meeting.

ben: 38:00

You find the meeting.

alex: 38:02

You're like, okay, I guess you do it all the time. We're like I'm going to take my batch of scenes. I'm like I'm like I'm like this one scene really, really good. And you're like that's, that's my worth for the week, and I'm like I'm just going to make this one scene work for me.

ben: 38:13

And they're like yeah, that's great, and you're going to find something meaningful, yeah, anyways, we're kind of a little off, we're off track a little bit. I'm not on the eye side, but it does. But but I think, I think it comes back to the reflection of why AI and the animation industry is so startling to us. As well as that, we do find such deep meaning, even in the work that we may not have thought we want to do, and the idea that that can be taken away and replaced by machine. I think it's existential For everyone, not just the artists within it. But it's like well, now, is it really art? Right? And I'm like, well, never. Just, maybe Coco Milan wasn't really art to begin with.

ben: 38:46

So when we kind of look at this as an automotive production pipeline, it's like, you know, I don't like it.

ben: 38:50

I don't want you to lose jobs, I don't want anyone to lose a job, but the reality is it happens, right, these things do happen because of those dynamics.

ben: 38:57

And when we can separate that sense of like, the artistry and the humanity and the existential piece, we can at least address one layer of this and go well, okay, I don't like it, but I have to face it and I have to be aware of it, and then I have to adapt to it. I have to find ways to do it and I have to rethink my relationship to creativity and art as it relates to my job and my professionalism, because I think we hold those two things too closely together at times. Yeah, and you need to have them. There needs to be, like you know, space between for both of them to co-exist, so that you don't feel like one. You know, the changing nature of the industry is a reflection of how audiences no longer appreciate art. It's like, yes, they're both valid considerations we have to talk about, but they're not, they don't you know? They're not completely correlated all the time.

alex: 39:44

Yeah, I think, I think you get the nail in the head there, where it's like we identify, identify ourselves in our work because we're like we're so seeing what, like how school teaches you, or just like, oh, this is art you're doing. So you're like I have to make this great, Like I don't know how many times I've seen juniors come in and do it and like I'm doing great art and they focus on, like the most menial things. Or like you are focusing on the wrong things here and you'd like it takes them like a solid, like eight months to get out of that mindset, that school mindset of like no, no, you're here to make commercial art and to get things done and okay.

ben: 40:19

And it's not to say you can't do no, of course not, I know. But it's not just the art and I think that's a, it's a challenge, and this is where we are in this conversation today around AI is this idea of art and what we're doing, and it's funny. So one of the shows that I produce is called TVO Arts. Okay, and it's I'll give you five guesses who produces, who we're producing it for? Okay, the first guess is TVO. So what we've been able to do is and so my partner is, her background is in design as well, as she has a like a, she's an over cheerer, so she's got I think she's got like a design and you know, a bachelor's in art history. Of course, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus. She's just amazing. And so when we took on this project, for me it was like great, we can do something exciting and new.

ben: 41:06

Talking about Canadian art, cause I was the brief and the mandate was how do we introduce audiences to Canadian art that's not the group of seven, yeah how do we help introduce the idea of art into, not the artist community but like to everyday people who maybe don't know how to engage with art? So that was what we started with and the nice thing was we it's kind of an art history angle. We get to get in deep and we started meeting with artists. And I'm not talking, like you know, craft, fair artists, I'm talking like world renowned Canadian icons. It's just amazing for us because I never thought I would be talking to some of these people. But you know, you really do get to meet people who live and breathe capital, a art, and it's a different. It's a different world than what we're dealing with in the kind of the commercial side of things.

ben: 41:48

And yet there's so many shared similarities and the passion is so similar and what you meet, what you find with these I'm going to call them iconic Canadian artists is there's a strong sense of a lot of people do great art, but it takes a great artist with a sense of like, not business acumen, but a sense of like.

ben: 42:06

There's more to it than just the creative process and practice that generates success. I would argue that almost any super successful creative, anyone like creative individual, has some form of acumen around the other pieces that matter, if it's self promotion and marketing, if it's understanding value and understanding how to demonstrate and capture value. So how much people pay you if it's opportunities looking for, like you know, those like blue ocean spaces where no one else is. This is the kind of the hidden secret that I think a lot of really successful creatives have, and that's in the capital, a fine arts, contemporary arts, that's in the commercial arts as well. If we look at anyone's created a show that's been super successful, there is absolutely a strong ability to create a good style, a good, you know, approach. That is a part of it, but it's not all right.

ben: 42:57

I kind of lost my train of thoughts where I was going to do this. But it's we'll, you'll bring it back, yeah.

alex: 43:02

So, yeah, it's, you know, like art, it like it's no secret, like there is blood in the water, like around gender of AI. Like people are very much upset especially with like the new leaks, where I think it was like, like if it was a discord group, like a screen captured of it was engineer AI engineers use using people's names as styles and then put that into their gender of AI. So, like rightfully, people were pissed. I'm like, yeah, I would be upset too, because like that is sounds like theft to me, right, or it's it could be argued, yeah. So I guess the question is like how do we, how would, how do you think we should fix it? Is it just a credit thing, a compensation, or just retraining the model, if that is even practical?

ben: 43:48

Yeah, okay, so there's two, two things. I'm just writing my notes down. Yeah, no problem. Where we get into like the the nitty-gritty gets in the trouble part of the podcast, those are where it's like the comments section starts getting full, yeah and okay.

ben: 44:02

So this is, this is. I'm going to caveat all this by saying I still don't know what I'm going to do, I still don't have a good answer myself, yeah, so I'll give you my thoughts around this, sure, perfect, and these are thoughts that don't necessarily coalesce to something meaningful outright, but maybe can help people with the conversation themselves, right, and, I believe, will help me get to there. So we have two things we're talking about. One is theft, okay, and the which, you know, we'll just call it theft because that's, I think, the word that will resonate the most with people who are against AI, although I don't necessarily want to just consider it theft outright, but let's just contact with that. The other piece is opportunity, which is sort of like, well, what, what?

ben: 44:39

What happens surrounding all this is the nature of the world that we're living in, and I am not an apologist for tech companies. I think tech companies have caused massive amounts of problems in the world. There's a great writer named Corey Doctro, who's actually he's a Trontonian, I believe he lives outside now, but he's an amazing thought leader around the nature of the internet, like he is very much, if you know, he's almost like a fierce advocate against a lot of what's happened in the tech world Because he understands these dynamics so intimately and he knows the kind of like the, the darker. I don't see darker like the.

ben: 45:15

You know the more visceral side of our human nature and that causes a lot of this tech stuff to be everyone's so excited and then you realize, well, yeah, we're all just trying to make money and you know it's all tribalism and blah, blah blah. So he has this word called in shitification, which is, if you really tease apart the internet, as you know, the monopoly of major companies. His concept of in shitification is all these companies are basically direct to make as much money as possible, typically for their shareholders or investors, like their stakeholders, right, like that is their operating principle, and almost all large companies operate the same way. If they are publicly owned or if they have a large investor base, they are doing the work to make those people money and then everything else kind of goes with it. If helping treat your customers well is a part of helping you make money, great, let's invest in it. Or if it's cutting costs, so you can make sure there's always a really nice thick overhead to create dividends and profit. Cool, cut costs, like it all serves that. When we look at tech companies, they're doing that as well. The in shitification stuff. I highly recommend you find it and post it on your blog because it's fantastic. I'll send you a link later.

ben: 46:17

These tech companies follow a similar model and so what happens, especially like if you think about Uber, let's go before opening on, let's go to Uber. Uber did this to cabs and Airbnb did this to hotels. There's an entrenched existing model. Let's go in and break it. And the ones like yay, tech disruption. But what you need to understand with Uber and Airbnb was they got massive amounts of funding not to grow the platform outright. That's a big part of it. It was also to pay the legal bills, the fines, to deal with the cities that didn't want to have them there, to fight through and create the new regulations that allowed things like Airbnb and Uber to exist peacefully, or at least for the kind of the ecosystem they worked within to modify enough to make space for them. And so big part of their money was not about hey, let's hire more drivers, let's make the app better. It was like we're going to get in big trouble with a lot of major jurisdictions, like cities are going to try to stop us. Cab companies are going to try and like band together to. They're going to spend money on marketing to make us look back. So they're spending money just to change perceptions and change regulations so that they were able to exist. Open AI is no different. You got vast amounts of money going to that company right now, and so when we talk about I'm going to get to the point eventually about it when we talk about like, what can we do and all that stuff, a big part of it will end up being regulation. But let's be realistic here. As much as I don't like these things happening, the fact of the matter is there are tons of money going into companies like this because the people who are funding it know that there's an opportunity to make money off of it. They want to make sure that they can do whatever they can to make the regulations favorable, and so they're going to go ahead and push through either way, and inevitably we're going to find ourselves in the other side of this debacle, not with AI going away, but with AI being boxed in with some sort of regulations.

ben: 48:08

This then kind of draws us back into the copyright question Open AI and all these models, a large amount of these models. There are models that have been trained a little bit more on the kind of the right side of let's call it like copyright theft, of copyright infringement. They use massive, massive databases which were absolutely full of copyright. You can see, the New York Times thing right now is basically making it very clear there is vast amounts of copyright and, in fact, open AI has basically said we couldn't do this if we didn't have access to that. We couldn't do this on public domain alone. So it's like, yeah, they did it right.

ben: 48:45

And this is where my thoughts become ill formed, because they shouldn't have.

ben: 48:52

Pandora's box has been filled with everyone else's stuff and opened, and the larger, larger world doesn't really care as much about the copyright as we do. That's not an excuse. It's not a reason to go okay, but you have to understand like we are like a 1% of the world concerned with copyright or the artists who own that copyright, and then there's a large group of people who don't really care. This is the same group of people who have no problem downloading albums in the 90s from LimeWire and Napster. These are the same people who have no problem with all listening to Spotify and getting all their music basically for $20 a month. The larger audience doesn't really, or the larger world doesn't really care as much. And so we're in a place where we need to figure out well, this sucks big time Because, yeah, you know, someone spent a long time creating a look and then building a brand around it, and building life around it and having it just someone go hey, it's mine, I'm putting it into a model.

ben: 49:54

And then now you got these dopes over on Discord going.

ben: 49:58

now look at how great I am Right and I'm going to talk with the AI artist in a second, because I do have views that are probably going to be annoying, but it's like I would be pissed if that happened. You should be pissed. It was happening. How do we do something about it? I don't know, and this is where I kind of hit a wall. I don't know because I look at the authors who are in the lawsuit right now, like the writers. I look at gosh, like Getty. All these other major organizations are like nope, we're going to get our money. But I might kind of I don't know the word I'm looking for here, but basically, like the kind of the sad side of me says you know what I think is going to happen. They're going to settle right and then there's going to be some sort of precedence and that precedence is going to be just enough to start pushing sentiment and legislation in a way that doesn't necessarily fix what's happened. It may address what will happen, which is so. This is the theft and the caught and then the opportunity side. So I don't think that that is going to resolve. It's going to find a fair resolve. I don't. I hope we can figure it out.

ben: 50:58

I see a lot of people in my community on my feed who are very active and negative against AI, and I think that the efforts that go into that, I hope we'll start finding opportunities for us to create resolution. But I also think this is going to sound shitty and everyone's going to hate me for this, but the world is unfair. The universe is unfair. Things happen like this. We need to find a way to resolve it, but we don't necessarily get full reconciliation on it, and I think that kind of word has a much larger connotation when I when I bring it up around. Reconciliation on these sorts of things is hard and so we need to figure it out. We also need to recognize that we have to continue to find ways to then prevent it and to adapt to it. So your second side of this is how do we then what? What next? And I think what you talked was amazing. Someone talked the idea of licensing your style to models A bit of like a bit of a roundabout here for a second.

ben: 51:50

But we all have spent the past 20 years posting our art to places like ArtStation, instagram and the rest of it. How many of us properly? Let's be real, how many of us really read the EULA and went oh yes, I'm fully protected here. Instead, because the you know, the social sentiment was everyone's got to be on here. You got to be on it. We're posting, posting, posting and all of our work. Guess what? It's just there to be taken and that's not an excuse. I'm not trying to apologize that they did take it, but it is certainly very little stopgaps and preventing that from happening. So maybe we need to start rethinking how we now engage with the world and those platforms, with our, our, our work.

ben: 52:28

I think I'm surprised I didn't get heckled at my taffy talk about this, because I got heckled with something else, but you know the concept of NFTs. I'm not an NFT person outright because I think it just carries so much baggage, but the idea of protecting your work in some form. Maybe it's the blockchain. When I described NFTs to my partner, she's like I don't get it. It's a JPEG. I can left click it, right click it and download them. Yeah, you can't, because we never made these platforms secure to the world. It's all just there, just the bane of our existence.

ben: 52:58

It's like well, what if NFTs? What if the browsers all got super excited about crypto, googles and the safaris and the rest of them were Apple and they said you know what we're going to do. We're going to make sure that all browsers now have attribution to the work through the blockchain and we're actually going to prevent right clicking because you can do that. We're going to prevent right click saving on any image because maybe there's threat of lawsuit and financially makes sense or there's opportunity and if we do this, we can charge people money, whatever it is. Now you can't right click on an image or you can't even screenshot. Mac and Windows are like no, we don't screenshot because that's obviously an image. Now we've got mechanisms that prevent some of this theft, so maybe we need to be looking for and supporting things like this. I know there's people who are excited about poisoning your image before you post it up. I mean sure, these are tools that can help the artist.

alex: 53:44

Yeah, the nightshade or whatever it's called.

ben: 53:47

I think our attitudes need to change. I think we need to start thinking more carefully about how we use these sorts of platforms and I think we also need to start becoming more opportunistic. We're too protectionist, and that's not a bad thing, but it's also like look, there are people who are going to figure out hey, I'm the most popular person in mid-journey styles and I could basically package up all my artwork, create some sort of package, license it to Adobe, license it to OpenAI or mid-journey whoever, and they pay me every time. Spotify, they pay me something. Maybe it's not like millions, but if I'm the Taylor Swift of digital art, you could probably make a living off of that.

ben: 54:22

And it's not on the payments, it's also on the brand that you get to build now and stuff you can build around that. And so if you're a really, really amazing artist, people love you and I know so many of my Instagrams Like, hey, what if you could monetize that in a different way? Instead of having someone pay you a job or try to sell a script or a film or an idea, you're getting these microtransactions of people paying for your license or paying now because they love you so much they want to buy your art books or your art directly, I feel like ecosystems start opening up that we could really get excited about. So it's not about protecting alone. It is about protecting, and that's both tools and behaviors. It's also about hey, maybe you got to lean into this now because it's going to happen how do you find ways to make this advantageous and to prevent the downsides? That was a big but, I hope, really meaningful insight.

alex: 55:13

I feel like I came to some conclusion there. Yeah, it was OK. We're not a conclusion there.

ben: 55:18

Woo, we did it. We did it, alex. One last thing I'm just going to add to this, and this is where I'm definitely getting my head chopped off. So I did a talk a couple of months a month ago with a group called FITC and I got to interview the head of AI for the VP of AI for Microsoft, this guy, john Mehta. He's just an incredibly intelligent guy and everyone else on the call really intelligent.

ben: 55:42

They're not just all banging the drum, going yay AI, but there's certainly a very bias towards there's upsides to this, while talking about the downsides and there's a lot of downsides we're not talking about, like ethical downsides, the implications of society for people who maybe are underrepresented. Ai is not just about art theft. It's about way more issues and I mean, if we really want to cast the rock down the road, it's about really big issues around things like containment theory, where it's like AI is going to get smart, and ground problem. Let's put that over there for now. But someone talked about AI. Training in AI is like teaching a junior artist how to think. You still have to do the work, and that is its current form, right. But when we kind of go back a few steps and talk about like number one. If AI had been trained properly on data that wasn't necessarily copyright or the copyright is permitted we would still be in the same place we are, would we still have the same issues? Because there's still the job loss, there's still the change and disruption, it's all there. So we have to kind of maybe reconcile that piece in one way. But then we also have to look at what, when someone says to me copyright, right, we've stolen someone's idea and used it so someone else can take it.

ben: 56:52

I also want to point out that as an industry and as a practice, we are often encouraged to learn and be inspired and copy the people that are better than us. Not to say that this is like, yeah, we get, but in the style of in a prompt. It's not much different than saying I want to make this look like that show. Or I really love Mobius, right, and I'm going to do something influenced by Mobius in my work. And five years ago people were like, oh, it's so cool, kind of like a vocative of Mobius. But now when I say in the style of Mobius into my prompt, everyone's like whoa, whoa, whoa, you're stealing and I think we need to sort of. We need to hold both those things together and say yes when someone else is profiting from your work. You absolutely need to. We need to figure that out.

ben: 57:35

But we can't ignore the fact that a big part of a creative practice is about being influenced. There's a great book by Austin Cleon called Steal Like an Artist and it's all about the idea of like this is the nature of that world to a degree as well. We have that already. So while we can't say I think the point I'm trying to get at is you can't say you're pure about this thing, knowing that we all get influenced either actively or indirectly by artists we love, the problem is the compensation.

ben: 58:01

But if I'm like, oh, I love this person's style and I get influenced by it and I create something new that has echoes of that person's idea in my idea, or multiple ideas, much like we're getting with prompts, and then I turn that into a show and it makes money, do we have the same problem? Then, if I'm not using AI at all and I'm not directly saying this is that person's style, but you can get senses of it, and this is so common in films and television. It's like a big breakout hit like Adventure Time. How many shows look like Adventure Time now? Or Gravity Falls? It's just we have to recognize this exists in another form already, and so we can't just be purists about this sort of stuff. Okay, I went probably a little too deep there. That's a view I'm really trying to reconcile myself as well.

alex: 58:47

Yeah, it's something I'm tackling as well. I'm like, okay, where's the line Is it just? Is there a line in the sand? I don't fucking know.

ben: 58:55

But yeah, the sand and the sand. It has a lot of wind blowing.

alex: 58:59

Yeah, it's shifting constantly.

ben: 59:00

Yeah, we need to be very nimble, and I think this is where dogmatic thinking is gonna be a negative for some people, because dogmas are important. This is a joke someone's karma ran over my dogma. It's like we have to hold values, true, right, I think that's a really important piece of it, but we have to also not let them shackle us to a sinking ship, and that's a hard thing because we don't want to give up values, nor should we, but sometimes those values have to be considered and not modified. You don't change your values just to address the way the world chains around you, but how do you still bring those values to life? How do you fight for those values in a way that doesn't hold you in the rearview mirror? Because I think that's where I get worried. Now I did a talk where it's like there's no rearview mirror here. It's just you're gonna redefine the things that maybe you want to hold on to, and I'd call that the craft.

ben: 1:00:00

There's people who want to maintain the craft of animation, and I think about stop motion is a great example of how yeah, there's still stop motion animation being done. It's not commercially viable and so you don't see a lot of it, unless you're funded by Nike which is a joke about Leica but for the most part you're either getting funded by some sort of arts organization, your self funding, but there's very few projects that you see being commercially successful on any major platform that are stop motion, but we still have stop motion. So I think now we're going to start seeing some of the things that we do today and go this is the craft of animations, like great, we're still going to need it. It's just not going to be commercially viable. In the same way, or fewer than will the ones that are great, will probably make it.

ben: 1:00:44

Somebody like oh this is all hand drawn, but we can't do that for everything. So the hand drawn one that really, really is amazing may rise up, but the stuff that we're used to doing, that we want to hold on to it, becomes more of a craft now, and it doesn't mean you don't make money, it just means it has a different sort of. You have a different approach to how that becomes successful and it's just not the mainstream.

alex: 1:01:03

Yeah, it just becomes a niche market where it's just a very select few can pull it off through creative means.

ben: 1:01:11

So then, and there will be a market. Who wants it?

alex: 1:01:14

Yeah, there's always going to be a market. It's just the market. It's not the Cocoa Mellon market. That's not the Cocoa Mellon market.

ben: 1:01:19

And there, and just to really quick on that, though that's not necessarily a bad thing Amanda Palmer did this great talk at TED years ago about leaving her. She's a musician and an artist. She left her label because after selling a hundred thousand albums a thousand albums or something like it was too small for the label to make money and they're like this isn't working and so they parted ways. She's like well, you know, I was getting like a dollar off of every album. They're only making 10 didn't hit the numbers they wanted to, so the mass market approach for them didn't work. But then she just built or leaned into her own community of really passionate people who had bought the hundred thousand albums. She sold to them her next album directly and made 20 times as much because she didn't have to pay the label.

alex: 1:01:59

Right, and so it's like a middleman right yeah.

ben: 1:02:01

There's no middleman. So it's like I think the side of the craft is really exciting. For some people. It's a risk, right, you may not find your audience. There's also hard work. You're not just going to make some beautiful phones like everyone's going to show up. You have to work hard at building community. You have to find ways to connect with them. Again, I'm going to invoke the NFT world for a second. These guys did it really well and it's like they can create ecosystems of interest around their ideas.

ben: 1:02:22

This is actually a great opportunity for people with a good idea. If you have an idea you want to see brought to life as animation, the tools are there. Hey, guess what? Ai can help you? Right, you can do production super cheap. You can connect with audiences. Social media platforms are there doing this all the time. We don't have to invoke cryptocurrency over and over, but it's like there's even ways to create microtransaction economies for your idea. It's there.

ben: 1:02:45

So the craft becomes interesting, because maybe you don't need to be in that world anymore where you are a service worker in a studio, service and industry. You're actually a creator and you're making your own opportunity. It's just these. That requires a whole new set of skills that some people may not have to pick up around entrepreneurship and marketing but it's there and that's actually, to me, the most exciting thing about AI right now is we can disrupt that larger industry to benefit the people who really want to take advantage, and I don't think we need to disrupt the industry in any big negative way. I think the industry is great. There's really good stuff, a lot of people get jobs and there's good stuff being made right but it's also problematic. Like you have very few people who are gatekeeping the platforms. So the people who are managing the Amazon and Netflix and the they're wonderful people, but they only have so much space to put things and so much budget to spend and so they gatekeep and so everyone has to fight to get through this narrow corridor to get their idea made, and in Canada it's very narrow corridor.

ben: 1:03:39

I know people who are YouTubers and they're like I never want to do broadcast work anymore. I've built my own audience. I get direct access to the people who want to watch it and then maybe they buy stuff for me. Like I bought a Mr Beast sweater for my son over the holidays as a Christmas gift and I'm like I actually really felt good about it. I'm like I'm supporting this guy, it's going, he's got a team, but it's like it's him yeah, it's not Netflix. So I kind of like excited about this idea of like how many people I know when I was at Taffy who pitched me ideas I don't know why, because I'm not doing anything with them. I'm giving feedback. These are great ideas, sure.

ben: 1:04:12

And just to go back to my copyright, it's like it's like Legend of Korra, but right, and I'm like, okay, this is really cool, but there's already a Legend of Korra. There's a big production budget. You're kind of an unknown. So let's be realistic and you know, 10 years ago that may not get made, but if you're really passionate about it and you can get a group of people together, maybe you can make it now and distribute it, you can monetize it and you can do all this thing with these tools and you don't have to worry about having to convince someone to help you to make it for you. The money is different, the dynamics are different, but it's like now it's easier than ever for you to get it up and out the door and it will continue to get that way.

alex: 1:04:46

So then, as we were Epic rant, I'm sorry, it's okay, it's all good. So we've been talking for over an hour, so we'll just wrap things up quick. Oh my gosh, okay.

ben: 1:04:54

Oh my God, I'm sorry.

alex: 1:04:55

Oh, it's all good. So, as we're wrapping things up for someone, so for artists out there, what would you? We've talked about changing your mindset, focusing on the craft. What would you recommend artists to do in this new future that's changing in front of us?

ben: 1:05:15

Okay, there's a lot. Okay, so number one shameless self-promotion. Okay, because I'm here, I feel I'm as well. Yeah, I've been teaching skills like this for years. I'm starting up my own podcast Hopefully we can do some cross-sharing around.

ben: 1:05:31

That called the Smartest, and the concept of the Smartest has been around for me for a long time. I've been teaching it. Now I'm going to formalize it, but it really reflects maybe the best, one of the best answers I can give, which is you need to be more than just an artist. You need to be smart. So you need to know all the other things that will allow you to be successful. And I talk about success in that kind of like larger. It's not financial success, it might be personal success, creative satisfaction. Whatever it is, we all strive for some form of success. Even if success is, I just don't want to work Right. I think the people who are really achieving that are the people who aren't just creatively capable or experts. They also have a wealth of other skills around them. So I'm going to use the Smartest as a way to explore that Sure, and maybe offer courses down the line.

ben: 1:06:16

So that's the shameless self-promotion part, but it really does go to well. What does that mean? Well, it means that you're not just a person. It means I kind of see two streams right now. Maybe that's too simplified, but it's like you're either going to lean in or you're going to lean out, right, right, for those of you who are going to lean in, the leaning in could very well be I'm going to lean into production. I'm going to stay in my job. I want to keep what I'm doing happening, right. So it's like how can I manage the status quo to keep the status quo as quo as possible? And that's going to mean, well, you need to understand how AI is going to be introduced into your workflow. Are you at risk of being replaced by a robot? Sounds like a brochure Replaced by a robot. But it's like then you need to be aware, right, you can't just hope it'll go away. It's not going away. So what is your job? Are you doing skin weight painting, guess what? You know anything? That's going to be kind of mundane and repeatable, and you could probably train a software to do it, even if you didn't have AI. You should start thinking now about what next. It doesn't mean go become a painter, although I will just say I'm just going to say this there. If anyone's like I'm done, I'm out of this.

ben: 1:07:25

Look into the skill trades and I'm not saying this lightly this giant deficit of skilled talent and I'm talking like electricians, plumbers, roofers, you name it. Like I just we just built the studio over the pandemic and it cost me dearly and I have like 30 different crews because the guy couldn't keep any of the people because there's no one working in that space. So if you're leaning out, we'll start with that for a second. I highly encourage anyone who's sort of on the fence are like enough, I'm done with this garbage. Look into the skill trades. There is going to be a massive shortage of skilled workers in the next 20, 30 years and it's huge opportunity for people who really want to lean into it. So there may be a small group of people are like oh my God, that's the motivation I needed.

ben: 1:08:06

For the rest of you, if you're staying in production, look at your role. Start looking at what happens if you were to move up a level. What if you had? What if you had software doing everything that you could do and adjacent to you? What would your job be then? And start training for that job right In your head.

ben: 1:08:21

So a lot of that might include things like well, you need to become a manager. Maybe you're not managing people, you're managing software. You need to learn how to be a communicator, a problem solver, the things that are professionally important, that we'd call soft skills, that aren't necessarily the hard skills of doing the work. You may also want to start learning how these things work right, because the better you know how these things work, the more valuable you become. So what you're going to try and do is start learning new ways to move up the value chain in the studio or the organization or the industry as it changes, and that's going to require a high degree of adaptability, and that adaptability comes from paying attention right.

ben: 1:08:55

Read the articles yes, you can be mad, but read them anyways and look what's going on. Follow the weird Twitter bros, because there's enough going on here that you could probably learn it. So if you want to stay in the industry, you need to put in the time and the effort to learn what's happening and how to adapt. That's probably the big one. The other thing you might want to look at is how does this? Now? Maybe give me permission to go and do the thing I really want to do right.

ben: 1:09:19

I work. So, friends and Enemies, as I told you at the beginning is a creative and productions creative agency and production studio. We're actually distributed collective. I work with freelancers. We call them fractionalized creatives because we're not fully freelance. These are people who give us portions of time over the long periods. It's almost like I have a staff of 30, but they're all like you know, they're fractionalized and these are all senior people who've left agencies in production. They're like I'm done and they got pushed out or they left for whatever reason, and they are finding success being an independent sole proprietor, a business owner. It's like well, maybe this is the permission you need to go pursue your idea.

ben: 1:09:56

You do need to still learn new skills, though. You need to learn entrepreneurship. You need to understand financing and funding. You know these are all things that you can find a lot of great insights online. Maybe I can help you with some of these things, but that is also like, if you can figure those things out, maybe you can just leave working for other people behind and become your own boss or start your own thing, and so that requires another set of soft skills, but it also requires you leaning into these tools, because these tools are going to enable you to do that in a way that you probably couldn't have two years ago. So I think a large underscore here is you have to embrace these tools in some degree.

ben: 1:10:30

And then the last piece is if you really don't like what's happening, get involved. Right, I don't know all the different ways that we can make any kind of real change. Part of it's going to be legislative, so it's going to be hey, are you actually out there talking to people who make those decisions? Are you voting for those people? It's a bit of a hand-fisted way of getting to the solution, but it's part of it. Are you having conversations? Are you going to places like Taffy or Ottawa or wherever, and meeting with studio owners? Are you in your studio and organizing a conversation with the people who are managing the production and the budgets and saying, like, how are we managing what we're going to be doing as we embrace these tools? Because those conversations can yield probably more direct results. But you need to be a part of them and you're either starting them or you're finding the people who have started them and you're supporting them and you're getting involved in those conversations.

ben: 1:11:17

I think any of these things all require. You got to lean in, you got to do more work, you got to develop new skills. But if you can do these things, you're going to start seeing the benefits as we start finding the new path forward. And that path could be very exciting and just kind of clench a little bit, that, if that path may include your job, that you do today is no longer needed tomorrow. So if you want to be upset about it, absolutely you should be upset about it. But you can either let it happen or you can let it wash over you and lose your job and figure out what's going to happen, or lean in and say, like, how do I get out in front of this? How do I do an end? Run around the inevitability and do something that helps me? And so you know, fortune favors the bold and the brave, and that's why I think people are going to really have to be this next two, three years. It's really going to be that fast.

alex: 1:11:57

Wow. Well, this is great, I'm going to stop there. No, no, it was great. I was like. You gave me an entire Thanksgiving dinner worth of information. It's awesome.

ben: 1:12:07

It's a fire hose. I know it's so hard and this is so. Again, thank you for inviting me. Oh, there's so many things we haven't we haven't discussed. I'm going to be following closely as you post this because hopefully I can join into some of the comments. Yeah, if I'm just again like if I'm on LinkedIn, I'm easy to find.

ben: 1:12:22

I like to think I'm fairly publicly facing. If people listening to this want to talk further, I'm very curious. I'm trying to learn as much as I can. I come onto these talks, like with you, and I think I know a lot, and I like to think I do know a lot. Whether or not it's right is a different conversation, but I know.

ben: 1:12:39

I like to think I know a lot, but I don't know enough, and a lot. A big part of that is I need to know the people who are dissenting to this idea of AI. I need to understand more of why, to stress, test my own views and to expand my worldview, and I've been very grateful for the people who followed up in other talks. So the same thing here. It's like if people are listening, they want to chat further, reach out. I'd love to hear from people and I'm going to have the smartest up soon enough and maybe I'll see if there's a public sentiment that's positive or negative, as I launched that world. But you know good for you to keep this going. I really look forward to the other guests you bring on, because these conversations are super and I think you're doing God's work. So thanks.

alex: 1:13:20

Well, that's it. I want to thank our guests for contributing on our journey so far, and I want to thank you, the phantom listeners, for being here to ramble around the water cooler. Come check in next time as we talk more about the subject of AI in the animation industry. Let's find out together. Don't forget to keep your eyes on the horizon.