The artist using AI to sell brands | Joe Salvatore

0:00I can outsource production, but I can't outsource my taste. Like that has to come from the engineer or the creative professional. I'm actually learning now how good of a director am I actually? Because it's going to be crap if I give it a half-hearted direction. It pulls me to something that you write about a lot. Limits in my language really are the limits of my world. Except now language doesn't just describe the world, it kind of summons it.

0:21Parth Patil:In creative, the model can generate any video, but everyone has a VFX team in their pocket with like image video models today. a lot of people are missing is like not everyone has a storytelling skill set. They can create a story that actually someone wants to watch a second time. I feel that the writer's skill set is actually the most valuable thing that I was undervaluing. The token grantee program gives a thousand dollars a week in tokens to high potential creators already deep in AI across film, gaming, comics, print, and digital art. There are no tool restrictions. The freedom to choose is the point.

0:55Parth Patil:Grantees also get access to my own custom fleet of agents and an ongoing collaboration with me. The goal, to close the gap between an idea and the world. Joseph, awesome to have you here. Parth, tell us a little bit about Joseph. How did you guys meet? Why did you select him for the token program, etc.? Joseph, I met Joe about a year, a little, maybe like almost a year and a half ago now. We met at this creator studio that we work out of here in Venice in LA. We work out of a place called the lighthouse. Oh, I think I've been to that one. Yes, yes, you've been there. Yeah. So Joe and I work out of the lighthouse and he's one of the regulars.

1:36Parth Patil:Definitely like, you know, you go in, it's like, I see Joe. But when I first met Joe, at the time, I felt like I was maybe one of the few AI creators and in a sense, like definitely the first vibe coder at the lighthouse, like one of the few and then I met Joe and I realized Joe was deep in the you know his his background is more in digital in digital uh in visual art visual storytelling um and like more more like brand related like asset creation and so Joe was very deep in the image and video model space and you know you can tell because you ask someone what's your favorite model why what are your favorite workflows how does it how does it fit into like the the way we think about these these new formats and joe would be the one that i would go to with my questions about the current state of image and video and uh what the what the third order implications are you know it's one thing to generate one thing one picture but for it to fit a more cohesive kind of brand thesis um so i've learned a lot from joe over the last year and a half and uh i also introduced he's one of those people it's like well what if what if i give him an agent you know what might happen to someone who's not an engineer at all, but when you give them coding agents, when you give them these types of systems, can we turn it into, what will we learn?

2:54Parth Patil:So that's kind of like the story behind me and Joe. But what would you say, Joe? Yeah, I mean, you nailed it. I had been experimenting with the tools for probably four years. I mean, I saw a group of filmmakers in like 2021. they made a really cool AI trailer that was, it was basically a mashup between the Lord of the Rings and Wes Anderson. And I saw it and I was like, that's just really cool. I want to understand how to do that and just kind of have that creative weapon available to me. So from that point, I was just digging in and learning the tools and like playing that game of trying to keep up with all the releases.

3:34And then when I met Parth, you kind of opened me up to the agent side of like, hey, why don't you try to take a step back and be an orchestrator of these things rather than staying so in the weeds of making one piece at a time which is was like a really important shift for me and I mean you know Reed I know you talk about augmented intelligence versus artificial like that's exactly what I've been personally experiencing it's like I'm tapping into areas of my thought process that I actually didn't really know was was accessible to me before these tools. So it's just stepping out larger picture for me has been kind of the story.

4:15So what was the first thing you saw the movie? What was the first thing you started diving into like on your kind of AI journey? Yeah, image generation. I would say mid-journey. The creative tool was the earliest thing, just throwing things out there. It was purely creative curiosity. There was no other reason for me to be using it other than that. And, you know, as I dug into that, I wanted to know the other tools that were coming out. I wanted to tap into the video capabilities. So it kind of just, it was a sandbox for me. And now it's to the point where I can functionally apply it to my career, which is, you know, I make content for brands.

4:56um so now i'm at the point where that's evolved to i am running automated static ad creation through codex thank you parth um but yeah that was the start it was image generation was the start yeah it was very much like i said just keeping up with all the tools what do these image models do what do these video models do and it's really only been recent where i've been able to to say, okay, the real skill set here is my articulation of my creative ideas. And I'm actually learning now how good of a director am I actually, because it's going to be crap if I give it a, you know, a half-hearted direction.

5:40You know, I think it built out, it really did build out from how do I prompt for a specific image that I want? And how do I How do I control the image? And then how do I make a group of images? And then it went into, okay, how do I make 200? So, you know, being able to set those structures of here is the creative process that Codex needs to go through. It's a brief. It is a, we're extracting all the different pieces of the brand, important elements. So it's kind of like, it feels like it was building a house for me. Like the bottom floor was just do one and then do two and then expand from there.

6:19So I don't know if that answers the question, but it was a gradual process for me.

6:25Parth Patil:Yeah. So you feel a lot of, it's like starting off and like generating one image, but then moving towards creating systems that are cohesive or like a consistent kind of aesthetic, a consistent universe is kind of like where you've kind of moved towards. Is that the kind of director approach is like having a broader vision across the set of generations? Yeah, yeah, I think so. And, you know, to even answer that question deeper of like, okay, how do you get to the automations? I think there are really good tools available to see what that workflow behind the scenes looks like. like node-based workflows like figma weavy i think that is the foot in the door for a lot of creative people marketers in general to understand like okay if i can see that this node goes here this node goes here and i end up with 50 different images coming from one input if i do that node-based workflow enough then i can say okay wait a second i don't even really need the node-based workflow anymore.

7:27I can just do that in, in codex or Claude or perplexity because now I understand in my brain, I see the path there and I know what it is supposed to look like and the, the, the points it needs to hit on the way to my output. Right.

7:44Parth Patil:And this is like chaining multiple models together and multiple like feedback rounds together. So it's more like the final output has a bunch of intermediary steps, it's not just one prompt or one generation. It's like a orchestration of this, many of these different models, right? A hundred percent. And in terms of being a director, a conductor, what are some of the kind of skills and insights that you've gleaned that you would kind of give as, you know, prompts, pun somewhat deliberately intended, to other people who would start this journey? Well, I think like macro level, the constraint in prompting, I guess, produces better results.

8:26The more room you give it, the more frustrated you're probably going to get down the road. You know, for someone building it from the ground up on their own, I would say lay out specifically what comprises of a good image for you. And that's the base level starting point. I don't know if that answers your question, Reed. Well, it's a beginning. It's the first part of the prompt, it's also kind of like, for example, when I'm answering it, but I'm curious, very curious about your answer, is like, oh, well, part of the thing is to think about like these AIs are kind of good role takers. So prompt it to a role.

9:01Like say, you know, like when I was writing Super Agency, it was like, okay, you know, be a deep historian of technology. What and what I'm saying is right and wrong. What would you elaborate or argue against it? you know, like that kind of thing as a way of kind of elucidating better kind of deeper points. But you're kind of artist, you know, kind of, you know, starting as an artist and a creator more than a coder. You know, this kind of conducting and directing and orchestration, I think is exactly right. But it's kind of like, how do we get people into that mindset? That's the reason why I was, you know, kind of, you know, prompting you on this.

9:45Yes, yes. No, it's funny you mentioned it. I forget about those steps of the process sometimes and it's become intuitive. But yes, anytime that I'm going to go and build an image set, you know, if I wanted to make headshots, like you are an expert editorial photographer in the style, inspired by the style of Platone, like famous magazine photographer. And then, yeah, it's basically, I think what we probably call that is meta-prompting, right? Like giving it high-level directives, what to do, what not to do, creating context for it. You know, if there's a product, creating context for that product.

10:25So it really is, in a sense, just a creative brief document, whether it's making imagery or writing a book. I think that high level direction of here's who you are. This is what you must do. This is what you can't do. That like is the right term latency that decreases the latency of the potential spread of information it's going to give you. So we're just compacting with that creative brief. The more specific we can get with our language up front, then everything else is downstream after that.

10:58Parth Patil:One of my favorite things about working with Joe is that he exists in this creative space, in a creative headspace, in a creative domain. And before I met Joe, most of my work and exploration has been in the objective spaces. Like you tell AI to build an app and it's like, okay, does the app run? Okay, it's pretty obvious if it succeeds or fails. Did it build the feature right? It's like a yes or no. But that's not the case in creative work. It's not like one thing is better than another. It's subjective. It requires someone who's seen many things to know what good looks like. And this is something that I wanted to unpack with you because I work with agents and a lot of times I can just bark at them and be like, oh, this doesn't work.

11:42Parth Patil:Go fix it. But it's different in creative, right? Because why something works or doesn't work is unique to the person who's creating it. So what would you say is counterintuitive about working with agents, co-pilot type systems on creative work in subjective spaces where it's not obvious what good or bad is? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think the agent has no idea, no idea if the work is actually good. Like like if it's making a picture or a static print ad, it's going to hand you the output and be like, this looks great. with the same confidence of, you know, whether it nailed it or it produced slop. It's interesting to see that and realize that, okay, like I can outsource production, but I can't outsource my taste.

12:28So at least for now, like that has to come from the engineer or the creative professional, or, um, you know, we have to intervene in that, that part of the process.

12:39Parth Patil:And what would you say? I was like, like, I know a lot of people are talking about taste, but what would you say is how you develop taste? Like how does someone develop taste? Yeah, I think it's really just like creative repetitions. Like the pre-production process for me has become more important. Looking at Cosmos, different designers, looking at magazines, looking at old print ads, you know, looking at Pinterest. Like getting a clear idea and cohesive theme in my inspiration, being able to communicate that so that that's the output I'm getting. So it really, it's making me go through the already existing production process just even more precisely.

13:21So Joseph, you've worked with all of these tools, Leading Edge, Codex, Claude, Hermes. So walk us through a project of your choice where this kind of created an entirely new workflow and go into some of the details of it. Right now, I'm working for a brand called Ketone IQ. It's an extragynous ketone beverage. I've tried it. Oh, really? What do you think? It's good. It's kind of a good brain energy shot without sugar. Yeah. That's it. I'm going to use that as an ad read. Yes. Right now, I'm set up with Hermes agents, and I use Codex for creative work or Claude. But for this scenario, let's say Codex.

14:11Hermes, and I haven't fully tapped into the capabilities of it, but I use it for research. So that would be step one. I went into Hermes and I said, hey, I want to pull deep research on 20 different successful static or print advertising styles that have proven across time. from the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and on to social media marketing today. What kind of information can we use as case studies, pull, and prove that these templates will work in a sale of a product today? So I want to generate 20 templates that I can look at and use for Ketone IQ sale coming up. So basically what it did is it went and it did research and answered the questions of here's why this might work.

15:02Here's why it won't work. Here's what you should change. And here's the template description. So I then took that into Codex where I already am connected to creative tools through file.ai. I like to use GPT image too right now. I think it's one of the better ones. And I give it my product. So the little shot bottle. And I also in Codex create some copy, some marketing copy for that campaign. So we have our templates, we have our product, and we have our copy for the sale. And basically I start off small. I have 20 templates, but I want to just do a run of two or three. Like let's select template one through three.

15:46Let's use some variation of this copy that I've supplied to you. And, um, let's go through our image generation workflow because I already have skills set where it's basically a creative image director. So it's going to go through my skill. It's pulling all of those elements, template one, product, copy, and I just let it go and give it a grade at the end when it delivers it to me. Once I got a couple rolling, I said, okay, let's run the full flight of templates and give me 10 different variations of each template. And I just let it run overnight and it was finishing up its generation when I woke up in the morning.

16:27Parth Patil:Yeah, that's, that's incredible. And you've like scaled a system around your, your direction of how you think about the, the, the brand media creation process. Yeah. Yeah. And I just, that just comes out of, again, creative curiosity. It does, I'm not driven by fear around this stuff. And I know that's strange in the creative space because there's a lot of pushback on, you know, creative tools and AI. I think it's just cool. Like I, I haven't been doing it out of like the need for survival. Like I've just been doing it because I think it's fun. Yeah. So if I can add value because of this creative exploration, awesome.

17:06Parth Patil:And one thing I've noticed about how you interact with the, I mean, of course you have the codex and that's, that's one piece, but Joe and I are in a, essentially we're in a telegram chat with one of our Hermes agents. Actually, Reid, you've talked to this agent, but it's one of our most creative agents. Why do I call it the most creative agent? I think it's because of the few people it's interacted with. It works with me on graphic novels. Even Joe has had it produce a graphic novel, but then now it's gaining a bunch of abilities around how Joe thinks about ad creation and asset and media positioning.

17:38Parth Patil:And so I feel that this agent is a reflection of all the people it's interacting with. It's learning some stuff from me. It's learning some stuff from Joe. and that feels like the beginning of this kind of collective intelligence like the agent that is at the core of the team of Parth and Joe kind of gets superpowers from both of us but then can bring that third lens to the to the team and then you're able to port those skills and abilities to other agents in your network right now it's manual like he'll be like okay you know package that as a skill send it to me and then he can work with codex using that new baseline ability I really feel that this like the diffusion of skills between people and agents is something that I've learned working with Joe over the last year.

18:18Yeah, dude. I mean, it's, it's been quite a resource to be able to just open up a telegram chat and just brain dump and get really, really anything that I want from that, the brief that we've created, a morning brief. Another example, Reed is like, I wanted to create a newsletter for Parth and I to be delivered and scheduled at 8am every morning. and the prompt was something along the lines of, hey, tell us what's been going on in the AI space and tech space in the last 24 to 48 hours. Not only that, but your goal as a newsletter for us is to be a futurescaper. So I don't want you to give me information that is, yeah, it's the news, but what does it mean?

19:00What's coming? And how can we look at this information as something that'll inform future releases or things that are coming down the pipeline or trends. So it delivers us that at 8 a.m. every morning. I think working on projects like that has just been like, that's continued to unlock my language further of like, oh, here's how I can think differently.

19:23Parth Patil:No, it's incredible. It's like every day I just, I open my phone and it's like, oh, we got the latest news report and I'm reading it and I'm just like, this is crazy. Like you're just passively more amplified and you're like, okay, what does this mean? Like the agent doing a little bit of that pre-thinking of like, where does this mean? What does this, where does this go? What does this mean? Helps us think about the future and plan, especially in like, I don't think you can keep up with AI without AI. Like it's, we're at that point now. So Joe, what is one creative skill that you think matters more now, not less because of AI?

19:57Yeah, I think it's clear articulation of ideas, whether you're in a creative field or a tech field, I think it's a linguistic skill. Yeah, just being able to speak in a way that my ideas are clearly communicated. It's interesting because the more reps I get doing that, the more I see my communication is clear in like photo shoot settings or in settings that I'm directing. It's having the reverse of what people might think it actually does, which it's actually increasing my efficiency in human communication. And, yeah, also just giving me those repetitions day in and day out with getting better output with these tools.

20:40So, yeah, I mean, it's what creative directors always have to do with humans anyway. But AI just made the gap between a sloppy brief and a tight brief much more visible. Right. So I have two kind of which may not seem apparently, but they are related questions. So one of them is, you know, the kind of the tool, habit or workflow that actually you had to kind of push yourself to get into and didn't kind of come naturally from step one, but was really important to do. And then the other one is how does this play in the multiplayer game? Like when you're working with other people, like not just the amplification of yourself, but like in, you know, AI in the multiplayer game.

21:20Yeah, I think for the first one, it took a while for the running automations to click for me because I'm very visual. That's how I've always learned. And I needed to see it first before I could go in and just tell an agent, take me through this process. So I really do think that was an evolution of using the tools first, seeing what they're capable of. Okay, now I can see it in my brain. Now I'm going to go here and do it and I can see it happening. but it's kind of behind the box. So it was automated workflows. And now I've kind of unlocked that by doing the repetitions up front. You know, in terms of the multiplayer, I'm dealing with that.

22:01I'm figuring that out right now. And, you know, I'm doing some consulting for brands that want to learn about these things and bring them into their marketing process. And for me, Reed, it's showing them weavy workflows. It seems to be that light bulbs go off because I I think a lot of people have the same position as I did. It's like, yeah, automation sound cool and everything, but I don't understand how it gets from point A to Z. So I feel like Weavey is more of a teaching tool for me to open up the door for automations for these brands. Right.

22:40Parth Patil:Being able to see the system before you sell the system, like showing them, here's what's happening under the hood. Here's what we're going to be doing. gives people more confidence in the process and brings them along. Yeah. We have time. Joe, if you have some questions for Reed and I, we'd love to give you an opportunity to bring it to the table. Notice how he emphasizes me versus him, but, you know, that's part of it. Joe and I chat every five minutes. Exactly. I could talk to you guys both all day about this stuff, I'm sure. But, yeah, no, the one thing that I've realized doing this work every day is my articulation is differentiator, like we talked about.

23:20And it's the specificity of how I express the idea that's making the world that we're creating land here. Which, you know, it pulls me to something that you write about a lot, Reed, and I know that you studied a lot, is Wickenstein. Limits in my language really are the limits of my world. Except now, language doesn't just describe the world, it kind of summons it. My question is, like, What does someone in today's professional world have to practice to play this game well? And going forward, what is the skill that needs to be built up to be a contributor? Well, that's one of the reasons why I've had you on.

23:57I think you've given a bunch of good starts. And I think it's an infinitely long path, which is good for us as people and as creators and as innovators, workers, et cetera. I think there's a couple of things. One, on the kind of Wittgenstein side, you know, it is, he was trying to figure out how it is language actually works, that, you know, we're like fish in water. We communicate with each other, but we don't really know how it works. We don't really know how the thinking works. And so that was kind of his philosophical project to kind of understand that there was a lot of philosophical problems that were misunderstandings of actually how language works.

24:35So let's try to figure it out since we don't actually understand it. But now on the, as exactly as you say, that it doesn't just limit the world, it now creates the world through AI. It's kind of the imagining what's possible. I think it's work to get better, not just in your imagination, but you're in your expression of your imagination. So that, and by the way, AI can be useful to that because you can say, hey, I'm trying to be more expressive and so forth. so what I would like you to do is run me through exercises and ask me about this and and interact and and when I say this what could I have said better what could what could be better and and kind of explicitly go through that loop and it's part of the reason why like you know I was kind of prompting you back to your early days from for for kind of most people because it's like well don't just go so give me a script it's like well of course you're going to get a pretty been a little dumbass thing on that.

25:33But he said, well, you know, what if, you know, kind of, we were looking at the script for this film, but we were thinking about it the way the Matisse thought about Impressionism. And we thought about the kind of the pointillism and the kind of the way that hit the eye. What might be the way that this script might be reinterpreted in that way? And by the way, what might come out as garbage. That's fine. Because then you go, well, all right, Let's try it with Dadaism or let's try it with, you know, Dostoevsky were writing the script. What would Dostoevsky, you know, kind of, you know, and by doing that and by summoning, you know, kind of characters, agents, colors, synthetic alternatives, that'll expand your own kind of language expressive palette and will teach you to be more specific.