AI, Beauty Standards and the Death of Realness, with Liz Seabrook

0:06Katy:My guest this week is someone I first encountered on Instagram many moons ago and later got to work with in person on a canon campaign in London for Creative Beam. From the moment we met, I was struck by her warmth and her razor sharp intelligence and the fact that she clearly has a lot of opinions, which, as you'll hear, is a very good thing. Liz Seabrook is a portrait and travel photographer based in London, known for her quietly luminous, deeply human images, the kind that make you feel like you're in the room with the person she's photographing. She shoots for the likes of The Telegraph and Condé Nast and has a knack for finding the light and creating the most beautiful, still authentic images that feel increasingly rare.

0:46Katy:But what brought her back onto my radar recently wasn't just a campaign she did with Hilary Grant in the Orkney Islands and made me want to buy everything in that campaign. No, it was an essay that she wrote for Creative Boom about AI. But rather than adding to the noise of hot takes and panic, she called for something more considered, and that's nuance. A word we could all use a little more of right now. We ended up talking about far more than AI though. Photography, body image, the pressure to be perfect, community, what it means to keep creating when the world feels heavy. It's one of those conversations I always expect from Liz and never want to end.

1:26Katy:So without further ado, here's Liz.

1:33Katy:This episode is sponsored by Adobe Acrobat Studio, the AI-powered workspace that's changing how we work with documents. Whether you're dealing with contracts, research, client briefs, or creative projects, Acrobat Studio brings everything together in one place so you can spend less time managing files and more time doing the work that matters. Find out more at the link in the show notes.

1:58Katy:Oh, confession time, dear listener. This is the second time I've recorded it because for the first time since I've started this show in 2020, my microphone wasn't working. So there you go. Here we are again. Liz has very generously agreed to let me chat with her once again. you poor thing well you know here we are we were actually trying to figure out what we were chatting about last time the first time and i think it was like the theme was very much what everybody's talking about you can't help it can you it's like that and botox in my circles one in the same as far as i'm concerned oh yeah absolutely yeah so both uh deliver some kind of result um that is not necessarily real yeah all contributing to the uncanny valley of the world oh i know actually i was thinking of you because of what we chatted about last time getting bombarded with these things on instagram now everybody's freaking out whenever they see an actress or a model that's just aged naturally they're like oh my god her face is saggy and then it's become it's become so mainstream for faces to stay forever 35 that when people just don't get anything done it just looks to a lot of people really strange I'm like oh god I definitely feel the opposite as in when I see all of these people who whose faces are just not quite real I'm like also just don't understand why everything needs to look the same now like I feel like there's a huge homogeny in like both the creative industries and also well by extension I guess then it spirals out into how we look because you know fashion photography design is all feeding the kind of I guess the zeitgeist that we live within that has a huge influence on the way people look and it is just I think we do just have this like homogenization across imagery image making and now people's faces, which is quite odd happening.

4:07Katy:Yeah, I've never really thought of it that way. I guess everybody's playing it safe, wants to. Well, I think, I mean, it's sort of that, to quote an iconic film, it's the same as Devil Wears Prada, isn't it? It's the whole like, oh, you think that blue sweater is something you've just happened to pick up off a rack, but actually it's based on all of these things. And it's the same for everything with how we arrange our aesthetic now it's like these weight loss jabs um which again like we're going to be talking a lot about nuance aren't we in this little episode but there's good and there's bad things about that i think um if it can improve people's health overall brilliant i just worry that it's going to be a bit of a quick fix it's not actually going to make you go out and walk can do 10 000 steps a day it does feel quite it feels quite dystopian and i've spoken to a few different people who are either kind of either on it or are treating people in like various kind of clinic situations who are on it and just like the difference in people how people are obtaining it and all of that is it's just so diverse and widespread and some of it's for the good and some of it's not and but I mean as soon as something's available it's available to everyone like however however you try to control it like if you've got enough money you can access whatever you want yeah gosh yeah and that's the other thing isn't it I think we're seeing the divide between rich and poor now more than anything because you look at some of these Hollywood leading ladies and you think my god but you know some of the when I was growing up the plastic surgery was was well gosh how can I say this tread lightly it was a bit monstrous at times it was obvious that they'd had work done and it wasn't that great now I'm I look at it and I'm like oh my goodness me I always think of like well now when you look around because obviously like tweakments are such a like easily obtainable thing now if you've got like a bit of expendable money and seems maybe even if you don't and I quite often think about do you remember I mean this must have been like mid 2000s i would guess and the whole like all the headline of leslie ashes trout pout oh gosh that was awful yeah i remember it yeah but like she was completely kind of demonized for having her lips done but it was also such a rare thing for people to have their lips done yeah and then she is like an older woman did and uh yeah they like everyone and it's like a witch hunt almost yeah it was and gosh the 2000s were brutal weren't they and some of the 2010s i mean they still are i mean when you look at the language that's used say when they sort of do a report on you know the hollywood red carpet when they talk about the men it's like you know i don't know so and so look dashing in a black and white number and then when they talk about the women you know it's something it's completely different language even now it's sort of leans more towards their weight or that they're aging backwards or all these kind of like subtle awful bits of language that definitely sink sink in and god knows what it's doing for the younger generation if it's making me stop and go oh god i mean well we're back to skinny top can't we yes that's the other heroin chic is back in its own like new digitized format oh gosh it's it's goes round and round in circles just when you think things are getting better i mean i'd hate to be a famous famous model um going on a beach holiday knowing that the following week there'll be like a report on my cellulite it's just i think it's really connected i think i mean this is a really like kind of slightly horrifying thing to look at but like you know we started moving back towards like mega skinny models and aesthetic after all the could like the kardashians had their like butts taken out so they went from kind of embracing like what hang on were they fake yeah yeah they all had like i just thought they were curvy no that is just yeah i think i think i knew it was fake i just didn't want to believe it i think i was putting my head in the sandal little bit a bit about it because you just kind of look at it and your brain just goes what is this what's happened to you yeah it's mad there was another lady i saw i mean i keep talking about instagram i'm not on it all the time promise um but she uh she was saying that she'd had breast implants when she was a kid and she just had them removed and it's a whole completely different world to the one I exist in I'm just fascinated by it but equally glad that I'm not in it not having you know never succumbed to myself personally any pressure to do anything although saying that I have whitened my teeth go full jiri ethics well just with the dentist he said you want to go a bit lighter on your teeth I said oh is that possible he said yes we can do it you You just have to wear this little thing once a day, like, you know, for an hour.

9:24Katy:I was like, oh, that sounds pain free. Yeah, I'll do that. There you go. The little things are happening. It's definitely made a difference. I did inherit my father's yellow teeth. Sorry, Dad. But yeah, I think it's interesting. I guess as a photographer, you, like, I've always wanted to ask this question. When you do people's portraits, nine times out of 10, does everybody go, can you make me look younger? Can you make me look slimmer? can you make me look good yeah I would say maybe like 85 % of people that I photograph don't like having their picture taken maybe more certainly not less so what do you say to them when they ask you that well they don't people don't necessarily ask things ask for me to do things sometimes they do I actually think it's happening less than it did when I was first starting out but I generally just try and reassure people that they look great as they are and they don't need anything and try and get them to a place where they feel kind of comfortable enough to be themselves in front of the camera and then hopefully they see themselves represented once they then see the pictures and a huge part of my job is just managing people's energy and allowing them to like feel safe and secure and maybe even confident if we can get that far I have had a few people who have like requested I had someone request selects of portraits before I sent them to client which is not something I usually would do but in this case I did and they entirely face tuned their portraits and asked me to retouch exactly how they'd face tuned the portraits which is so hard because there's so many kind of well nuances as to like how someone or like micro things that someone's done so maybe it's like a tiny little bit of a lift of an eyebrow a tiny little bit of a shortening of a chin like and then you just have to like squint at the picture and figure out what ai has done in order to make these things happen and try and match the best you can but um wow so they put it through ai and they said can you well facetune's essentially ai isn't it oh i've not heard of it so it's something you can it was the thing that was big like i don't know maybe four or five years ago right where you could upload your portrait or your selfie or whatever into the engine and then be like eyes a little bit bigger mouth a little bit narrower lips a little bit fuller and it would just like and do everything i think you could do it for your body as well but um god but yeah that was a big thing a while ago and i think maybe that was the start of like that was the start of ai and kind of people adjusting there but on their own terms rather than it being something that's done to them so you know like photoshopping has been a thing for a really long time in the dark room you could do things before that yeah um but this was giving people the agency to like retouch their own image which is quite a slippery slope and then i feel like that probably led then to the kind of like proliferation of fillers and having actual surgeries or treatments done in order to like realize your like face tuned portrait so depressing really depressing because i think in this era of ai you can you've got access to all these tools there's even the very basic filters that you can put on instagram you can really tweak and improve digitally how you present yourself to the world.

13:09Katy:I, when I was in the midst of my back injury year, looking very tired and very much in pain, discovered a few things and how to play with them. And the more I played with them, the more I realised, okay, they might make me look a little less tired, but it was taking away from what was real and just looked so fake. So in the end, I said, okay, I'm not going to do that. And I don't use anything on Instagram. I'm just, I've kind of made my peace. I'm getting old. That's a beautiful thing and actually I have gone on a bit of a journey where I've fallen in love with you know the greys that are coming through and the little kind of wrinkles around my face and the little things that make me me and I'm like oh okay I look like I've had a bit of a life you know and I can see that in other people I've always seen that in other people I think it's beautiful their little kind of quirks their little dimples the little lines around the the eyes are so pretty and so beautiful and it's it just depresses me that people can't see it in themselves and they just want to try and halt the natural process for as long as possible i understand and i'm not you know both you and i are not judging people here we're not saying that it's the wrong thing to do it's just i just think personally it's a shame that there's so much pressure to be this perfect ideal that it's just well like an inverted commas perfect as well i know yeah what does it even mean yeah and who's setting that standard oh yeah well it's the beauty industry isn't it and people who make money from us feeling insecure the very industry we work in well yeah i mean kind of but also yeah i mean i guess i'm just kind of a lackey in it really do what i'm told um i remember reading about um i can't remember when it was i feel like it might have been 1930 might have been a bit later but women didn't shave their legs until that point where a ray like a razor brand realized that they could double their money if they started marketing to women so just started trying to figure out like oh women should shave their legs I mean, they were like, you know, like Egyptian culture where sugaring has been a thing for a really long time.

15:32So that hair removal has been a thing for women like prior to that. But it had never been anything for like Northern European women, for example. And so, yeah, it was just like a way to make more money.

15:44Katy:Gosh. Yeah. And you think about all the things that we had access to when we were kids. I know there's an age difference between you and I, but even so, compare it to what there is now. I um I don't know about you but I reach for the same product you know if I change something in my makeup bag it's maybe once every other year like you know obviously I'll keep buying the same things if I know it works and whenever I do I'm like what what is this product gel eyebrow tint what's what's that all about you know and and then like this other stuff like what did I discover the other day it was like something some kind of like I can't remember what it was but it was something to plump your lips like made it sting and make made them look fuller oh yeah I'm like god I just I just gonna get my Rimmel eye coal and uh my Chanel foundation I'm I'm happy yeah oh to be a girl growing up in this era apparently I was um I went to see a friend who was chairing a talk about fragrance the other day and sephora is their target audience is teenagers oh which i found really interesting given that like when i go in there it does feel like a kind of visual assault of like color and volume of stuff but i hadn't really thought about the fact that it was directly aiming at teenagers and how much money everything in their costs and like just how much yeah how much product there is available to young people now my partner adam who works at um creative review just did a feat they just did an article in the new issue about skincare for children oh god no which is the next uh the next big thing um so it's like cleansers toners obviously like moisturizer and spf fine but like yeah face masks for children like sheet masks and it's just like why they're babies don't need them alone give them a good diet and make sure they drink lots of water and they're fine but i'm saying that i think i i mean i had very i've always had like skin that was on the dry side so i did start using like anti-wrinkle cream when i was like 14 but i think that's just because it smelled nice and it was nice and rich well there you go i wasn't chuckling at that i was just i was thinking about all the things we did when we were kids and we thinking about what we look like and what our skin was like was never on the agenda we didn't have any eyebrows for a start oh well I plucked all of those out gosh I mean that's actually the one thing that if I could get done I have been like looking at what is it like tattoo you can have your eyebrows tattooed on and they do it so beautifully and so realistically like oh that'd be nice I wouldn't have to faff about with my eyebrow pencil every day I mean we're talking about these things but we still use these products we still like to try and present ourselves in a in a nice way to the world and feel good ourselves there's nothing wrong with that you know I can understand why some people get to a certain age and just stop doing all of that I mean I kind of never really did much of that well you don't need to oh god i sounded like my mom then my uh sister-in-law who's 10 years younger than me would be cringing she's like you can't say things like that this is the thing you've got to keep learning haven't you and you've got to stay open-minded to the the things that were burned into your system when you were a kid when you're a teenager you've got to like stop yourself and just try and have that self-awareness because you can find yourself saying things like she looks good for 40 you know what's that all about she's 40 you know why anyway I remember and I don't know if you had a similar experience but when we were allowed back out after the first or the second lockdown I might have been the third lockdown I think it was like July 2021 and um it was a lovely sunny day in Manchester and I went to meet someone for a coffee and it was like a Saturday afternoon and people were out to go drinking quite right you know wanted to sort of get back to normal life as fast as possible and I I was like stood there going oh my god this is so weird I've never seen this many people with so many treatments and I feel like that whole two years of being cooped up allowed people to try out these things whilst they they didn't have anywhere to go I do also think there's something to be said for people spending two years looking at their own faces you know like we lockdown happened people carried on working but everything moved on to zoom and online and you know like even now like you can't just because I like to do things when I'm talking to people and people are like should we book a call in like should we book and it means a zoom it means a google meet it means a teams meeting and I'm just like can we not just it's only the two of us can we not just have a phone call we just have to see each other all the time but also we're then also looking at our own faces so we probably spent in those I mean I didn't uh I didn't really have that many zoom calls thankfully and still don't um apart from this apart from this but yeah I don't think anyone had ever spent so much time looking at themselves and then had all that time and extra money online as well yeah well yeah there was that um constantly on tiktok and instagram and getting bombarded with things and the world wanted to carry on making money and we had money to spend so i mean i spent mine on red wine and cheese and some people spent it on fillers and botox you know i think i don't which is better to be honest.

21:52It's their own I think.

21:54Katy:Exactly yeah I mean this is the this is the thing we're talking about but I want to get back to talking about AI and creativity because it draws a lot of parallels I find with the beauty industry and the pressures that us women never mind men or soon to be children hopefully not are under to look a certain way to be their best selves to be our best selves and ai is in danger of making everything look the same as well so don't you just think that the very thing that a lot of people are trying to avoid that re the reality the rawness the authenticity is going to be the thing that saves the day in the end i think my theory my crackpot theory is that kind of everyone will go in opposite directions there'll be some people who go AI into the metaverse if that's still a thing if they seem to have gone quite quiet recently but will essentially end up in like Wally and the other half will go to like go back to the ground and use their hands and dig and make stuff and I think there'll be this like polarity in society where people go either way because there's always going to be people who want to sit in the safety of being the same as everyone else and you know there's huge like mass market appeal in that which means there's money in that so it works but there's also going to be the people who look around and like everything looks the same and that's quite boring so i think yeah i think there will be a division i think one will have more money than the other one but i think one will be happier than the other yeah so but it's interesting at the moment with um like briefs and stuff coming in from agencies where there's like increasing amounts of ai appearing as mock-ups and i worry with that that you know they've already created this essentially the photo that they want to create with terrible lighting and um dubious retouching but then that you get on set and they're like we'll make this and it's like well where's the fun in that i mean you've still got like a degree of and i like i strongly believe that like a huge part of creativity is problem solving um so you do still have to problem solve how to make something that's essentially already being like dreamt into existence but it's just not as fun as it and i was talking to my agent earlier about something and they were talking i was like well should we like we're kind of going around the houses about this brief that's come in and i was like well should i just talk to the client should we just have a chat to start with to get the like process going and they were like no no no the creative needs to like come up with the concept first and then we'll bring it to you after that and I'm like why why am I as the like person who's actually like actioning the image making why am I not involved in the conversation from the start and I feel like there is a kind of at the moment there's kind of it feels like there's a bit of a divorce from the people who and making the final output and the like this idea stage which is a lot of it's been kind of feels like it's been siphoned off to ai and i was jack davison um great photographer did a call out on his stories recently about like how are you seeing ai show up in your industry and particularly obviously a focus on photography and everyone's kind of saying the same thing that like decks now are just being made out of AI images.

25:23And that's what the expectation is that we create on the day that we get to set. And it just feels, yeah, it feels at the moment like people will, there'll be like a swing of the pendulum where people just go, oh, fine, we'll just make everything with AI so we don't have to worry about these boring conversations with these boring photographers, videographers who make problems for us. And then I think it will swing back when everything starts looking the same. But yeah, I think it's going to be a rough couple of years figuring it out.

25:57Katy:Yeah, I agree with you. I think it's going to be very turbulent. And I think the customer is going to decide a lot of it ultimately because I think they will lean more towards the real, if they find out an ad, and it's already happened a couple of times, isn't of a real person and the beauty standards are being pushed more and more to the extremes. What's that going to do to a brand's reputation? And so then you can just imagine they'll go, OK, well, we're going to switch it over now and we're going to bring in real people again. It's like the Dove campaign, you know, real beauty standards. And look how it's sort of switched the other way around again.

26:33Katy:So is it just is the technology forcing this cycle or is it just a cycle that's happening and AI is part of it? I think there's an excitement around new tech, which I don't think is a bad thing. like I think you know it's the same as someone getting like a new toy at Christmas you just want to play with that thing for like when you initially get it you figure it out and then you're like okay cool that's something I've got like and then you put it in the back of the cupboard well you might put it in the back of the cupboard but every now and then you'll pull it out and like you know you'll go back to your like at some point you'll go back to like your N64 and play with that for a bit and then you'll be like oh wait actually the VR was quite fun and you can't begin to flip-flop between things and there's this kind of melding of the two practices or like two two toys in that case but I mean I think like like when you were talking about the beauty standards and that I think there's I come back and I think we spoke about this last time I come back to this idea of like when was the last time we saw an armpit that looks like an armpit um I went to this exhibition at the photographer's gallery um a few years ago which was of like an advertising photographer from the like 80s i think and she had a well i think it was a she maybe it wasn't anyway they um had an image of an armpit for a shaving campaign where it looked like an armpit you know you had that slightly like greenish hue where the hair had been and you know like an armpit does but like how long like you know now if you look at any i think there's been a bit of change maybe on social with like specific like different hair removal brands like I think estrid shows you actually like people actually removing hair on their things but like besides that when was the last time you saw an armpit I was just looking on google and it's just brought up a load of um skin rash and skin conditions so don't do that not that um but I think we've been like we've been sitting and living with unrealistic beauty standards for a really really long time and it's been really insidious but i think there's um so i don't know how much the consumer cares like because we're peddled perfection all the time to the point that we don't know what's real like i remember talking to a friend there's a photographer who shoots a lot of portraits who i consider to use an unreasonable amount of retouching and they're a female photographer generally shooting women and I noticed that one of my friends who's had like issues with body dysmorphia and you know with her general appearance quite a lot in the past and I noticed that she was following this photographer and I asked her like do you realize how much retouching is being used for these portraits and she was like oh no I thought they were just really good at doing their makeup and so like we as people like in the creative industries who are used to like the tricks that people are doing are like wise to it but I don't think that like and she's not like you know she's a very intelligent like now quite body positive person but it was just completely unaware of like what this photographer does in order to create the portraits that she does And because they're generally women who are kind of in the public eye, there's this, I guess, also assumption maybe that they have like a great makeup artist alongside them or, you know, they have enough money to invest in their skin to look really great.

30:01But not that it was the photographer who was actually kind of pulling the strings.

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30:43Katy:Small things, but they add up. If you're looking for places to claw back time in your day, it's worth a look. Link in the show notes. I've just thought of a new Instagram or TikTok account that you can start. What is real? With Liz Seabrook. And you could be like the hovering person in the corner pointing up. But see this image here of Katie Coward? Yeah. She is most likely to have had, you know, like the plastic surgeon ones. It's like a really... It is awful. but the PR and marketing in me, you know, the person in me is amazed at how clever, you know, this plastic surgeon in California somewhere is like, here's, I don't know, Demi Moore.

31:26Katy:This is what I think she's had done and it's been done very well. And if you want to come and have it done with us, then we're available 24-7, you know, that kind of thing. I'm like fascinated, but equally horrified. But it's just being an expert in something, isn't it? I was talking to my friend the other day who's a pathologist and she has her like pathology exam to become a consultant coming up or she's taking it for the second time. And it's absolutely bananas what they have to do. So they basically get like slides of cells for their exam and they have to say what the problem is in the cells.

32:03But it's dear Lord, there's nothing moving. it's all it's all just plates of still still images of cells and it's just recognizing patterns after patterns after patterns and um of anything it could be anywhere in the body it could be any kind of condition or anything that's kind of got in got itself into the body and i was talking to another friend who's a scientist about this and how bananas i thought it was and she was saying that she had been a part of an experiment where they'd given pathologists cells to look at to figure out how it is that they these people are able to notice the patterns like repeatedly and they put like a gorilla in the corner of the cells and the pathologist was so fixated on finding the patterns that they were looking for or the known patterns that they didn't even notice that gorilla had been inserted into the cells so yeah i mean these plastic surgeons i effort and the same like me i'm looking for retouching i'm looking for filters and how things will be done and i can spot them because you know it's part of my job i'm used to looking for it also more

33:12Katy:reassurance to people listening to this and they're like oh i hate getting my picture taken and all the rest of it you take hundreds of pictures and there will be a few like i saw a couple of me that i had because i had my portrait done last weekend there's one of me where i'm like laughing and it's the side of me and I'm like who is this person I look like a character out of Labyrinth not in a good way but then you know some of them were really nice I was like quite happy with them I was like oh yeah I look all right I've just discovered I've got hooded eyes that's a new thing but you know we go on YouTube we find out how to do our eyeshadow just to open them up a little bit we'll be all right i'll live to fight another day i think there is also an interesting thing now of people having their picture taken where like it's always obviously always been a rare thing to have your picture taken but now it's a rare thing to have a picture taken that you're not in control of um with you know people like how many selfies do people take a week yeah quite a lot and you but you're completely in control of that you know that you can delete whatever you don't like you know that you can you know how to hold the phone in order to get your like best angle you know up here right above done my space that side but and so it is it's a it's a it's a losing control of how your image is going to be captured and then shared which is a scary thing to do and like I try to well not even try to I just do acknowledge that like having your picture taken is a really scary and confronting thing yeah because it is for me as well so you know I have to remember it for everyone else because we are all human we are all human and it was like I don't know what I was expecting but the last time I had my picture done professionally was probably about 15 years ago and I thought right time to get some sorted and I could have easily used AI I could have taken a picture and you know done it up online and stuff but I worked with a stylist I worked with a hair and makeup artist it was actually the stylist suggestion that I get a hair and makeup artist I was like okay cool that'll be nice and then we got this amazing photographer as well they're all incredible people good location and you realize the skill and the mastery and the experience and the teamwork and the art of it all the oh for this next one I'm going to do it here we'll need an outfit that works with this kind of okay what about this you know and they're all just working around me like busy bees and I'm just sort of sat that stood around bewildered going how did I get here you know but also equally just humbled that there's this human team of brilliant creatives creating this vision for me um yeah i mean i don't know what my point is it was just so humbling to see them all at work and all doing this doing these great things and then seeing them the next day on instagram doing an amazing shoot with a model stroke ballerina who is sort of leaping in the air with these like amazing gorp core outfits on i was like oh i wish i could have done that that would have been fun have you heard of the ai app mush i have not it's uh well it's a fashion thing it's where you upload all your clothes and you can create outfits but one part of the app is that you can create your own virtual character it scans your body and your face and you put it in and then you can you can put clothes onto the onto your digital mannequin and see whether it suits you so me and my tom were talking about this over dinner the other night we were saying if we're talking about disruption and what's happening what's going to happen to the fashion industry you know photographers in your field what are they what's going to happen if people don't need to see models wearing clothes anymore that was a kind of startling well it's already happened right yeah wasn't it is it mango who just did it have done like this whole year is all um all their e-com is ai really i think they took they got several models like likenesses like kind of 3d scanned them and then just you know they then have like a full reading so they can change their body positions do different faces uh without having to shoot any any stuff in studio i think so it's a real person it's a real model but it's a real model who's like uh you know i guess had usage paid to them um for their likeness for a year yeah first campaign generated oh it's campaign and this was 2024 and it was for their teen line as well oh dear have you got any friends who are working more with ai and they're getting the ai jitters you know of the vibe coding and they're getting stressed about you know tokens i don't know anything about what you just said which I feel quite relieved about.

38:25Katy:So beyond the LLMs you have you can have agents working for you doing lots of different tasks and you might be able to get them to code for you you might be able to get them to sort of assess a website put processes in place you can assign them specific roles like social media manager marketing manager what have you. In Silicon Valley they're building a ton of stuff everything's speeding up if developers last year were using ai 20 they're now using at 80 i would say and they go to their little parties in silicon valley and they're checking their phones because i think you can set up a thing with your whatsapp so you can talk to your agents wherever you are and get carry get them to carry on working for you whilst you're out of the office and people with claude specifically you only have a certain amount of tokens i guess space to do stuff until you it gets reset and then you have to wait until the next time zone that you can carry on so it's it's like ai sort of token anxiety or something like that i feel like i need to take a breath after saying all that is stressful i was having a conversation with my friend's husband the other day who's a i think he's a senior developer for like cyber security and he was saying that at his company basically all of the like junior developer roles are now being done by ai and that he's concerned because there's no longer a pathway for young developers to become senior developers because they're being kind of outsourced and this is something i hadn't really thought about hugely is the fact that we're losing our like entry-level roles so then how does anyone get experienced in anything yeah it's a massive problem massive problem and i'm i haven't got the answers i don't think anyone has well it is i mean the answer is stop using ai for everything yes that would help we don't want it to replace us everything's speeding up as well are you finding that clients are wanting things faster clients have always wanted things yesterday i don't think that's really changed i think since i think i think since photography has been digital that's been that's been the case like timelines are always you know you're always going to get a request that's like oh we've had these images these selects for three weeks and now we suddenly need high-res tomorrow like deadlines deadlines and i think also the like ever-increasing load of like how much imagery is required in order to run a business like everything needs content for every everything and that means that people's schedules get busier and busier and there's more and more pressure on creative teams to produce um and then but then also project manage things so naturally things slide because there's so much pressure on everyone to get everything done for the same budget as when it was two campaigns a year yeah and now it's two social campaign there's more work but spread over the same budget yeah and that's potentially going to get worse with ai oh it's absolutely gonna get worse yeah well it'll get worse if we continue to see the same homogenization across in the industry where people aren't like because you could use ai for like the social campaign or you know bits and bobs for social letters a photographer friend of mine was saying that she'd taken some interiors shots last year and then they suddenly popped up in January with a bunch of mums AI inserted into them oh god so now we're going to have to like regardless of who we're working with we're going to have to put out contracts when we initially start working with people that say you cannot just bung any old AI so you've got to update your legal contracts yeah gosh yeah I hadn't thought of that but you know there's a a way of looking at it where if we're able to use AI generated imagery for sort of the that the stuff that does get like the grant work essentially where it's just imagery that needs to be rolled out that there could be more space to be creative and have more budget in order to run bigger or more interesting campaigns but I think realistically people are just going to want to spend less and less on marketing yeah yeah I guess they will it's always the way isn't it especially with the economy being the way it is i'm just wondering if the advertising standards authority have put a clause in yet about what's real well i know the association of photographers are working really hard to figure out the legality around ai and plagiarism and sort of the machine learning side of things where like everything's being fed in and then what comes out of it see i know nick dunmar at the op has been doing a lot with that uh and working with government as well to try and legislate for it but it's also because it is all moving so quickly it's really hard to keep up generate legislation for it is faster than ever normally the yeah it takes years doesn't it before governments catch up with the technology and at the moment i'm trying to remember where we were at even just 12 months ago and where we're possibly going to be in six months so they haven't got a chance i remember one of our friends had bought um and i mean this is to me absolutely wild but had bought like a fairly reasonable chunk of land in the metaverse and uh one night was up late with their baby and happened to like look at their computer and notice that someone was stealing all of that land but there's nothing you can do about it because it's not policed in any way it's not like you know there's no federation of like anything protecting the money that you've invested into land and so it's just someone can take it and you're just watching your money just drift off wild what what did it look like did it have any kind of like visual i don't know i mean it's all completely nonsense to me because i just don't want to engage with it but um yeah i just i think of red dead the game the video game red dead when i think of land and the metaverse I'm like you know Arthur you don't play video games do you know this I might play Mario Kart every now and then oh there you go then we'd be all right we've talked about a lot you know photography AI beauty standards the way it's all heading is there anything that you're feeling optimistic about this I know I said last time because like when we finished the conversation I was like yes this was a good thing to say and it still stands even amongst all of it which is that I think to be creative is to be optimistic we can't keep there'd be no reason to put anything out into the world if we didn't think that it was going to be seen received and in some way make a difference or impact someone's life so as long as we're making we're optimistic 100 well thank you Liz for coming on the creative being podcast this was a really fascinating chat thank you for having me

45:47Katy:That was the wonderful Liz Seabrook. And if this conversation left you wanting more of her work, you can find her over on Instagram, where her feed is basically a masterclass in finding the beauty in the everyday. And if Liz's essay on AI sparked your curiosity, it's on Creative Boom right now. I'll pop the link in the show notes. And I'll leave you with a thought she ended on, because I haven't stopped thinking about it since. I really genuinely haven't. to be creative is to be hopeful. If you enjoyed this episode, please do subscribe, leave a review or share it with a creative friend who could use a bit of that hope today.

46:19Katy:And I'll see you on Thursday when we're back with Liz for the spark. Until then.

46:28Katy:Thanks to Adobe Acrobat Studio for sponsoring this episode. If you're curious about what it can do for your workflow, head to the link in the show notes to find out more. Thank you.