The Impact of AI on the Amazon Community I Part 1

The Impact of AI on the Amazon Community I Part 1 Speaker 2: Hey, guys, welcome back to Seller Sessions. Joining me today is Dorian Gorski. He's been a regular on the show with the Main Image Monthlies of course and today we're just going to record his in-depth but we've had a pretty interesting conversation, this hot topic at the moment and the speed of which AI is going. So we're going to cover this today because I think it'd be worthy of sharing and then we'll do his in-depth next week. So Dorian welcome to the show. Speaker 1: Hi Danny, thank you for having me. I'm quite excited for this conversation. We didn't have a chance to dive really deeply into this, so looking forward. Speaker 2: Yeah, so where do you want to pick the thread up from? Because I think the best angle to start is the design angle, being a designer versus non-designer and the beautiful option that everyone has access to AI and they can get an output to a level, right, which is unprecedented. So give me your rundown of how you've seen things as an agency that's been running 10 years doing main images, etc. Speaker 1: I think AI and the whole LLM revolution really affected and maybe affected is the bad word, but, you know, challenged the creative industry in a way. The main thing that we see in terms of the latest updates and people sharing outputs is usually visual. So from the creative agency perspective, yes, it's been a revolution. I'm not going to lie, I panicked at the beginning when I saw the outputs and I was thinking, damn, I might be out of the job. But I think, you know, we've gone through so many revolutions in the history. So sometimes you just have to go back and look at a larger timeline, you know, longer timeline and see That, in fact, we had plenty of those from phone to computers, even Photoshop, right? When Photoshop first came out, designers started to panic because, you know, those people that were drawing things by hand, they're like, OK, we're out of job. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: So not not really same as, you know, laundry machine is not going to get rid of the need to clean your clothes. So you just have to you have to find opportunities and you have to obviously get to know the technology and just ride the wave and see what it gets you. The worst thing you can do really is to ignore any type of, especially technology advances in technology. And, you know, we've learned this from Blockbuster versus Netflix, where you kind of, you know, brush off and say, OK, that's not going to affect me. And then, you know, a couple of weeks later, you're out of business. So I think from our perspective, we are embracing it and we are embracing it fully. Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, just to go on, you said about the evolution. Let's take, for instance, the music industry. Right. Let's look at the cycles there. There is a point from about 88 onwards, 86, 88. But it really came to the fore in the UK with the rave scene in 88. Is more and more people were making records in that way on computers. We were all using Atari ST. I started later than 88, but the first wave came through. But then musicians would say that's not real music and that you can't play. But electronic music wasn't about having chord progressions, etc. All right. And, you know, some of the biggest records, like dance music records, are one note bass lines that vary Rarely go up and down in key and there are other elements to what goes into a house record versus a musician like a jazz musician. And the interesting thing for that is. If you think about audio and MIDI and being able to sequence inside of a computer, you had this group of people over here who are musicians, will complain about this new music made in computers and it's not real music, right? And these people were going, fuck them. Who cares? I'm not interested. If I want to make on the computer, you carry on doing your noodley jazz bars and stuff. However, And I see this because I witnessed this whole collapse with LimeWire. People that were making dance music were complaining about the internet and people getting their tracks for free and downloading because they're stealing their art. So one side you've got musicians Saying that's not real music, that's not artistry. The people after the development of that 10-12 years were complaining that their art is being stolen, their musicianship, their music is being stolen. So they complained about the internet and now you've got the next wave. The people that come through the internet and who braced it and give away all their tracks as part of promotion, yeah, rather than trying to sell them vinyl and stuff, that wave of people are now complaining about people that are making tracks with AI because it's easy to do and it's not proper music. So as we go through the evolutions, do you see what I mean? You have to be and embrace each of these cycles or you, you know, lo and behold, you'll be left behind. Speaker 1: I'm glad that you've mentioned musicians. So I'm gonna follow up with a question. Do you think it's we see the biggest pushback mostly from creative people and it could be because we're just so proud of our, you know, our Skills and expertise and I don't know, maybe this is something with human nature where we feel insecure and we're feeling like losing control. Because you've mentioned, like, you know, obviously AI now these days is affecting the creative industry massively and the technology was. And you mentioned just music scene when the new tools were released. Is there something there? Speaker 2: Yeah, what it comes down to is the fact that we all live by our own perception, right? It doesn't mean what you see is exactly what everyone else sees, right? So you see your worldview through your lens and your lens is developed by years on the planet, childhood, everything else that goes into it, right? There's a makeup there. Now, what happens there is innovation is taking the past And then turning it into the future, if we look at it as a broad stroke 10,000 feet. So if you're a musician who's learned to play the piano very well and you do things a certain way and you like certain things, when this noisy tin music comes along with bomb, bomb, bomb, it's not music to you, right? But the people that making the Bom Bom Bom, the tin music, are no different to the punks in the 70s. Because that was a racket. They weren't proper musicians. They couldn't sing. But it was still music, right? And what does it come down to? It comes down to perception. Music and taste and beauty, there's a subjective element to it. So those generations that don't embrace, saying it's not like the old days, right, are going to get left behind. In these cycles, which have got faster, the forward generation is saying the same things as the musicians did in the late 80s. Do you understand? Because we've gone through that cycle, right? So let's look at the cycle. Musicians making records on the computer. That's noise, not any good, right? And they're not artists. They're not musicians. 2001 LimeWire comes along. All the artists dance music as well. Who make bomb-bomb-bomb music in the musicians eyes and now saying it's not fair our art is being stolen and musicianship is under attack. But you weren't a musician to the previous generation. Do you understand? And those people that were stealing off the line wire and stuff, were the next wave of the industry that knew they could just put their tracks out, starting with MySpace all the way through various different MP3 aggregators now, because the whole distribution network has changed. And then that generation is now complaining about AI because it's not proper music. They're not musicians. They're not artists because they're just using prompts to make the music or whatever way that they're deciding to their application to making the track. And they say it's not fair because what I spend two weeks building, you know, all the production and working out samples, drums, melodies and stuff like that, and then paying for the mix down the record. You can do the same with AI, but without that talent that they have. Could you take seven to ten years to learn to be an audio engineer of a half decent level to get a track mix down? So what's happened is the previous generation has seen themselves in a new light. They are the artist. They are the musician. But the previous generation said they weren't. So the people that would say, well, fuck them, the musicians, 80s, then fuck them, LimeWire. And now the LimeWire crew that have developed is going, fuck AI, we're taking away our artistry. Do you understand? It's still creative. It's an output and people are enjoying it. It may be subjective and that subjectivity reduces as the niche of that music grows and develops. So all that's happening now is that really to me. Speaker 1: Yeah, I have a few musician friends and I remember last month we were sitting down and chatting just about this. And I've asked them a question which I'll ask you, okay? So we're talking about from the perspective of the maker that's very protective of their craft. But let's put yourselves You, Danny, in the shoes now of the consumer. Let's say you open your Spotify account this morning, you go in for a run and you have the latest release album, you know, it gives you a suggestion of the latest release and you see something's popping and you put it on your headphones, you run and you're like, oh my God, this is the best thing I've heard since, I don't know, Beatles or something like, I don't know, or like UK Garage. And you're just completely pumped. And then you find out it was all AI created. How would you feel? Speaker 2: I think the consumer doesn't care because this is your craft, remember? This is your craft and the skill that you developed. The consumer feels the music and hears the music. And it resonates with them. The only people that would complain about that, let's say that, you know, like you got, we call them train spotters. These are people that are dedicated musos, right? Used to buy all the album release singles, go to concerts and stuff like that. And they'll be, their thing is like, yeah, he's a music connoisseur. So that very small crowd will hate it, right? And they'll push back and they'll go, poor musicians because they're purists. They're in the purist thing. But we're talking everyday consumer. If you think about music, it resonates. It's an energy, right? It's a sound, it's a frequency. It works in the key. Now, if you think what most of the time, but not all, music can make you happy, it could be sad, it could be memorable, right? It connects memories around it. And you know the feeling when you've heard a record and you love it and you put it on repeat all the time in your playlist. We've all done it. But if you're the everyday consumer who uses music as a passing interest and enjoys it, they're not getting into the politics. It's the purists that complain and the purists of the smaller group. Speaker 1: Yeah. And I think the other issue with that is, let's say you find out it's all generated by AI. I think it still doesn't affect artists in any way because Artistry is about personal branding. We don't follow brands and actually artists just because we like their output. That's the main thing, but there's also the character. We want to go to the concert. We follow them on Instagram. We want to get to know them on a personal level. I think when people are scared of AI outputs, they don't realize that Yes, we'll see a lot of it soon and we see it more and more. I think here I want to touch on something that we've discussed just before hitting the record on this podcast is leveling the playing field. When, let's say when we saw, I'm going to go back again in history when we saw a lot of mass manufactured food, for example, McDonald's, you know, food that comes in a powder. People are thinking, okay, I no longer need to eat. I can just, you know, pour water into a cup and I have five, two minute noodles. But with that, I think we start to appreciate real food more and more, especially these days when we see a lot of food being mass produced. It's being tainted with all sorts of chemicals. We start to appreciate the real thing even more. Organic food, which is actually the food that exists in nature, is something that you're going to pay more in your supermarket compared to something that isn't. And I think here, It's, you know, the leveling of the playing field is going to happen with the outputs that AI is creating. What do you think? Speaker 2: Yeah. But as I said to you before, it's the floor raises. Yeah. So it starts here. So can we go into that conversation? I'll give the analogy of what we discussed. And you said, well, I didn't really think about it that way. You were telling me about like, you know, the researcher roles were reduced because AI was a lot faster and you only needed one. And then I was saying to you... Yeah, go on, you tell us. Speaker 1: Exactly. I'll tell, I'll say that the main thing that I was concerned and where you kind of shine some light a couple of months ago, a little bit month ago, a month ago when I saw the latest OpenAI image generation release, I was blown away like everyone else. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: And the first thing that came to my mind is, well, now everyone has access to it. And I was super excited for especially brand owners that didn't have the budget to work with agencies. A lot of times people come to me like, we really want to work with you, but you just can't afford it. I like everyone to have a chance at winning. We all do, if you're a nice person. But suddenly they do. And that means that everyone in the world can create high quality content. And I was first, I was super pumped about this, but then a thought came into my mind, it's like, Okay, if all the content is good in the world, where does it leave us? And here you had a really good answer. Speaker 2: Yeah, so my take on it, and I say this, we've got the workshop coming up and it's especially around that for non-designers and if you're working on the budget, because let's say you're doing it yourself or you're getting it off Fiverr, You're able to take up that next level. So if we say Fiverr from last year, two years ago, I'm not saying that the people on Fiverr that are using AI. So I need to separate that. So people would go on to Fiverr and places like that. And let's be honest, if you've got an eye for design, you would know that 99% of Fiverr, unless you find a unicorn pissing rainbows, It's garbage. I'm sorry to say it, but it's absolute garbage because you're going to go up against commercial images. Now, for some people, it won't look garbage to them because they're brilliant at numbers, they're brilliant at PPC, but maybe design isn't their thing. Fair enough, because we can't be great at everything. So what you see is like, well, yeah, that looks good. Then we entered the fray. Let's say that you don't know how to use Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. You're not was drawing as a kid, even at a low level, right? If you and another person, it might look like a six-year-old has done something in paint if you've got no design sensibilities or learnt the software. That's a fair thing to say. You do it 150, 200 times, you get better. Every time you do it, you get better, right? The more you do it, you get better. So that isn't an attack or anything. The point I'm trying to get to is if you imagine the output on Fiverr And the output, the person who's not really a designer and everything, but they're doing it to cover the cost and stuff, has now, the floor is risen for all of the flaws on that level. And what I mean by that, let's say is that the everyday person can get an output superior to what they could do in Photoshop and design programs if they've got no design skills. So that person now gets something as an output. So let's hold that thought. So this is good because you're starting your business on your way up and you haven't got the money to spend for a third party and you've now got a better chance because your images are that much better because the floor's risen up to the next step. But somebody, everyone else is. And if you, I'll go back to the domain knowledge thing. Let's say that, like yourself, I'm not a designer, but you've got Alex, he works for me, he's got 30 years worth of design experience. What do you think his output looks like, prompting versus mine, the nuances, right, of the designer is different. What output would it look like if you needed to knock up a legal contract In something like ChatGPT or whatever. Versus an account versus a lawyer that has the knowledge and uses ChatGPT just for speed to get the legal ease. And there's the difference between those two. Right. So whilst they're getting closer together, if you're like you, an exceptional designer or you're an exceptional engineer, you are going to go like that. So the floors come up from the bottom to there. So everyone's floor is risen. But then the people that are really good at it with the domain knowledge will probably 10x to a certain level. It will top out. Are you still on course with me? You understand where I'm going with this? Yeah. So what we've got is that we've got this output rise and it's improved and that's fantastic and it's allowed people to do that but then there's going to be a rise at the top and now it's going to have to equalize somewhere in the middle. The gaps are getting closer but then further away. So if you're a designer who the biggest problem we have a designer right is bottleneck. Why? Because design people can lose hours in the design. So if you're a designer and working for a brand, imagine how much more output that you can get. If you're an agency working for a brand like you, look at the output that you can get and the volume of that output and then the value for money for that volume for the output because you can do the creative stuff that you already know is domain knowledge. Which would take you 10x or whatever it is to do without it. Now you can produce that level of quality, if not higher, because you've got tools that enhance your knowledge in terms of, sorry, the tools are enhanced off the back of your domain knowledge to increase, to improve volume, right? And we said earlier on. Fatigue, right? Everyone has decision fatigue. The average person wakes up in the morning. Them first five hours, if they're a morning person, they're the key hours. That's where you do your deep work, your best work and everything else. No different from sitting in a recording studio like I did for 20 plus years. No different for you to sit now doing design work. Eventually, that fatigue kicks in because you've got to do the emails, that and that thing over there is laborious and you come back and you get distracted. Now what happens if you've got everything running autonomously and running AI in the background, it frees up more time for the creative work. The creative work you do will give you more expansive because you now can prompt through the future. Therefore, chances are you can improve what you get and the volume and the speed of which you get. So it does start to equalize as it comes up. Speaker 1: Yeah, and I can tell you exactly from our perspective where it has the biggest impact. So, three years ago when the first GBT-3 came out, I stopped working for one year. I wasn't doing any content for one year. I said stop, like full-on stop. I remember I was in Italy and I said I need to stop and full-on. I spent the next six months researching the technology. I even signed up to a Python course and LLM course. I was like, I need to really understand this. Where is this going? In terms of the output, I knew the output was going to get better. So back then I had a team of 30 something people and I had some very talented designers, very. So our output was insane. It was great. Just, you know, even better than the GPT these days, but it was missing something. So where I actually saw opportunity in LLMs was not the image generation. And that's where I'm trying to maybe with my trainings and with everything that I'm speaking about and I'll be speaking at Seller Sessions is yes, it can create great images. But I know from certain that beautiful images, it doesn't mean that they will connect. Yeah. So where I saw the biggest opportunity and where we see the biggest impact What we do from LLMs is research. It's trying to get as much data and analyze it as quickly as possible and summarize it. We used to do a lot of stuff manually. I had a research team of five, six people going through every single review, one by one, and just picking up keywords, the sentiments, manually. I've seen thousands and thousands of listings and I've seen listings with horrible images, really bad, but they have this piece of copy or something written and it connected and it hit the spot. So that's, for me, that's where these days I see the most opportunity. And combined with the images, it's a killer. But I think a lot of people forget that content and beautiful content is just one. It needs to connect. And how do we find that connection? By truly understanding who we're speaking to. And that's where we mostly now Our focus is on the research and ideation workflows. Speaker 2: Absolutely. Absolutely. But why can you do that now? It goes back to my point earlier. You just walk straight into my point, right? Think about it. You've cut down the research end and you're spending longer in ideation. Where else have you spent it before? In research, not the ideation. The research is the laborious work looking for the gold, right? It can take hours, weeks, months, depends whatever it is that you're doing. If something can do it, I'll give you a perfect example of this. Next year, For the first time ever, I will be doing Seller Sessions whereby I get to choose whether to have sponsorship or not because I've now got a new model which will allow me to sell the tickets without the tickets being subsidized. My sponsorship, that's why the tickets are so cheap. Because you can't do what I do on a 499 max ticket. And if you put my events on in the US, that's a two grand event. That's the reality. But because of the nature of the way that things had gone, I got venues with double dipping with their hands in my pocket. And then you've always got like, even like last year, I turned down 22 sponsorship deals, what were disguised as speaking gigs. And because I held the line, I could have took the money, put them on stage, but I'm not doing that at my events. It's not a pay for play. I even got now, I won't go into details, but Amazon, can we, what's going on? Can we help with any content at Seller Sessions? You know, we've got some initiatives, the UK branch, and I'm like, One, it's a no, you're not going on my stage. And two, what world do you live in? If you think with what's going on with our community now, we're going to have you on that stage.