Creativity vs Control: Where AI Fits in the Creative Toolbox

0:00The learning curve has always been this great obstacle to people entering the space. Resourcedfulness is a far more powerful capability than resources. We don't know exactly when, we don't know exactly how, but we do know that the ultimate interface is like an insure way from our retina. My thesis for the next 10 years is going to be that tastes will outperform skill. Being a creator in 2025 is tough, but building for creators is even harder. Every creator is inherently creative, so their workflows are diverse, unpredictable, and highly personal. But they also want magical modern experiences. So a few companies have been able to crack that code, although many are trying, now that AI is opening the aperture.

0:50Perhaps no better person understands this conundrum than our guest today, Scott Belzky. Scott was the founder of Behance, has now spent over a decade at Adobe after Behance was acquired, and has now their chief strategy officer, and has also advised companies like Pinterest and Atlassian. So how can AI enable creators, and where should that tool set end? What does an AI native UI even look like? We're going from the prompt error to the controls error. Plus, do people really want this book personalized experiences or do they desire familiarity? And what happens when something rare becomes ubiquitous?

1:27Listen in to find out. By the way, this podcast was recorded live in San Francisco during our fourth iteration of our A16z Games Speedrun program. If you'd like to learn more about Speedrun, head on over to a16z .com slash games slash as a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16z fund. Please note that A16z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the company's discussed in this podcast.

2:04For more details including a link to our investments, please see A16z .com slash Disclosures.

2:15Scott, I'm extremely excited for this conversation. You have worn so many hats over your career. Of course, you were the founder of BeHands, which is the platform for creatives to discover and showcase content. You sold that to Adobe, had a stint at Adobe. You then stepped into the venture and startup space where you invested in and advised many companies from Uber to Pinterest, Jakarta, Flexport, Ro, you found your way back to Adobe, where you were a cheap product officer, and now cheap strategy officer. And in the midst of that, you've written two books, and you're a consummate student of creativity, technology, AI, frequent reader of implications.

3:02If you don't follow Scott's blog, it's a great read as well as a frequent commenter on Twitter. So, with all of that, this is such a unique time. and you are maybe one of the most interesting people to ask questions about where we are headed in the future of creativity. And so maybe with that, I'll start with just at a high level, where do you think we are headed with AI and creative tools? How will it change the way that creators interact with the medium and think about creation? Yeah, well, first of all, thanks for having me and thanks for the nice intro. I'm happy to share perspectives and some lessons learned in the hard way and whatever you want to cover.

3:37On the question about creative tools, I'll listen, I mean, creativity and storytelling has been my passion forever. And I think that historically, I mean, I got Photoshop when I was 13, and it took me a year to learn the quarter of it. The uphill battle of learning how to leverage these tools, the learning curve has always been this great obstacle to people entering the space. And the skills required to use these tools are also a badge of honor for the people who have the skills. And now you have this moment where two things are simultaneously happening. The floor is going down, and suddenly more people can enter the world of storytelling, whether you're a salesperson or a data analyst or a marketing person, you can do your own thing as opposed to rely on others to tell your story.

4:21And then at the other side of the spectrum, you have the ceiling going up, where suddenly if you used to be an imaging professional or an illustrator or a motion graphics artist, You're now also able to create a video, you're able to create thumbnails without having to go to a graphic designer to do it for you. And you're able to push your category to another level. Folks that are in the 3D space, I mean the things that are happening now with 3D and animated 3D and 3D vectors. And I mean it's just absolutely mind -blowing what it looks like to also raise the ceiling. 10, 15 years ago there was very little venture capital going into the creative space.

4:55There were only a few games in town, names in town, and it was extremely hard to break into those workflows. And now I think it's just the world is going to be filled with humans trying to differentiate themselves through creative expression, because they're competing with agents, right? And I think that that's sort of this brought awakening. So it's exciting. But the early era of AI and creativity was somewhat disappointing in my view. It was very prompt -based. It was driven by these basic models. One core conviction I have is we're going from the prompt error to the controls error of AI -based creativity.

5:33And what I mean by that is you'll actually be able to generate assets with layers. Like you can think of Photoshop as layers. You can have a lot of levers to change things and get it exactly how it is in your mind's eye. You'll have a lot more capabilities to reference certain ingredients, styles, structures, colors, color palettes, themes. And it's fun to see our design team is building this entirely new tool set for the controls era of AI. And a lot of you are probably thinking about that as well. And it's really exciting because everything goes out the window, like all the playbooks of the past, this linear workflow and the daunting nature of it are all in the past.

6:17And then of course, like the Asian -assisted flows are also a very core part of all that. Yeah. Lots of different threads to pull and unpack there. But as someone who has been at the forefront of building creative tools and advising creative tool and company for so long, we have a lot of creative tool. Builders in here, a lot of creatives in here. maybe on the tooling side now with this AI wave, there are researchers and sort of technologists, some of which are creators themselves, some of which maybe are in, but I'm curious, what are some of the misconceptions about building for creatives as someone who has done that their whole life?

6:54Well, I think that creatives, and we were all creatives, but like creative professionals, they hold dear their ability to achieve what's exactly in their mind's eye. And if you think about that, that's the antithesis of the notion of these generative AI models that essentially are trained on a discrete data set and always essentially output like the center of the distribution of the data that it was trained on. These are also creators who are oftentimes trying to stand out and do something different. And so in some ways they're frustrated with the average manifestation of their prompt, right? They want something different.

7:28Also, I think these creators want choice in models. So one of the concerns I have about the companies that are model companies competing in this space is that if you're a model company, it's hard to offer all the models. One of our major decisions that we've needed at Adobe over the last year is to actually become a platform agnostic model company. So we do build our own models in a way that's commercially safe and is important to a lot of our customers. But we're also going to support all the major models and people are going to be able to choose which model they want for which action. And I imagine there will be probably thousands of models, some that specialize in animation or explosions or drone aerial shots or whatever the case might be.

8:09And customers, creatives want to have their choice of what model. And they want to be able to use it in their workflows. Creatives have always complained about workflow, right? I mean, the whole notion of work and flow, like flow is the creative state where you can just do whatever's in your mind and work is what gets in the way of that. So if we can remove more of the work from workflow, that's the ultimate holy grail for most creatives. And I think that that means that a lot of these pieces need to be in the same tool oftentimes. Totally. And maybe building on that, where do you see Adobe in that evolution of how creatives interact now with AI?

8:47A lot of folks think of some of these AI models as the camera. Yeah. But of course, there's AI -assisted tools within some of the existing toolset. And so how do you think about where's the right place to expose AI and Adobe's current products? And are there any areas where you think a net new interface makes sense? So we're doing both. We believe that all of our products, including the marketing products, not just the creative products, need to have AI and exactly the right time and place. So whether that means having an agent that critiques your design work, work in critiquier design work, based on a certain persona that you're trying to target with your marketing.

9:26That's something that we're surfacing within products like Photoshop, as well as the marketing products. The ability, of course, generative fill, generative expand, like all those sorts of things are integrated throughout the entire suite. But we're also building these net new native Genai products that are really throwing out the playbook of the assumptions of layers and everything else and really just starting from scratch. and we talked about it publicly, a project called Project Concept, which is basically like mood boarding and concepting in the age of AI. So it can let you start with your work, it can let you source stuff from stock or wherever else, and then it lets you use, it has the firefight models, but also has the flux models, and you can just start to go crazy.

10:08And the cool part about it is that if you have an image here and an image here, you can use a little eyedropper and take some ingredients and aspects of this image and apply it to this image and then use that as a prompt for your next image. So it's really like a remix type of product as an example of a native Gen .A .I. product that we're building. So we're looking at both. We're also trying to partner with a lot of folks in the ecosystem. I mean workflows has always been really important in terms of how creative's work. So historically we've always worked with different sound products. We've always worked with different motion graphics products.

10:40And similarly the products that are in the ecosystem we want to like like invite into the flow, I think that that ultimately makes our customers happy. Awesome. What creative problems do you think AI is unsuited to solve or help? Where does AI stop? This is like one of the greatest questions I think about all the time now, because AI is only getting better. And yet, what makes creative content really effective is when creative content moves us in some way. Now, what makes something move you? It's usually emotionally triggering. It's usually a story you didn't expect. It's usually something that has to do with the taste and the meaning that was injected into the content by the creator.

11:24And AI is not good at that. AI is good at doing things that have been done and applying things to formulas that have been declared as efficient formulas on the internet for telling stories. If you talk to great directors, I spend a lot of time these days really interested in the whole filmmaking and storytelling space, It's just personally less Adobe more personally. But when I talk to these directors, they talk about how it's all about the timing, right? You can have one scene with actors. And if it's like one second too long, either the joke doesn't land or it's not emotional or it's not real.

11:57And so so much of that intuition is very much based on this director's personal view on the world. That is not something that I've seen to be replicable by AI. And so I think that these tools each enable humans to, again, get out of me more of the work part, so they can do more of the flow part. And the flow part, if you could spend 10 times the amount of time you have every day on the flow part, you can do even more meaningful, more incredible stories. And if I were to sum up my decoration about my thesis for the next 10 years, it's going to be that tastes will outperform skill. Because skill is going to be offloaded to compute.

12:33And what's going to differentiate everything you do in life? Taste. Do you think there are any use cases where you could have a hundred percent generated, fully personalized for Scott Beltsky entertainment experiences where there's no human interfacing? Well, first of all, let's start definitely from marketing purposes. So we have a product called Gen Studio now. You take a campaign that you made, right? And then you say, great, I want to I want to mount this folder of 10 ,000 images. I want to employ this copy agent to make 10 ,000 slogans. And then I want to create this in 120 languages. And then you push the button.

13:14And then literally it creates like 160 ,000 assets that you can then drive across platforms and do A, B testing and automate this and whatever else. Like that is the future. And when you think about all the production costs that is currently spent on stuff like that, it's just insanity, right? So there's no reason why that should be done manually. That should be done through AI. And with the human labor you free up from that meticulous production work, you're going to come up with instead of one campaign to test, you're going to come up with 100 campaign ideas. You're going to raise the ceiling of what's possible, right?

13:48Now, on the entertainment side, it's a little different. I happen to believe that part of the entertainment sensation is a shared experience. I can't talk about house of cards with you. If we We saw a different house of cards, right? And I will stop talking about it because I'll know that you saw a different one and it's not a shared experience. I would anticipate a hybrid. Back at the Behance days, we always thought about building networks as like the 99 and one model. 90 % of people consume, 9 % sort of curate and 1 % create. And if you think about it, you apply the same thing into this new world we're in.

14:19I imagine that 90 % of people will just consume content and want a shared experience. Maybe 9 % of people will be like, oh my gosh. Imagine if that episode ended this way, and they might engage in the tools that you allow them to with character, IP, and whatever licensing we have to make a variation, or maybe the 1 % or the people who do that, the 9 % or the ones who curate and decide what's worth prime time for the 90 % to see. So I think it's going to be a similar model, but I just don't think that everyone will have a personalized movie. Yeah, no, I agree completely. I think I could watch an endless supply of Star Wars content.

14:52Streaming, just in your eyeballs, right? But if I don't have a place and don't have podcasts, as much as I enjoy watching it, I also enjoy listening to podcasts and reading Twitter and Reddit, etc. And if I don't have that shared experience, but you can amplify that shared experience if I can remix the ending of Rogue One or your name. I mean, one of their thought experiment, which sure people have thoughts about, but I've been thinking a lot about the history of what happens in periods of abundance for any sort of item. So when shoes become ubiquitous and commoditized, what do we end up doing?

15:25We end up seeking more scarce versions of shoes by buying higher -priced shoes that are branded and same thing for handbags and same thing for cars. Like when anything becomes commoditized, humans seek the scarce version and are willing to pay more. And so what happens when content is commoditized? I mean, historically, it hasn't been commoditized. It was super expensive to make entertainment content. Now that it's not, well, humans react in a similar way. Will we start to seek the more scarce, higher premium, higher taste version of the entertainment content or not? I think that's an interesting debate, but I personally would be bullish on the best storytellers in the world in a world where anyone can be a storyteller.

16:07Fascinating. You talked about ad creatives and marketing use cases from your purview at Adobe. You get to see what the entire media landscape or entire user base of Adobe is doing. What has been the general reactions across the spectrum towards AI? Like which use cases are really diving in, which are more hesitance? Yeah. And why? Well, we're at a moment in time right now where there definitely are two factions on either side of the spectrum. On one side of the spectrum, there's a good swath of the creative professional community, especially illustrators and graph designers that are extremely threatened by this technology, really worried about the implications and have become basically anti.

16:51And I just think that you can never fight the advance of technology, right? But what you can do is find ways to make a work for you. And we're involved in the conversation with that community and I think that they'll start to tinker and recognize that there may be appropriate ways or ways that they're comfortable with leveraging it while also retaining their craft. On the other side, you have these kind of AI creative hackers who have basically discarded all their traditional tools and are like all in. And to them, it's like sacrilegious to use a product that is traditional. They just want to totally go pure AI.

17:25And it's fun to see them work within those creative constraints because they are constraints. It's really hard to do an AI. It's really hard to make an ad and describe the text and get it right. But so much easier just to literally take into Photoshop and write the text, right? but you can try and you can spin your wheels. There's that faction. But I don't know what the numbers are, but I would say like it's 10 and 10 and then 80 in the middle. I think the 80 in the middle are like, listen, I want to do the best work possible and I want to do the least mundane repetitive work possible and they're very much embracing these tools when it's appropriate.

17:57I want to step back a little bit to the Behance founding experience. So it wasn't the traditional way that at least we think about starting companies. You bootstrap for the first five years as you got the company off the ground. And then later in the journey, decided to raise venture funding. I'm curious, going back, would you have taken the same approach? How do you think of that in retrospect? I think of this a lot only because I get asked this question and I might not sure if it was a best or worse practice. I mean, we nearly died five years bootstrapping. The fact that we didn't meant that we could raise our first round was from Union Square Ventures leading five years into the business when we were break even.

18:36And so we actually only had to sell a very small portion, relatively speaking. And then when we got acquired, that played a real factor because acquisition, Apple's Tapples, I was like, oh gosh, like it's actually the same outcome as if we took two rounds of funding and that much more dilution and that much more market risk. So I definitely played a role, a beneficial role. At the same time, there were some sideways last years of behands in that five years. There were a couple of years where we were not able to afford the talent we should have been hiring. We were not able to level up the team the way we should have.

19:08And I was, for some reason, very proud of being a bootstrap company and having control over my own destiny and not sort of thing. It was a stupid ego thing because when my team started coming to me saying, I literally can't do the best work of my life here because I don't have the resources to invest in this opportunity. When we started to grow and we couldn't scale, I felt like an idiot. I was like, oh my gosh, why am I depriving this team? And that's when we went and raised our round. So the one thing I would say is this though, resourcefulness is a far more powerful capability than resources.

19:45Resources when you have them, you throw them at problems like carbs. It feels good, but dissipates quickly. Whereas resourcefulness is like muscle. When you develop the capability to address challenges in the hard way, that sticks with you over time. And I think that capability developed during that five years was valuable to us. Yeah, you mentioned the messy middle and of course you wrote a book on this. And so maybe unpacking that part of the Behands journey when you faced the initial spark of excitement and then a little bit of plateau, how were you able to keep the team motivated? How were you able to make the hard decisions about what features to deprioritize?

20:24I'm sure there were probably, you know, push -and -pull signals to potentially pivot some that you had to navigate. What are some of the lessons for the folks in the room who maybe you had an initial spark, but are now sort of questioning whether that's enough to call them to greatness? The Messy Middle Project was inspired by the fact that we don't talk about these questions. As a tech community, we typically focus on the romanticism of the start and then these like glorious finishes, whether they're gloriously great or bad. That's the sound bite. Now, of course, there is a lot of really messy stuff that happens in the middle that all of you are also probably in the middle of, when it comes to this question of when you should quit or when you should stick with it, to me and to my friends who've gone through this as well, it's all about this measure of conviction based on what you now know.

21:12When you start and you're starting from a place of ignorance, you're imagining this great product that solves this huge problem and everything goes up into the right. And that's a very easy period of the journey to have a kind of conviction in. And that's actually what helps us quit our jobs and unplug from the reward system of society and jump into starting a new business with tremendous amounts of risk. When you start to get shoulder to shoulder with customers, I think we all end up realizing, to some degree, that the thing we had in mind is at least 30 degrees off a product market fit of what the customers actually want.

21:44Why? Well, oftentimes customers do things in very strange ways. Like, they won't use an enterprise product, even if it makes their life better, because they won't get as much credit with their boss. And so they'll do it the old way so that they look like they're doing the work that merits the credit. It's like weird silly things like this that actually are the difference between utilization and not utilization of a new product. But no entrepreneur in the beginning has this belief that, oh, we have to stroke people's egos in the enterprise to get this product to be utilized. Like, we're all more rational and we're like, oh, yeah, if it's a better product, people will just use it.

22:18So there's a lot of things like that as this one silly example that we learn in the process of shoulder to shoulder to customer that Help us lose conviction and as we're losing this conviction It's always the question of oh my goodness. What do we do or sometimes we actually gain conviction? But the product in our mind keeps changing based on what we're learning So when you're at that moment where you're like okay, should I pull the plug and try something different? I mean, there's by the way There's no pride in sticking with something that's not working. That's just silly It's a waste of time.

22:49So I always ask founders like this conviction test. I'm like, all right, knowing everything you know right now. Either do you believe you just have the wrong solution and you have a good sense of what it is, but you still have conviction in that long -term view that this industry will change as a result of what you're doing? Or have you literally just lost conviction in the problem in and of itself? It's a false premise or it's the wrong problem or it's the total wrong solution space. And you know, like, hey, if you've lost conviction based on what you've learned, like quit, price something different.

23:20Otherwise stick with it, because that's just part for the course. So at the end of the year, you wrote some predictions about where you thought tech and AI were headed into 2025 and beyond. And I want to pull a few of those out and talk to you about them. One of them was a prediction towards more homegrown or DIY software, both on the consumer side and the enterprise side. So like consumer side, if family game night and create a game to play with your friends or your family or enterprise software Who's deciding that custom software Built with AI tools is actually more efficient and more helpful than some of the third -party tools For the companies in the room both consumer companies and it'll be tooling companies How do you think they should reorient themselves around that evolution?

24:07Well, it's interesting since I wrote that I got a lot of feedback and my thing is evolved a little bit But I think right now all the rage is DIY software, replete, cursor, whatever, be able to go in and say, I want this and then it pumps out just half baked app. You could use for certain purposes, but still requires a lot of final mile work to get it to really work. And that could be a threat of all of us building software. If everyone can just build their own software based on the code that's on the internet or whatever. I'm actually more interested these days in what I've started to call conformative software.