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Podcast Episode Summary: Business Wars - Best of Business Wars Daily | AI Disruptors | Episode 6
Episode Overview This episode discusses the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on various industries such as climate change management, fast food, and advertising. Hosted by David Brown, the episode features journalist Haje Kamps and comedian Kenny DeForest, who delve into how AI technologies are both benefiting and posing challenges in these sectors.
Key Topics Discussed
- The Rise of AI
- AI has been gaining traction over the past decade, with recent advancements leading to widespread public interest.
- Major tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and Meta are racing to acquire and develop AI technologies.
- Ethical concerns surrounding AI development are increasingly coming to the forefront.
- Impact on Climate Change Management
- AI is transforming wildfire detection and management.
- Companies like Pano AI and FireScout utilize high-definition cameras and AI to detect wildfires more efficiently.
- Pano AI: Uses cameras to detect signs of smoke or fire, alerting authorities faster than human counterparts.
- FireScout: Claims higher accuracy rates in detecting fires compared to human watchers.
- The potential for AI to save lives and resources in emergency situations is highlighted alongside concerns about privacy and misidentification.
- AI in the Fast Food Industry
- The introduction of AI in drive-thru operations aims to improve efficiency, order accuracy, and upselling capabilities.
- Presto Automation: Focuses on upselling and accurately processing orders, outperforming human employees in certain metrics.
- Concerns arise over the loss of human jobs and the diminishing personal interaction at fast food establishments.
- Personal experiences shared by the hosts reflect mixed feelings about the growing reliance on AI in customer service roles.
- AI's Role in Advertising
- Advertising agencies like WPP and Ogilvy are now embracing AI to create content more efficiently.
- The ability to generate ads based on simple descriptions could reduce costs and streamline processes in ad creation.
- The discussion touches on the implications for creativity, human jobs, and the emotional connection often present in human-created art.
Key Takeaways
- Advantages of AI: AI offers significant benefits in efficiency, safety, and accuracy, particularly in urgent situations like wildfire management and fast food services.
- Ethical Concerns: The potential for job loss and the erosion of personal interactions raise serious ethical considerations about the future of AI deployment.
- Human Element in Creativity: While AI can generate content and data analysis, the human touch remains essential for engaging storytelling and authentic artistic expression.
- Transparency in AI Use: The necessity for transparency and accountability in AI-generated content is discussed, especially in advertising and influencer marketing.
Conclusion The episode concludes with a reflection on the balance necessary between leveraging AI's capabilities and maintaining the human elements crucial for creativity and personal connections. As AI continues to evolve, society must navigate its integration thoughtfully to harness its benefits while addressing its challenges.
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This markdown summary encapsulates the podcast episode's discussions, highlighting critical themes and insights that resonate with the broader conversation on AI's impact across various industries.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:05Today we're talking all about artificial intelligence. Over the past decade or so there's been a slow build in public interest as whispers spread about the technology finally making a new to be a new to the new to new to new to new to new to new to new to new to new to new to new to new to new to new to new to new to new to new to new to new to new to new Well, the excitement and alarm about the power of this technology has reached something of a fever pitch. In our new three-part series, we were interested in the moves and maneuvers that help catapult AI forward. We're tracking the way the big tech companies, specifically Google, Microsoft, and Meta, are acquiring and developing AI technology.
0:39And we'll be getting into the ethical quandaries they face, too. But today we're taking a look at the way AI has affected three industries, climate change management, fast food, and advertising, both the positive and worrisome effects of letting computers make choices for us. Here to talk about all that and more is journalist Haya Camps and comedian Kenny DeForest. Stick around for the best of Business Wars Daily.
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3:16From Wondery, I'm David Brown, and this is the Best of Business Wars Daily, where we talk about trends, controversies, and how they affect you, the consumer. and joining us is Kenny DeForest and Haya Camps. Thanks so much for speaking with us on the Best of Business Wars Daily, y 'all. Thanks for having us. Yeah, of course. My pleasure to be here. Thank you. Kenny, I understand you just released a new comedy album and a special called Don't You Know Who I Am? Let's take a listen to a clip from your stand-up. Basically what generalized anxiety is, I would say, if I could describe it, my brain is a bad detective.
3:51That's what it is. That's how I would explain it. I got a really confident bad cop living in my head. And he looks at all the correct evidence and then just makes the wildly wrong conclusion. So every day he comes in just all cocky, hot cup of joe, just like, all right, fellas, let's take a look at this case. What do we have here? Okay. Interesting. It appears when you enter a room, people tend to react warmly. All right. They're often smiling. They say nice things about you personally and professionally. Not to mention there's always an outpouring of support when times get tough. Open a shut case.
4:25Everybody hates you. Everybody hates you.
4:31And it's the only thing they talk about when you're not around. I know, it's crazy. Would you believe this? They actually get together at coffee shops and talk about what a piece of s*** you are. And the only way to get them to stop would be if you message each of them individually on Facebook, preferably at three in the morning, and apologize for things that happened over 15 years ago that only you remember. And I'm like, right on, detective. Jenny, tell us more about the special. What's the focus? Yeah, so it's called Don't You Know Who I Am, which is a little bit of a play on the closing joke, which you will get if you watch it.
5:05But it basically, I had a friend that passed away during COVID, and he had struggled with drugs, and I grew up playing basketball with him. and I started talking to friends and realizing that there's this sort of post-sports drop-off that a lot of athletes experience that no one really talks about. And I definitely experienced it. You know, you go from sort of this daily serotonin hit playing ball and you don't realize that it's more than a game. It's like, it's how you deal with stress. It's, it's how it's so much of your identity and it's just gone. And I think a lot of athletes have a dark period and a lot of times, you know, drugs, alcohol, things of that nature are kind of used to fill the void.
5:46And I felt like maybe this is an interesting thing for me to talk about in hopes that it'll be relatable to other people that have experienced the same thing. So it's kind of that. The special opens with a story of me getting dominated on the basketball court and it ends with a story of redemption. And then the middle is kind of my struggle of putting it all to bed and moving on. I can't wait to check it out. That sounds really interesting. Hiya, you're a reporter at TechCrunch, but you've also launched multiple companies. You're in a book, directed a venture capital firm. But I understand on the down low, you have a passion of photography.
6:24And you caught anything in your lens this summer? Yeah, no, I love photography. My favorite thing continues to be people. You know, you can take beautiful landscapes, you can do beautiful all sorts of things. But people have this, like we are trained as humans to read other people in a way unlike anything else. And capturing somebody's essence or soul or beauty, it fills me with a joy unlike anything else. And yet you cover technology.
6:55Interesting life choices. Yeah, yeah. What have you been covering most recently for TechCrunch? I'm guessing AI has been on your radar. There's been a lot of AI stuff. Yeah, for sure. I mean, that's red hot in the VC industry right now. But actually, I've been looking a lot at founders that look unlike other founders. It turns out that I've been kind of tracking two trends. One is that a lot of very successful founders tend to be older than the narrative seems to support, right? The media loves a story about a Zuckerberg or somebody who's like quits college and becomes a multibillionaire. The wunderkind, right?
7:30That's sort of the, yeah. Exactly. But it turns out that a lot of really good founders have a lot of experience. And that experience you get by being in an industry for a long time, right? It's like if you're a fresh journalist, you know how to write. You have nothing to write about. You haven't lived. You haven't been anywhere. So the same thing for companies, right? If you're the guy who's been talking to everybody in that industry for 20 years, you know everybody. You know everybody who might buy something. You know everybody you might hire. that's a very different circumstance than a fresh-faced investor.
8:03Yeah, I guess there's something of a parallel in that AI is considered a relatively young field, but it's already being put to work dealing with some problems we've been wrestling with for ages. And in the case of something like wildfires, they seem to be intensifying, certainly over the past decade. And up until recently, fighting wildfires has largely relied on human observation and judgment. But not anymore. Let's check out a clip from a recent episode of Business Wars Daily. A slate of companies have cropped up in recent years promising more efficient wildfire detection with, you guessed it, AI.
8:36One of the companies is Pano AI. Last year, it raised$20 million and pulled in an additional$17 million this year. Pano works by mounting high-def remote control cameras in areas at high risk for wildfires, according to TechCrunch. The cameras can be controlled manually or rotate automatically, scanning the landscape around them. The video footage is then checked out by AI, which looks for signs of smoke or fire, and if it detects fire, an alarm goes off. Pano's CEO, Sonia Kastner, told TechCrunch that humans will double-check the AI's findings before alerting nearby fire stations, cutting down on potential false alarms.
9:16But Pano appears to be doing its job. The company said it had detected a fire in Oregon earlier this month, a full 14 minutes before the first 911 call. That's valuable time saved, but of course, this technology will cost you. A fire station hoping to license Pano's technology will have to pay$50 ,000. But fire stations aren't the only customers Pano is hoping to target. Power utilities and private landowners like ski resorts also use Pano's technology. And of course, like any emerging market, consumers have options here. FireScout is another player in the game, also relying on high-def cameras and using AI to scan the images.
9:56FireScout says it detected a 59-acre fire in California at the end of June, only several minutes after it started. Hi, I heard you got a demo from Pano AI. What was that like? It's really interesting, right? Like, as a consumer, you're used to very slick software. Like if you use Nest or anything like that, everything is slick. Everything is easy. And the demo, like at first I was like, is this it? Like really, honestly, is this it? That I was not super impressed. Then I thought about it for a moment and I was like, actually, the alternative to this is somebody sitting high up in a tower and being on a lookout, right?
10:34I've done fire lookouts in the past, like just helping out a friend. And it's kind of wild how even relatively simple technology, like the actual camera technology is off the shelf and super simple. The thing that is advanced is the AI that actually can look at this and say, hey, that change in the landscape since I scanned a minute ago, what is that? Is that a cloud or is that something sinister? And the extra cool thing is because they have most of the area covered by more than one camera, they can do extremely exact triangulation. So they see it from one camera, they see it from another. That means you can calculate the exact GPS coordinates.
11:10Like if I'm up in a tower, I can say, well, it's kind of to the east, right? And somebody else can go, oh, yeah, it's kind of to my north. But that means you have an enormous area where this fire could be. And you still don't know if it's a real fire or not. So you have to send somebody out there. And by the time you've done that, you know, half an hour has gone by, maybe an hour has gone by. So by having much more accurate cameras that can zoom much further than you can with a pair of binoculars and accurate triangulation, it means that you actually get a little bit of a technology edge. And this is a world where, you know, a small fire, one helicopter can put out.
11:42a big fire that is potentially lots and lots of lives lost and a huge resource drain. Yeah, I certainly see the advantages there. On the other hand, you were talking a lot about cameras and zooming in. I can imagine other things getting caught in the crosshairs of those cameras. Any concern about AI, I don't want to say being too good here, but maybe even going rogue? Yeah, it depends a little bit what you mean by going rogue. So these cameras, like any sort of buildings and any places where people are pixelated out. So even as an operator, you can't look there essentially. So if that happens to catch on fire, that's a different problem.
12:22Well, let's just pull back for just a moment. Kenny, I think I have to ask, do you have any kind of video security, for example? No, I live in an apartment in New York City. So, uh, I kind of, it's futile. Yeah, it's futile. I know what's going on out there. Uh, it's a beautiful thing about a one bedroom, not a lot of ground to cover, but I have had a ring system before when I, I had an ex that had a ring system at her place and, um, you know, I liked it, but, but at the same time, it's, I was, the alerts became too much. And so what ended up happening is I would mute the alerts and then I would basically just not check the ring, you know, Because it would alert me if a squirrel ran by.
13:01And at some point, I was like, I don't want to look at my phone more. So I'm going to mute these. And then I just ended up basically not having a ring system. You know what I mean? Yeah, well, too many false alarms. Certainly get that. But also, I think there are a lot of people who are really uncomfortable about the ubiquity of cameras. I mean, you'd never really know where one might be. And the lenses can be made so tiny that, I mean, what is off limits, what isn't. And the flip side of that, it seems to me, Kenny, is that we become sort of inured. We become sort of used to this level of constant surveillance.
13:38Do you ever get that feeling that you're being watched? I mean, yeah, it's everywhere. And the part that's, I mean, scary for me about this, and I was saying this to Haya before we started, I'm excited to hear somebody who has enthusiasm for the technology because all I feel is fear. It's just 100 % fear. I grew up watching. I'm like, have you people not seen RoboCop? Have we not watched Minority Report? Like, we're just marching towards this, to me, this end that's been prophesied since before the technology even was close to existing. You know what I mean? Philip K. Dick was in the 50s being like, this is probably going to be bad.
14:09and uh and here we go because we're just you know we're humans we can't help ourselves we're little lemmings marching towards a cliff and that's how i feel and you know it's kind of that old idea like how much privacy or liberty do you give up for security and that's kind of the the paradigm that we're messing with right now and um you know the facial recognition stuff scares me it's like you know the idea of going cashless i'm like what have you never done anything illegal before don't you want to be able to peel off a 20 and not have anyone know why you did it? I mean, what are we doing? You know what I'm saying?
14:42I don't need everyone to know where I am all the time. I think that's what the blockchain is for now. Yeah, yeah. There you go. Right. That's right. Yeah. Well, I was thinking about, you know, you add AI to that mix. And it's one thing if somebody can see something or make out something through a sophisticated camera and Zoom. But once you enter data and you're, you know, and you're able to make the kinds of correlations that most human beings wouldn't bother to do. I wonder, and that seems to get to the problem, right? That we, in a sense, don't know what to be afraid of, but we have this looming sense that the power here could really turn on us.
15:26Kenny, do you think that's fair, Kenny? Yeah. Well, oh, without a doubt. I mean, I had the same thing with the ring. What I know, I think it makes us more afraid. Like, I don't know if you've heard of the Citizen app, but somebody in New York was like, you should download the Citizen app. And I was like, man, here's what I learned. If I know what's going on outside of New York City, I'm never going to go outside because it's insane. Like there's almost like too much information. Now, obviously, you know, ignorance is bliss, whatever, but you also want to protect yourself. I get it. but like when I would scroll the ring thing, like looking through the neighborhood, it just made me feel like I lived amongst a bunch of paranoid, terrified people.
16:04And it would be like, is this a package thief? And then you look at the video and it's clearly just like a teenage kid walking by, you know, and everybody's just, now everybody's like a potential criminal. And I was just like, it was infecting my brain in a way where I was like, this doesn't feel worth it, man. I don't know, like lock your doors, have a floodlight or, you know, one of the alarm systems that just makes a lot of noise. I mean, that's more of a deterrent anyway. And what are we gaining by putting cameras everywhere? Is it really a safer society? I mean, it's, I don't know. Haya, what do you think for Pano AI?
16:39Do you think that there's something of a backlash that's sort of pushing against the development of this technology? Or what do you see as a future for the company? Honestly, I hear everything everybody says as scary about AI, but at the same time, you can't slow the tide of the oceans. And I think it's one of those things where if somebody says to a fire department, hey, for$50 ,000 a year, instead of people who are in watchtowers, maybe six hours every now and again, you have 24 hour alerts if something goes on, no fire chief in their right mind is going to say no to that. And so the technology exists.
17:18And at that point, it's like, well, we can't shove this toothpaste back in the tube. And now I think we're into mitigation. Like, how do we make this less harmful to people? Like, how, you know, if you like to do naughty things in the forest, how do you make sure that that doesn't get caught on camera? That kind of thing, right? Right, right, right. But that's a different conversation, I think. Well, and to jump on what you just said, like, I've been obviously so far on this episode sort of more anti. But here's the truth, too. we are entering a part of our development as a society where we have some really big challenges and we have a massive population and dwindling resources.
17:55And obviously these are powerful tools. I mean, I lived in California for five years. I mean, yeah, if you could put out a fire before it gets you, I mean, the amount that that saves, the environmental impact of that, you know, is massive. So obviously we are entering a part of human history where we need help. we got to figure some stuff out. And so if we can, if we can have these technologies help us and as long as we can do it in a way that's safe, like, obviously we have to explore it. And like you said, the toothpaste is out of the tube. So at this point, let's, I guess, try to embrace it and make sure that we're regulating it in a way that we can still be naughty in the woods.
18:32You know what I'm saying? Right. Yeah, this can seem some serious, I mean, this is pretty heavy duty stuff and we're about to shift to some lighter fare. I promise. Stay tuned as we talk about how AI is shaking up The fast food industry as the best of Business Wars daily continues.
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20:22Hey, welcome back to the Best of Business Wars Daily. Joining us is journalist Haya Camps and comedian Kenny DeForest. We're talking about AI today and how it's being used in some interesting ways, including in the drive-thru of your favorite fast food restaurant. Let's hear a little more about drive-thru AI in a clip from Business Wars Daily. Many chains see it as a great deal, according to CNN. They say it can ease burdens for overworked employees, improve order accuracy, and here's the kicker, upsell customers better than any old human can. Yep, because sometimes a human asking, would you like fries with that, just doesn't do the trick.
21:02Presto Automation is one company that's established itself in this burgeoning industry, and upselling happens to be one of its selling points. Presto's CEO told analysts on a call last month that Presto's AI automatically upsells every order, and those can be tailored to the weather, the time of day, the order itself, or even the customer's order history, according to CNN. Restaurant operators sure like the sound of that. But last month, CKE Restaurants, that's the name behind Hardee's and Carl's Jr., announced that it was partnering with Presto to bring AI to its drive-thrus. Meanwhile, rival AI company Hi-Auto has become another major player in the drive-thru industry.
21:43Hi-Auto's biggest brag? Its order accuracy rate. Human cashiers have an average accuracy rate of 84%. We should note this figure comes from the company's own blog post. But they go on to say that one of their partners, Lee's famous chicken recipe, counts a 95 % order accuracy rate thanks to HiAuto technology. That's a jump that could result in more satisfied customers and a higher rate of repeat visits. HiAuto also partnered with the king of fast food, McDonald's, to test AI in some of its drive-thrus. AI can be great for restaurant owners, that appears clear, but customers? Workers? That may be another story, according to CNN.
22:24The technology can be glitchy. A loud drive-through isn't the best place for AI to pick up on voice cues, after all. And out of 10 AI orders placed at a white castle in Indiana, three folks asked to speak with a real live human, either to correct a mistake or because, well, they simply wanted that human interaction. Because that's another thing this AI technology lacks, at least for now. Warm. And the ability to have a quick chit-chat with another person. We got White Castle, Wendy's, McDonald's, Hardee's all serving up AI at their drive-thrus. What do you make of this? I'm not sure we need something more impersonal when we're getting our food, but I mean, what say you?
23:07I mean, I don't know where you go through your drive-thrus, but where I go, order accuracy isn't what they're known for, to be perfectly honest. Before we started recording, I was complimenting Kenny on his radio voice. and I drove through McDonald's the other day and this clearly an AI came on and was like, hello, do you want to order blah, blah, blah today? And then he got cut off and instead what we met was with like,
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23:34right, and I was like, okay, I'm not being funny. I'll take Kenny taking my order as a robot any day of the week over the alternative. I don't see a downside to be perfectly honest. If I want to go talk to someone, the drive-thru ain't it. Just saying. Well said. Kenny, have you come into contact with AI at the drive-thru, or would you prefer face-to-face interaction? I don't know if this counts as a drive-thru, but I did recently see the robot barista in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. And boy, did I not like that. I mean, here's the thing. I get it. But here's what I think about. Who is this good for?
24:15People that are already incredibly wealthy. You're just automating a workforce. These are jobs for people that probably don't have a ton of other options and you're just going to automate that. But so then what happens eventually? So all the farmers are then at some point automated. So then the CEO of Burger King is just the only one raking in money and everyone else is robot staff. And then what? They just give us just enough money every month so that we can continue to buy Burger King? I don't see how the future, and to be honest with you, I guess, you know, maybe, and not the comedic relief role that I'm probably here for, but, you know, as someone who advocates for mental health and for speaking, you know, there are a lot of stories out there of people that were like, you know, I was suicidal and, um, a cashier showed me a simple kindness and it made me rethink.
25:08And that's what I worry about. I mean, the world is already getting more and more impersonal. We're getting more and more online and we need human interaction. I mean, if there's one thing COVID showed us, we are social creatures. We are tribal creatures. We need to be amongst our tribe and we need to have interactions and not to be isolated. And that's what worries me about it. And I mean, who's really messing up the order at White Castle? It's sliders and fries. That's what they ordered. Then you punch it right in. But the big thing here, and this gets to sort of part of the business model, it's not just that you lay off a lot of workers.
25:42It's upselling. And apparently robots, we are told, are better at it than humans. Although I have to say, Kenny, I would have a tougher time saying no to an upsell from a robot than a real human being. So does that sound right to you? No, I look a robot right in the eyes and say, you don't affect me, sir. Yeah, shove it up your tin can, pal. That's what I say. Take those fries. Haya, what are you hearing about this business approach? Is everyone sold on the idea that this is really going to be good for business? Well, the truth is, you know, every drive-through employee now is trained to do upselling anyway, right?
26:26And most of the time they don't. They just want to get the job done. And so I think there's this interesting thing. I think what they're trying to do is trading the amount of extra time it takes to try and do an upsell. and then they trade that off with order accuracy. And so hopefully it takes the same amount of time, but they make more money. I think that's the sell. But to Kenny's point, and I think this is actually a really, really important one, like whose jobs are getting replaced? There's so many people I know who had their first job in fast food. I worked in retail as my first job, right?
26:54But the really scary ones to me is trucking. Like self-driving cars and trucking is going to completely change the landscape. Almost 6 % of every working adult in the US works in trucking. And all of those jobs are about to go away. Now, is it safer to have a self-driving truck? Maybe. Is it more efficient for the truck operators? Probably. But what are you going to do with that 6 % of workforce? And so you're seeing a massive shift of wealth from people who already had a lot of money away from people who didn't have a lot of money combined with a lack of a safety net, no mental health care. And if you lose your job, you have no normal health care either.
27:34Like, I know I'm meant to be the pro side of this argument, but it's looking pretty bleak over here. Well, nobody's in nobody's in any corners here. Feel free to just sound off as y 'all are doing. I love it because this is, I think, bringing to the surface a lot of these issues that we haven't had a moment to sort of pause and think about. But I also think that maybe this deserves just a wee bit more scrutiny, Hyah, because, you know, if we're talking accuracy, chat GPT itself, I mean, what many people, that was the introduction for a lot of folks, the introduction to AI. Well, it certainly is not the most accurate source.
28:11And in fact, if you go on and ask chat GPT, as I did today, a fairly basic question that I figured it would have no trouble handling, you get bogus answers. Is accuracy really a thing? I mean, can we rely on accuracy as a hallmark of AI as it stands? So actually, I think for ordering in drive-thrus, AI is kind of the perfect use case. And the reason is that you have a very small, very predictable set of activities, right? If you ask ChatGPT the lyrics for a song or something else, you expect ChatGPT to know everything. You don't necessarily go through the drive-thru and say, hey, what's the population of Nepal?
28:53They don't have to know that. You don't expect that. And so because the question space is much smaller, the accuracy goes up dramatically. You can still ask them what the population of Nepal is, but they can just tell you to bugger off because they're not expected to know. And I think because of that, you end up with much higher accuracy because you know there's probably maybe 300 interactions in total that you might possibly have with an ordering chatbot. Now, the accuracy thing is true, right? The accuracy for chat GPT 4.0, which is like the newest one, isn't super great. So I think the thing about ChatGPT4 that's interesting is that we're currently arguing about a malfunctioning toddler.
29:39Toddlers aren't meant to be fully functioning human beings yet, right? ChatGPT4 has been out for less than a year, and it's learning at an incredible rate. A year ago, it basically didn't exist. So I think there is something there. The accuracy will go up, and there are different degrees of accuracy what's important. If they said, hey, ChatGPT is going to be running 911, I'd be like, hey, that's a really bad idea. But if the worst case scenario is that they give me a strawberry milkshake instead of a chocolate milkshake, I'm like, okay, fine. That's like the error rate there and the impact of an error I'm willing to live with.
30:12Or maybe I'm not and I'm going to shout out to the manager. But either way, kind of the problem space is limited enough that it seems safe enough to try. Yeah. Kenny, you raised some really serious concerns here. I'm curious though, have you actually tried chat GPT or any of these, um, AI services yet? Um, I messed with it a very little bit, but I'm just like, there's just part of me that's like, I don't want to participate in this at all. I'm just kind of waiting and seeing, I did mess with it a little bit. It is fun. Um, I have a couple of friends, you know, that are writers and they, they had, they made some interesting points.
30:47They were like, yeah, chat, chat GPT is not going to be able to, you know, bang out a pilot for you or whatever, but it's actually can be a good writing partner. And a friend of mine was telling me this, he was working on a short film and he'll feed chat GPT like, okay, two people were on a date. One's a germaphobe and one is really messy. Give me six examples of something that could happen at the dinner. And like, for those kinds of prompts, it seems to be really helpful. And it's kind of like a writing partner that you can bounce ideas off of. So, you know, I think where I'm trying to land with this stuff is it's here.
31:21Learn to be responsible with it. Don't be, uh, don't just shut it out and pretend it's not there because it's not going anywhere. So I think at some point I will sort of test the waters a little bit more and open myself up to it, you know, but it is hard. Cause I think about it, you know, with the drive-through thing, it's like a cost benefit analysis, right? So the benefit is what more accurate fast food orders and the cost is tons of jobs and even more economic inequality. Like, I don't know, man. I don't really care if a human gives me the wrong milkshake. It's fine. At least that person has a job.
31:55And so to me, it's like, again, with the wildfires, that's a great application for it. That clearly benefits society. I just don't think more accurate Wendy's orders is, I don't think the juice is worth the squeeze when it comes to that. You You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Comedian Kenny DeForest is talking with us, as well as journalist Haya Camps of TechCrunch. You're listening to the best of Business Wars daily. And coming up, we'll be talking more about how AI is disrupting industries from firefighting to advertising. Stay with us.
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34:30Hey, welcome back. We're talking with journalist Haya Kamps and comedian Kenny DeForest about AI. Just do it. Because you're worth it. Diamonds are forever. Where's the beef? I bet you can name the companies that go along with those iconic slogans, right? They were the product of lots of late nights and workshopping. In other words, human creativity. But that may not be the case much longer. Artificial intelligence is already changing advertising, and, well, rather than trying to fight it, ad agencies are embracing AI. Let's hear a bit more about that with a clip from Business Wars Daily. Last week, WPP, the world's largest advertising agency, announced it was going, quote, all in on AI, CNN reports.
35:14The agency is teaming up with NVIDIA, which is one of the leading suppliers of AI hardware and software. The two companies are creating a platform that allows clients to create ads and other content simply by typing in a description of what they want. Oh boy, watch out, Draper. This new platform will allow brands to create two-dimensional images and videos and three-dimensional simulations for advertising purposes, AdAge reports. It'll connect generative AI tools from places like Adobe and Getty Images, giving clients access to sweeping libraries of images and graphics. WPP's project will launch soon, although the company has not yet said when.
35:55WPP isn't the only agency giant embracing generative AI. Ogilvy, which reps clients like BMW and Burger King, has launched its AI lab in Paris. The goal, the company said in a statement, is to harness and build on its expertise in using AI and give brands access to AI art generators, so clients can use the platform to create their own ads and videos for various purposes. All of this access to creative materials on demand raises questions about the future of the agency model. After all, when an AI can show a luxury car or a designer ensemble on a London street or any desert in the world by typing a few words, the need for pricey shoots in exotic locations plummets.
36:40A representative from WPP told CNN that the new platform outperforms having people, quote, manually create hundreds of thousands of pieces of content using disparate data coming from disconnected tools and systems. That sounds like smaller creative teams will be needed to service client accounts. Jenny, I want to play a little game with you here because I know this sounds far-fetched, But let's imagine you're a comedian with a comedy special that's being released and you need to get some eyeballs on that. Turn to AI for PR material, perhaps? What say you? See, this is why I'm. I mean, yeah, obviously, that'd be amazing.
37:20You know, I can streamline it. It's going to be faster. I don't have to pay anybody to do it. But here's the thing. My album just came out. The album cover. One of my close friends and high school teammates is an incredible artist. and we paid him to make the cover of my album. And now I'm selling stickers and I'm selling t-shirts and him and I are splitting the profits of that. And that feels so much more gratifying than if I had just used AI. And here's the thing, I know AI would have done a good job. I would have made something cool. I wouldn't have to pay anybody. I'd make more money, but I don't know, human collaboration, especially in art, like that's what art is.
37:55I mean, it's always in some respects collaborative. I mean, obviously there might be a visual artist that works by themselves, whatever. But even so, it's the human element in art is so important, I think. I hope. I want to believe that. Maybe I'll be wrong. Maybe in a few years, there'll be a 100 % AI movie that blows my mind. I don't know. You know what this reminds me? This moment reminds me a lot of what was happening with recorded music at the turn of the millennium. I mean, where we have a lot of people involved And there's a lot of ways, too, in the making, not just the creative content, but the marketing of that.
38:40It disappears. And what you are left with is, yes, the end of the gatekeepers, but also a kind of grand leveling in that you have more creators who are now able to access platforms and ears that they might not have been able to reach. were it not for the proliferation of technological tools, like, you know, think of Pro Tools and that sort of thing, right? Haya, what are you seeing in your reporting? I mean, is there a kind of parallel here, a parallel experience that AI represents? So I play with AI a lot, and I have tried, I've really tried to make it write my newsletters for me. And in theory, I feel like it should be able to, right?
39:28Feed it all the articles, turn it into a newsletter. And it just falls flat. It has no personality. It has no soul. And I think the stuff Kenny touched on is I think for art to make sense to humans, it needs to have a message. It needs to have something that goes underneath, that understands humanity to be able to connect with it. I'm not Hemingway, right? But I would like to think that my writing is funny, engaging, adds analysis, adds context. And people read it for those reasons. Like a lot of the stuff that a lot of journalists cover, you get a press release, you mush it around a little bit, you add a pitch, you hit publish.
40:08Please, AI, take that away from us. Humans don't need to be involved with that. But for real, like fun reporting, talking to people, engaging, like it's about the core of what makes us human. And I think that talks about art. I think that talks about anything. We're like, I'm sure you've had this, right? You sit down with a magazine and you read an article. It's like, eh, whatever. I've got some new facts. Or you have one where you're like, oh, that was engaging. I feel like I knew the story. I understood the characters. I understand why this impacts - The emotional element there. Yeah. Right.
40:40Right. And so far, AI hasn't been able to do that. And I think there are some advertising type forms where AI can probably do well. It can crank out 6 ,000 different Facebook ads that are super targeted to Kenny's interest, to my interest, to your interest. Right. And so I can see that if it's just about crunching numbers, like an AI can crank out 10 ,000 pictures and 10 ,000 ads and see what I look at for a millisecond longer than any other ad and then reformulate that ad. Great. But humans should never be involved with that anyway. Hi, you mentioned something that made me think of a kind of dilemma that I think the rise of AI hints at.
41:24And, you know, it's not just the there's been so much written and talked about a rep plagiarism, for example, getting AI to do your homework and all that. But if you take it to that next level where you have professionals, say, in the creative business, and for you as a journalist, of course, it's writing that story and it's coming up with that narrative. On the one hand, I can see how being inspired by something that ChatGPT or something might spit back out at you would be a benefit. Do you credit that at all publicly? Do you concede to your readers? that you had assistance from AI or not? How do you try to square that?
42:08Because these are some real issues facing a lot of folks in the creative arts right now. Well, I think there's a couple of truths in there. One of them is that I don't think original art exists. And what I mean by that is that everybody is inspired by everything. The idea of simultaneous invention, like the crossbow was invented in six different places all around the world at roughly the same time. That wasn't because everybody had this lightning of genius idea. It was just like, it was the next logical step. And I think a lot of that happens for creativity too. Like I at some point wrote an article, which was like, hey, am I an AI?
42:46And what I meant was that I had written books that were based on ideas that were brought by other writers, other people. So I was adding something, but I was also collating a lot of information. And that's pretty wild. I'm hearing something very comfortably analog in the background, that train going past your window. Right? Yeah, yeah. There's something soothing about the old school. And I think that that's a big part of the way that the lens through which we're understanding AI, that it is something for which we don't really have a perfect parallel. I think everyone is concerned about what this means writ large.
43:27But sticking with what we were talking about there, I know recently Ogilvy, the PR company, launched this thing called the AI Accountability Act, calling for influencers to disclose their collaborations with AI-generated content. They disclosed that with a hashtag like hashtag powered by AI or some kind of watermark. One of the leaders of the Ogilvy campaign said, I want to quote here, If we aren't honest with our end consumers, then we lose the effectiveness of influencer marketing as a channel. And I think in a way this gets to this human aspect of it. And what, if anything, it reveals when, you know, we're trying to be honest with those that we're communicating with.
44:11Kenny, do you trust influencers in the first place or are you on social media much or would you appreciate something like an accountability act like that? Yeah. To answer your first question, absolutely not. I don't know if you've met an influencer, but they basically are already robots. So I assume. But yeah, I think people should absolutely have to disclose that. I think just especially as, again, it's like you said, it's brand new. We don't know what this is. There's a lot of optimism. There's a lot of concerns. And I think one way to help with that is to disclose so that the public knows, okay, this is a situation where AI is being used.
44:49Now we can decide, does this seem like a good thing in this particular arena? Does it not? You know, I think the public being informed about the ways in which it's being used is going to be paramount to sort of figuring this thing out in a way that could be beneficial and not as harmful. and I especially think like in my world you know right now a lot of my um I myself am not a guild member but we have a lot of my close friends are on strike and you know we're we're looking at the effect on um you know television and movies and and things of that nature and you know and in the future like listen there's people that have come up through stand-up I've been doing this a long time and there's just certain people that have a charisma and and a look and they're maybe not great joke writers, but people are like, no, that person has something and they'll try to hire a different comedian to write jokes for that person.
45:36Well, what if that person could just use an AI joke generator and be like, all right, I grew up in this place in a trailer park, uh, write a joke about my childhood. And then like, you know, they might be able to go on tour with that. And I personally hate that and think that stinks. And I would love it if they would have to tell people that a robot wrote their jokes, you know? And so I'm all for disclosure because, again, I think it's the only way that we can participate. I don't want tech bros the only ones running this. You know what I'm saying? Like, we have to democratize this a little bit or it's going to be a nightmare.
46:13Hiya, what do you think's behind Ogilvy's move? Are they trying to really be up front with the world? Are they maybe trying to put the genie back in the bottle? or you've heard about greenwashing and that sort of thing. Is this an attempt to sort of show that, yes, we want to use AI responsibly, almost as a kind of a show? How do you read all of this? What I think is interesting in creative pursuits and all that kind of stuff is like, I don't have to disclose that I read a book. I don't have to disclose that I had a great conversation with a friend and I don't know where that book or that friend got their information from, right?
46:48So I feel like the powered by AI thing just feels really silly. And I appreciate, especially in creative jobs, like if a robot writes Kenny's jokes or if somebody else writes Kenny's jokes or if Kenny writes Kenny's jokes, those are substantially different to me. We've been talking with journalist Hayek Kampson, comedian Kenny DeForest. Kenny, tell us where people can listen to your new comedy special. Yeah, so the special version, the video version is free on my YouTube. It's called Don't You Know Who I Am? And then the audio-only version was actually released through Blonde Medicine Records, and it has 20-plus bonus minutes in the beginning that were cut for the special just to keep it thematically tight.
47:30So I would say check out both, but the special version is on my YouTube for free. Don't you know who I am? Kenny DeForest, the 1R. I'm going to watch it right now. Haya, tell us where we can find you and your reporting. On TechCrunch, I'm super easy to find. H-A-J-E. And I write about all sorts of things. I occasionally can be convinced to have an opinion or two. So, you know, there's that. Hiya, Kamps and Kenny DeForest. Thank you both so much for joining us on the Best of Business Wars Daily. We sure do appreciate it. My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. An absolute joy to be here. If you or someone you know is struggling, you can call 988, the free national suicide hotline.
48:07In our next series, we're going back to the dawn of AI and tracking how the tech behemoths, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft battle to develop the most powerful AI possible. And on September 12th, I'll be joined by LA Times tech columnist Brian Merchant and Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz for a live stream event to discuss the controversy around artificial intelligence and what it means for the future of the planet. Make sure you stream exclusively on Wondery Plus on September 12th at 8 Eastern and 5 Pacific. And make sure to join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.
48:51From Wondery, this is the best of Business Wars daily. I'm your host, David Brown. Karen Lowe is our senior producer and editor. Produced by Emily Frost and Jessica Halstead. Audio assistance from Kyle Randall. Sound design by Sergio Enriquez. Our producer is Dave Schilling. Our senior managing producer is Ryan Lohr. And our managing producer is Matt Gann. Our executive producers are Jenny Lauer-Beckman and Marshall Louis for Wondery.
49:25In 1993, three eight-year-old boys were brutally murdered in West Memphis, Arkansas. As the small-town local police struggled to solve the crime, rumors soon spread that the killings were the work of a satanic cult. Suspicion landed on three local teenagers, but there was no real evidence linking them to the murders. Still, that would not protect them. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show American Scandal. We bring to life some of the biggest controversies in U.S. history, presidential lies, environmental disasters, corporate fraud. In our latest series, three teenage boys are falsely accused of a vicious triple homicide.
50:02But their story doesn't end with their trials or convictions. Instead, their plight will capture the imagination of the entire country and spark a campaign for justice that will last for almost two decades. Follow American Scandal on The Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of American Scandal The West Memphis Three early and ad-free right now on Wondery Plus.
From the publisher
You've heard about how AI is poised (and already) revolutionizing just about everything. We're digging deeper into that and taking a look at the way AI has altered three industries — climate change management, fast food and advertising. We're joined by journalist Haje Kamps and comedian Kenny DeForest.
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