EP 461: The future of AI-powered storytelling. What’s next and how to grow

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Even if you're a big boring business, right? Those huge enterprise companies that for decades you've just been cashing in billions of dollars, slow growth AI changes all that, right? And I think now we're at the point where everyone knows the power of large language models and how that can completely transform your business. But there's a whole nother category of generative AI that I think has already been making bigger waves in the past couple of weeks. And those are the visual sides of generative AI from recent announcements from OpenAI and their Sora and Google VO and, you know, so many different creative platforms I think are changing how companies can use AI and also what consumers want and what they expect. But I'll tell you this, even if you are a big boring business, that you've never been on the cutting edge of cool and marketing and advertising and visuals, I think you might want to listen up because I think the future of AI powered storytelling is going to completely change. And our guest today can help. Walk us through it. All right, what's going on, y'?

All?

My name is Jordan Wilson and welcome to Everyday AI. This is your daily livestream, podcast and free daily newsletter, helping us all not just learn AI, but how we can leverage it to grow our companies and careers and to make you the smartest person in AI at your company. If that sounds like you and what you're trying to do, this is your new home, our website, your everyday AI dot com. Go over there, make sure sign up for the free daily newsletter. We'll be recapping today's conversation, but there's also hundreds of episodes and thousands of hours of other podcasts, videos, written content, everything you need to know to grow, it's there, sorted by category. No matter if you want to learn about healthcare, marketing, HR or something else, it's all on our website ready for you. So make sure you go check that out. All right, Technically, we're debuting this show live. It's pre recorded, so if you're looking for the AI news like we do every day, that's still going to be in the newsletter, but we're going to get started and I'm excited for today's conversation. This is one near and dear to my heart, so we might dork out a little bit. But everyone please help me welcome to the show our guest, Eric Yang, the CEO of Topaz Last Topaz Labs. Eric, thank you so much for joining the Everyday AI show.

Thanks, Jordan. Looking forward to the conversation. Thanks for having me on.

All right, so I actually used Help as Labs way back in the day. Can you tell everyone a little bit about your platform, your company, if they've never heard of it?

Absolutely. So we're software that helps you upgrade the value of your content and make it look more professional with one click. So, for example, if you have 720p footage, we can upscale it to 4K and make it look like it was shot natively in 4K. If you have a blurry photo, we can make it sharp and usable for social media or whatever else you want to do. Actually, we've been around for about 20 years now. We started off doing Photoshop plugins for an HDR effect and for turning your photos into art. We did that for a little while. Those were probably the products that you might have used back in the day. And in 2018, we started exploring generative AI models for upscaling images and videos. And those were absolutely phenomenal, especially at the time. And we've been on that ever since.

Yeah. Walk me through a little bit of what that kind of transition has been like. Right. Because. Yeah, it was. You called it out there, right, Eric. It was the original Photoshop plugins that I was using right before I became a heavy canva user. I was tinkering around in Photoshop, Photoshop, and that's where I found Topaz. But, you know, now you have the. The video AI6. Right. The photo AI3. I think that's. That's the right numbers and updates there. But, you know, walk us through kind of your transition into, you know, providing more of these AI power tools on the front end, because the appetite's there. But I'd love to hear what that's been like for your company.

Yeah. One of the things that we think about a lot is we want to create the best tools for a category that is growing. Right. So in 2018, there were two things that happened. Number one, our experiments with generative AI for upscaling. Nobody else was doing it at the time, and in internal testing, it was absolutely amazing. It was jaw dropping. Actually, the first version that we released, it was really buggy and it was really slow because GPUs at the time weren't that optimized and it crashed all the time. The UI looked like it was Windows 95, but it worked so well that it was flying off the shelves. And with that kind of traction, you kind of know, on the technology side, that you're onto something. And the second thing is the amount of content back then was. And content creators was massively increasing as well. You know, you have all these platforms that you can get a lot more visibility by generating good content and with good stories. And therefore the value of upgrading content also started to grow. So with those two things, we sort of decided to make a transition into focusing on this fully.

So. So let's, let's fast forward to the end there. So, you know, I started off the show on a little ramble rant about how I think even big boring businesses that maybe haven't always been, you know, on the creative cutting edge, they haven't been, you know, big companies that think that there should be out there putting visual. How does today's technology change what businesses can actually do and accomplish without having, you know, a huge creative team?

Yeah. So today is the early days of what I think will be a pretty exciting revolution in content. So if you fast forward, let's say three to five years, I think we'll be in a world where any story or any concept that you have in your mind that you want to be able to tell to people will be extremely low friction and easy for you to tell. We'll be in a world that any story you have in your mind, you'll be able to put into a video and just describe it using words, visuals, storyboards, whatever, and not require a creative team in order to create a amazing, professional looking, true to life video for you to use in your business. And where the barrier to entry there will be the quality of your storytelling rather than the quality of your technical video production skills. Right. And I don't think we're 100% of the way there yet, but there are still things right now that you can do, especially on the image side, I would say, that are production ready.

So I do want to dig into that a little bit more. But first I want to attack this from another angle. Right. Topaz has millions of users. What have you seen your customers leaning into the most recently? Right. Like that's something I always like to ask, right? Like I had the head of AI at Canva and I'm like, what's the data telling you? What are users building in terms of creativity? What are you seeing with usage on even your own platforms? Right? Because I think a lot of times it's, you know, companies like Topaz where it's, it's the younger, you know, more creative teams that are using this and really on the cutting edge. Where are you Seeing this leading right now, at least even within your own platform.

Yeah, I guess this is one counterintuitive thing to bring on up on an AI podcast. Actually.

It's no AI, Right?

Yeah. So I think one of the biggest use cases of AI right now is to, how do you say, to supplement the real world. Right. It's not actually to create completely new things from scratch. I think that's where a lot of the focus gets put, because that's the coolest thing that AI can do right now. Given noise or given absolutely nothing, you can generate something that looks amazing from scratch, that's super cool. But the most useful use cases that we've seen and the ones that people pay for are they have some content that they like, but maybe it's not professional enough or high quality enough in some way. And that's actually where the dollars are right now, is being able to maybe change something about it so that it removes a barrier for them to be able to use in production or like upscale it to 4K so that they can charge more for it and things like that. So I would say right now, at least, the biggest business use cases are combining the real world with AI tools.

That's a good point. And this is something, you know, I think I brought up maybe three or four months ago that I think that we're already seeing, whether we know it or not, AI generated photo and video all over the place. Right. Like, I think early iterations, you could obviously tell, right? Like nine months ago you can tell. But today, yeah, I think big creative teams, they're, they're uploading, you know, their current video and it's like, oh, we have a gap here, right. And instead of having to go reshoot something, you know, there's tools now, great AI tools that can extend that video by three seconds or, you know, to grab a still out of, you know, a finished shot and to be able to take another angle at it or to create some, you know, a little piece of B roll. Do you see that already happening? Are we already seeing, you know, AI powered, you know, video on actual shows? And maybe we all just don't know.

It currently, at least from what I've seen. We haven't really seen much generated video in production, like on TV or Netflix or anything like that. I don't know for, for a fact, but there's been no indications in like the people that we've talked to. Anyway, I think one really interesting use case of generative AI so far is actually generating ideas. So you don't really need super high fidelity, true to life, high resolution content. If you're creating different ideas or brainstorming for a show or creating storyboards for a show so you can use AI and people do use AI a lot to to do that and generate ideas for themselves and lower the cost of product.

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Oh yeah, Cost, cost of production. I think that's something that there's no argument, right? Like it's already, it's already gone down exponentially. Faster shoots for big creative teams. Right. I like, I remember even myself, right. I'm, I'm a former journalist. I used to do a lot of photo and video work and I know a lot of times it would take dozens of hours of planning, getting certain shots, storyboarding things, reshooting, editing, all of those things. So as we look in the future. So Eric, you were saying in three to five years you kind of see this world where you can just type something in or upload a source image and really get whatever you want. Talk us through how that changes because I think that changes a lot. That doesn't just change and lower the barrier of entry for people creating the content, but I think that changes the expectations of the consumer as well. Right. Like no longer can a one size fits all piece of marketing, I think work in the future. So how do you see that kind of changing on both sides?

Yeah, absolutely. So I think one of the most important things about marketing is to stand out from everybody else. Right. And historically, or I guess within the past 50 years or something, one of the really good ways to stand out is to have really high production value, to have inspiring, aspirational content that other people look at. It's like, wow, that's really great. I think in the next three to five years that is no longer going to be a barrier to entry. Everybody, me, you, everybody listening to this is going to be able to produce the most professional and realistic content that anybody can create just based on the stories in your mind. So then you got to think about, okay, what is the differentiating factor then? And I think the differentiating factor will be the quality of the stories, the creativity of the content that you're actually putting out, which is I think a great thing to happen to the world because that's the value of communication, that's the value of content. So I think that'll probably be the biggest change where the best stories will eventually win rather than just the, you know, being able to hire a production team and actors in order to, to tell your story.

Yeah. So, you know, it's, it's obviously no, no secret how much over the years. So first with, you know, just faster Internet speeds and then social media. Right. But, but video dominates. Right. I think some of the most recent studies I've seen is, you know, more than 92% of Internet users are watching videos every single week. Right. No surprise there. But even for yourself, can you talk about your own experience? I always like learning from the people who are building these companies. How even have your kind of habits changed or consumption changed, you know, with the rise of video and all of these creative AI tools, how has it changed for you personally and both what you're consuming and maybe what you're creating?

Yeah, for sure. I think for me personally I, I'm trying to learn golf right now. Right.

Same. I'm terrible too.

I'm really, really bad. But I, historically I've always learned using books and so I actually bought a golf book to try to try to learn from it. It's like a 50 year old book or something and it was pretty good. But I think the biggest impact of course has been watching random videos from creators on YouTube that are actually way more useful than this book that, you know, somebody took years to write. And I think that's a pretty big change that has been brought about by the democratization of content that on YouTube. And that's actually super useful to me and my, my, my, my, my golf. But I think in the future that'll be compounded even a thousand times. Right. So as the barrier of entry gets Lower and lower. That's just gonna get more, more, more, stronger.

So speaking of the future and that barrier, what should companies be looking at? Right? So, you know, obviously I see like, you know, people falling in three buckets, like those that haven't done creative visual storytelling. Storytelling. Well, those that have done, and then everyone else in between. So how do all of these new tools, these new features, these new generative AI breakthroughs, right? How should these companies and decision makers listening to this very, very show, how should they be preparing, right. Their, their next year's marketing plan, their advertising, their, their communications, Right? Because things happen so freaking fast, right? How can companies, you know, plan ahead and actually take advantage and grow with all these AI advancements?

Yeah, at the end of the day, AI is a better tool. So I think the way that I see it is any company has growth goals and a lot of that revolves around obviously distribution. Whatever part of your distribution strategy revolves around content creation and getting your story out. That's where you really need to look at AI to see whether it can make you more efficient or even make things possible that weren't previously possible. I think actually the, the storyboarding part and being able to work with real visuals as you're creating the stories in your mind has been a big way that we've seen even current technology be able to help substantially and lower the cost of production. I think in the next couple of years, you'll be able to produce final content or final videos especially very easily as well.

Yeah, and there's obviously those huge no brainer upsides, Eric. You keep, you know, bringing up storyboarding, which I think is one of the best and easiest use cases. Right. Because in the end, I think there's still this piece of authenticity that I think we sometimes just glaze over. Right. Because we get so excited about, you know, the AI future of, of storytelling and all of these tools. So how can you still balance that, that authenticity that, that human in the loop that, you know, human appealing to other humans? How can companies balance that when it's so freaking easy to just go in there and, you know, go into these AI systems? And I get right now, you know, a good eye can still detect that they're AI generated, but probably not much longer. So how do you balance that authenticity?

Yeah, that's a great question. So this has actually happened before, right. So back in the day with, with film photography, you can, you know, change the exposure and dodge and burn it a little bit, but it would still look like the photo. So basically, photos were very believable kinds of things. A record of history. Right after digital photography, a couple of things happened. Number one, actually, the barrier to entry of photography became way lower and a lot more photographers started coming around. Number two, though, with Photoshop, all of a sudden you couldn't believe what's on the page anymore, right? You can literally have anything be depicted in a photo. And I think through some combination of society adjusting and people's expectations adjusting and social norms, we still view photos with a healthy degree of skepticism, but some degree of trust as well. And I think a similar thing will happen with a AI generated content future where a lot of it depends on the context and it also depends on the content, the stories themselves. So just like with big technological innovations in the past, people will adapt to the realities of an AI generated content future. And I'm personally pretty excited to see how it goes.

Yeah, and you know, I'm glad you brought up the classic example of, you know, photography going from film to digital and then through the Photoshop eras, right, where, you know, Photoshop became a verb and, you know, people were always like, oh, that's Photoshopped or that's not real, that's Photoshopped. Right. But I think society had this nice, you know, 10 to 15 year period where they could adjust their expectations, right? Where it wasn't just like overnight, you know, every single thing, everywhere was Photoshopped. But sometimes I feel that this is where we're at with AI, right? Like society isn't going to have 10 to 15 years, right, to, to adjust to AI images and AI videos because they're starting to, you know, really, I mean, you have AI companies like Runway, right, Signing deals with major film studios like Lionsgate, right? So there's, it's inevitable that it's already happening and it is happening and it's going to continue. So how do we as a society, right, how do we have to go through that Photoshop moment to see what's real, what's fake? And are there any dangers to, you know, too much of our future storytelling be driven, being driven by AI?

It's hard to predict. Yeah, I mean, there's definitely risks, I think. I think one of the interesting things that will happen in a future where there's a thousand times more AI generated content, Actually the value of real content, the ones that you actually go out with a video camera or your iPhone and shoot, it actually disproportionately goes higher the value because there's going to be less of it in relation to everything else. So I think there I Don't. Personally, I don't necessarily believe in a technological barrier to being able to tell, like what, watermarking a real piece of footage or something like that. But I think societally we will value content that we trust is actual, actual recording of reality more than AI generated images. I think if I were to make a prediction, I think society will see AI generated content more as an illustration of a concept, as like a sort of, like an art kind of kind of thing. Whereas we will still place heavy emphasis on recording reality through actual videos and images, similar to how we do right now with images.

Yeah, no, that's. That's a good point. And it's something that, you know, I think in all the hoopla and hype, we sometimes just, you know, skip over. Right. Like reality and authenticity and believability. Right. I think those are important things that we reflect on and talk about, because as a society. Yeah. Things are. Things are moving very quickly. You know, Eric, you talked earlier that, you know, hey, maybe in three to five years, you know, you might be able to tell a story that looks very, you know, looks very real and can really help, you know, your next product launch, your next, you know, service that your company comes out with. But maybe aside from that, aside from being able to, you know, essentially create a new story from scratch with. With a text prompt as an example in the next three to five years, what other area of AI generated storytelling are you really paying attention to? Right. Like as a leader of a company that's competing in this space, you know, what's maybe that. More incremental steps, maybe not in the next three to five years that you're looking at and you're like, this is a big area. This is something I'm excited about and brands need to pay attention.

Yeah. I think getting a little bit more into the steps required to achieve that. One of the biggest issues right now is, I guess we can say, call it believability or. It's very easy to tell whether a piece of content is AI generated to the naked eye or realistic. And there's some pretty challenging technical problems associated with this, but one of them is that the texture and the resolution and the sharpness of the videos right now isn't good enough. And that's the piece that we're spending all of our time trying to solve right now, basically making the video quality and texture look believable enough to where you couldn't be able to, you wouldn't be able to tell versus a real video.

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, it's I, I think we're getting there though. Right? Like, I mean, what do you see for that? Is, is that another couple, couple months, couple quarters, couple years still. Right. Like, I'm like, I follow this maybe way too closely, so I think sometimes I'm too deep in the rabbit hole. But how long do you say until something like that happens?

Probably in three years.

Okay, there we go. Right, right at that. Three to five year. Three to five year timeline. Nice.

We, we have something in the very early stages right now that can for example, take one of your old 30 year old video clips that you can barely see any detail in there and restore it to hd. That is obviously it still has some issues. You can't, it's not like you shot it with your iPhone today, but it's believable enough to where you would absolutely want to use it and send it to your grandma or something like that.

Yeah, that's huge.

That's so cool. In three years it's gonna, it's gonna be way better than it is right now.

Yeah, that's so cool. And I think that's another one of those overlooked areas. Right. Everyone just wants to, you know, make a thousand new videos for whatever. But yeah, what about our, our memories that we've already created but maybe don't look very good or, you know, don't are missing those details, the smile on grandma's face or whatever. That's. That, that's an interesting, another use case for, you know, AI powered storytelling.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, at the end of the day it's all about humans, right? AI isn't going to consume content. So at the end of the day it's all about people creating content for other people to consume. And the key part of that is the stories.

So Eric, we covered a lot in today's conversation from what you all are working at Topaz to where trends are going in the industry. Kind of the pros, the cons, the scary things, the exciting things. But what would you say as we wrap up, what's the one most important thing for our audience to know when we are talking about the future of AI powered storytelling?

Yeah, I guess I would say just try, try things out because it's about to be really, really exciting. I personally can't wait to live in the future where you can imagine anything and create professional, great looking content from it. I would be able to use that, I would use that every single day and I'm, I'm really excited for what's coming next.

All right, well what's coming next. We're always going to keep you in the loop, so thank you so much, Eric, for joining the Everyday AI Show. We appreciate your time and your insights.

Likewise. Thanks, Jordan.

All right, hey, as a reminder, y', all, we covered a lot and there's a lot more. So we're going to be recapping today's conversation. Maybe you heard something that Topaz is working on. You're like, yo, I want to see that. Don't worry, it's all going to be in the newsletter, so make sure. If you haven't already, please go to your Everyday AI dot com. If you find this helpful, please share this with your friend. If you're listening on the podcast, please subscribe to the channel. Leave us a rating. We'd appreciate that. And more than anything, please join us tomorrow and every day for more Everyday AI. Thanks, y'. All.

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