Supercharging Creativity

So what would you say has surprised you the most in terms of the connection between like data centers and art? Back in the day, like when you were coding something, to compile a piece of code. You could go get a coffee, come back, and then it would be ready. And so we're we're kind of at this place where we're not going to be able to

Even to generate a video, like I don't even have time to go get a cup of coffee. Like it's it's amazing how fast how quickly these are moving. It's only going to get better, it's going to get faster, more powerful. The quality, the resolution of the output, it's it's astonishing. This is Where the Internet Lives, a show about the unseen world of data centers and the incredible advances they make possible. I'm Stephanie Wong, and I'm your guide to the people and places that make up the internet.

This season, we're exploring how AI is fueling the next industrial revolution, redefining everything from farming and healthcare to design and manufacturing. And we're asking how data centers are adapting to power it all. In this episode, how AI is supercharging creativity. It's almost impossible to define art. Most of us think of it as something that we make through a combination of imagination and creative skill.

We know that some of us are better at it than others, although whether nature or nurture is responsible is debatable. But we all agree that art is in a constant state of flux, that it evolves as our world evolves. There is an area of human endeavor as limitless as outer space. great achievements begin as human curiosity. The infinite domain of creative thinking. That infinite domain has inspired generations to pursue their passion for art.

And it's also inspired the growth of institutions and industries looking to grow that passion. Do you like to draw or paint or Well, if you do, chances are you have the interest needed to become a serious argument. So call or write today for your art test and don't let the wonderful world of art pass you by.

Today, the rise of AI is supercharging the act of making art. Creatives with access to smartphones or tablets are making stunning films. Songs and digital paintings, sometimes in minutes. It's a revolution that has us trying to define. Define art all over again. And it's bringing up complicated questions about the line between machines and human-driven creativity and what creative expression looks like in the 21st century.

No one knows this better than Mira Lane. AI is, you know, making its way into all sorts of spaces and that's going to be an incredibly disruptive force. Mira runs the Envisioning Studio at Google, where she collaborates with artists to develop AI tools. That makes it easier for anyone to create digital art. I'm also an artist and uh I get to do a lot of really creative things. Her work puts her at the heart of a fierce debate.

If AI is riding shotgun in our creative pursuits or even taking the wheel, is the end result still art? The thing that we try to do, at least my team and what we're trying to do here, is we're trying to lean into that and understand it and be involved in the conversation. You didn't plan on this career in technology, right? So what has it been like to embrace it?

I entered the workforce when, you know, like we didn't even really have cell phones. In that world, you don't imagine technology permeating our society and the that it has. I al have always felt like coding is a form of creative expression. You know, it blends

the logic of science, with the artistry of creation. There's there's no other way where you can write something down and have it, you know, bring it into existence from a blank slate in the same way. So it's technology is woven from the moment that I wake up to when I go to sleep, it gets woven into my life. And so it's just a space where I just couldn't I couldn't envision it back then. I just didn't imagine careers like the one I have right now either. So it's it's been amazing.

Beyond her passion for technology, Mira's been having wider conversations with herself about art for a long time, going all the way back to her first art classes. I learned about uh Picasso and He brought in this kind of idea of viewing subjects from multiple perspectives simultaneously. And there was something about this like, let's move away from creating purely realistic illusions of three D on a two D canvas and into this more like fragmented perspectives world.

It teaches us artists to think beyond what we see. It teaches us to explore, deconstruct, reassemble things.

He was always experimenting. He's like it was a constant reinvention. At Google, Mirac collaborates with artists to develop cutting edge AI programs like the music sandbox suite and the film creation software Flow. These tools allow people to create a song or a film by simply writing prompts for the program to follow. So the more detailed the prompt, the more incredible the output.

For Mira, these tools put experimental power into the hands of everyday people. And it's a power that can harness any medium to express an artistic vision. In her own creative work, she says the magic often lies in the places where those media overlap. I do work in ceramics, I do print making. Uh I also create experimental films. I write poetry. My medium changes depending on the subject and what I'm currently thinking about.

sometimes what I'll learn in printmaking I'll kind of bring over into film or I'll bring, you know, something I'm experimenting with in another medium back and forth. She says the same applies to AI tools. The challenge is getting people to push the boundaries of what AI can do in the creative space. You can use these AI tools in so many ways. And what I find is sometimes we use them

in some way to generate the thing that we're currently comfortable with. And so we'll take a new tool and we'll be like, well, let me do a traditional video or let me do a traditional piece of music. Versus what are some of the new things that we could experiment with and and explore that don't quite exist right now? Lane at night, Mira often turns to AI for feedback on her creative ideas too. Kind of like a friend or a peer in the industry.

As artists, like we don't always sleep and not everybody's awake late at night to bounce ideas off of. So you can use it as um Like a partner in some ways. And and so I think that there's just like there's a tremendous amount of flexibility in these tools, well beyond like.

when you first initially look at them, what you think they might be used for. Can you think of a moment where this light bulb went off when you realized just how powerful these tools can be for a creative person like yourself? One aha moment for me was in twenty eighteen um when I was experimenting with some of these new models and I remember having convinced some researchers

to take my artwork and to like sample. Like we we took apart the videos and we took all the frames and we created an AI model based on my artwork. And every night it would generate some ideas and I would come in, there'd be a folder of new ideas, I'd dig through those and I thought, Oh, this is interesting.

This might end up becoming a really interesting creative partner in the future. Not right now, not in twenty eighteen, but in the future. And so we fast forward to now, twenty twenty five. These tools can just like they are so iterative, so creative. And I don't have to wait overnight to get something in a folder and then have to dig through it. Like this is just a dialogue that's happening.

Mira saw this firsthand when her team was working with filmmakers Eliza McNitt and Darren Aronofsky on a short film in partnership with Google's Deep Mind. It was the first in a series of three shorts exploring AI's role in filmmaking. When we were working on a film that was called Ancestra, it was released at the Tribeca Film Festival. We need help here! Is my baby gonna be okay?

Some of their prompts were really long. They were describing a scene, what was happening in that scene, the lighting, the movement. the camera angle. And so some of these prompts were, you know, like hundreds of words long just to get like the exact thing that they were hoping to get out of out of the AI tool. Now you can certainly write

Simpl prompts and get things out that are really amazing as well. But when you're a film director and there's something you're you're trying to do, you have a vision in your mind. That's an example of like how it becomes really valuable in knowing the craft and being able to use the right words and to pull the right content out of these tools.

Last year, advanced prompting helped shape the world's first AI-driven hit song, a one and a half minute 70s throwback called BBL Drizzy. It was created by a guy known as King Willonius. My name's Willonius Hatcher. I go by King Willonius, aka Avocado Poppy Online. I'm uh stand-up comedian, AI storyteller, and most recently I started calling myself a curious doer. To his family, King Willonius has always just been Will.

Will grew up in the small city of Del Rey Beach, Florida, just north of Miami. That's where he first tapped into his creative side through comedy. I just remember being on the bus, just making kids laugh and like just cracking jokes and acting silly. Starting in his 20s, Will took his comedic creativity and turned it into both stand-up routines and comedic music videos. Where'd you get those nonstick pans at? Him These days, Will is mostly known as a rock star in the AI art space.

He speaks on panels across the country about the intersection of AI and art and how AI can help marginalized communities break into creative industries. Over the past few years, he's become a regular at film festivals across the country. But it was BBL Drizzy that changed Will's career completely. Will wrote the song in 2024 during a break at a 48-hour film festival. He quickly posted it online and then hopped on a plane to Las Vegas.

And then I remember just looking at my phone, I was like, wow, this is doing really well. It's like 30,000 views. This is great. People like liking it and sharing it. And then uh my phone dies and I fall asleep. When I wake back up, it's at like over a million views. And I'm like, this is insane. BBL Drizzy went viral.

The A-list hip-hop producer Metro Boomin remixed it. Drake rapped over it. Live bands covered it. It supercharged Will's career and landed him on Time magazine's list of most influential people in AI in 2024. Not bad for a song he composed in under an hour. Like even when I made BBL Drizzy, like I tell people, like, yeah, it took me like thirty minutes and they're like, Oh my gosh, I only took thirty but I was like, Yeah, but I have been writing

songs and making songs for over what two decades. So I've like I've written I have thousands of songs. It was just like a no brainer. I didn't have to like overthink this process. It was just like, okay, write the song. I wrote the song and it took me like five minutes to actually put the lyrics together. When it came time to make the cover art, I knew exactly what prompt to put to to get. the seventies looking image that I wanted to get.

had I not spent all this time diving into AI and it might have took me a little bit longer. It's the same precise prompt writing that allowed filmmakers Eliza McNitt and Darren Aronofsky to push the boundaries of AI filmmaking last year while producing Ancestra. But even Will says AI tools are no substitute for actual creative learning. We have tools now that can kinda like

shorten that learning curve. You have to put in your your ten thousand hours learning your craft. It might not be ten thousand hours in the future, it might be only five thousand hours, but you have to, you know, be disciplined and and wanting to Like learn and get better. Every time you create art, you create with the intention of doing better than the the time you know before. The use of creative AI tools is exploding. And not just in filmmaking and music.

According to Forbes, we generate around thirty-four million images a day with the help of AI. The online streaming service Deezer reports that 20,000 AI-generated songs get added to its database daily. And in the past few years, some AI-generated artwork has sold for a million dollars.

But none of this content generation works without one critical element, advanced computing. How do data centers and advanced compute actually make these AI tools possible? Most people don't think of data centers when they're thinking about artwork, first of all. And um, but you know, the way to think about this is they're kind of like the the processing power behind all these creative tools.

They provide massive parallel processing. They let you take a creative task and break it down into smaller pieces and work at it. simultaneously. I did a lot of work in 3D rendering in my college years and even trying to render like a modern animated movie, it takes hours to render frames sometimes on a powerful desktop computer.

So oftentimes what happens is these are delegated to a render farm or a cluster of servers in a data center. They can distribute that rendering work across hundreds or thousands of processors at once. takes the time for something to render from potentially like Days to hours to minutes. I would say it's like one way to kind of supercharge the creative tooling. These supercharged creative tools are making projects like BBL Drizzy and Ancestra logistically and financially possible.

But they're also shaking up the larger creative industry.

What does a world look like where one person can now play every part in a complex creative process? You can essentially just be a one man studio from You know, the visuals to the sound design to having the actors. Like I did a forty eight hour film festival couple of weeks ago. I voiced both the characters in the video, uh the man and the woman. And, you know, I was just able to do like a speech to speech transfer.

And that was really exciting. I mean, to say that we were like literally at the like the twelfth hour, and we just needed these voices. Had we not had these tools. We we wouldn't have been able to submit a film. Mira says she's seen AI replace certain jobs. But she's also seen it create new ones. And fears that AI will eliminate thousands of jobs across the creative sector are just that. Fears. It's really easy to get caught up in hype and fear.

and think that these tools are maybe way more advanced than they are. And so what we would try to do is get people to have just playtime with them, understand the contours of that tool, the technology, what it's capable of doing. And then realize that it's it's actually not going to completely take over your job. As we heard back in episode one, the integration of machines to increase the speed of manufacturing during the Industrial Revolution sparked similar workforce fears in the early 1800s.

But as machines took over rote tasks in factories and on assembly lines, they actually freed up people to take on new roles as managers, supervisors, quality control inspectors, and white-collar administrators. AI is having a similar effect on the creative industry today. You know, there's very few people that know how to load cassette into one of those big film projectors anymore or

And those big cameras. Back in the day that was like a skill set you needed to hire for and it was um a really important one and that's transitioned into a different type of role. We see that happening in all sorts of industries as well. It's gonna happen in the creative industry. And the best way for us to understand that is to be involved.

So do you think that AI can actually allow us to be more in touch with our own humanity? I believe that, you know, the ability to express yourself is a birthright. I think everybody should be able to have tools, technologies, mechanisms to express yourself. I do think AI is an equalizing force. I think this is a moment where people are going to be able to just tell incredible stories quickly. They're gonna be able to share things that have never been possible before.

I think it enables a deeper understanding of ourselves. I mean, AI is sparking a lot of conversations about what it means to be human. And so I think it's it's a mirror of introspection. Whatever skill set you've been cultivating over these years, whether it be in marketing, business artistry, whatever, and you you put it out on top of that, it it it gives you like a superhuman type ability. Don't think about what

this AI may take away from you. Like think about what you can possibly create. You know, if you took your knowledge, your skill set, your intelligence and and had this thing on top of it, what could you imagine? What what type of sound would you create? What type of business would you make? We may not know exactly how AI will change artistic creativity in the decades to come, but we do know the technology will become better, faster, and more accessible with time.

Just like the computing advances of the past. The shape of things to come may now be resolved in decades instead of centuries, because the human mind has been relieved of much repetitive work to devote itself. Creative think. Mira Lane is the VP of Technology and Society at Google, where she leads the envisioning studio. King Melonius is an AI-first artist.

Where the Internet Lives is produced by Latitude Media in collaboration with Google. You can subscribe to the show anywhere you access your podcasts. Please give us a rating if you are enjoying our journey together. If you want to see some of these stories for yourself, including one featuring King Willonius,

We have a series of short documentaries on YouTube. You'll find the film linked in the show notes. And if you want to learn more about how Google's data centers are benefiting communities around the world, go to datacenters.google. I'm Stephanie Wong. Thanks for watching.