MEDIASCAPE: Insights From Digital Changemakers
Join hosts Joseph Itaya and Anika Jackson as they dive into conversations with leaders and changemakers shaping the future of digital media. Each episode explores the frontier of multimedia, artificial intelligence, marketing, branding, and communication, spotlighting how emerging digital trends and technologies are transforming industries across the globe.
MEDIASCAPE is proudly sponsored by USC Annenberg’s Master of Science in Digital Media Management (MSDMM) program. This online master’s program is designed to prepare practitioners to understand the evolving media landscape, make data-driven and ethical decisions, and build a more equitable future by leading diverse teams with the technical, artistic, analytical, and production skills needed to create engaging content and technologies for the global marketplace. Learn more or apply today at https://dmm.usc.edu.
MEDIASCAPE: Insights From Digital Changemakers
From Atari to AI: Jonmar's Vision for the Future
What if early coding challenges in the '80s could illuminate today's AI complexities? Join us for a fascinating conversation with digital innovator Jonmar, a pioneer who has crafted over 100 apps, including five global chart-toppers. From tapping out code on an Atari to leading digital breakthroughs at Nike and Savage Apps, Jonmar shares his journey with us, reflecting on the universal appeal of creating digital experiences that captivate audiences worldwide. Discover how his unique blend of design and engineering skills has fueled a career that bridges the nostalgic past with the cutting-edge present.
Jonmar is a visionary thought leader, according to Popular Science Magazine, who embarked on a journey through the worlds of AI and augmented reality. With a career that seamlessly transitioned from innovation at Nike to revolutionary AR storytelling platforms and AI-assisted social gaming experiences like Spectavo, our guest illuminates the transformative potential these technologies hold. Through vivid examples, they illustrate how AI and AR are reshaping our daily interactions, offering fresh perspectives on creativity, and enhancing social experiences with intuitive, AI-generated content.
As we navigate the future landscape of AI, the conversation shifts to its implications for work, global politics, and personal interactions. By exploring emerging roles like AI ethicists and translators, we uncover how AI enhances human roles, driving enterprise innovation while emphasizing ethical considerations. We also delve into the exciting realm of generative AI tools, discussing favorites like Claude, Perplexity, and ChatGPT, and their impact on productivity and creativity. This episode invites you to imagine a future where AI transforms lives, offering both potential and challenges, while underscoring the importance of curiosity and continuous learning in this rapidly evolving digital world.
This podcast is proudly sponsored by USC Annenberg’s Master of Science in Digital Media Management (MSDMM) program. An online master’s designed to prepare practitioners to understand the evolving media landscape, make data-driven and ethical decisions, and build a more equitable future by leading diverse teams with the technical, artistic, analytical, and production skills needed to create engaging content and technologies for the global marketplace. Learn more or apply today at https://dmm.usc.edu.
Welcome to Mediascape Insights from Digital Changemakers, a speaker series and podcast brought to you by USC Annenberg's Digital Media Management Program. Join us as we unlock the secrets to success in an increasingly digital world.
Speaker 2:It is my immense pleasure to have John Marr on Mediascape Insights from Digital Changemakers today. John, you have been at the forefront of technology, creating multiple apps, having over 100 apps with five go to number one globally in the App store. You have worked with Nike. You've worked with many, many companies on innovation, and all of this started with you know you didn't go get your master's and your PhD, but you started off getting a degree or certification in code design. So let's unveil that a little bit. Talk about it seems like maybe this is something you were always interested in, but did you have any idea that this is where it would take you?
Speaker 3:Yeah, not really. I mean I remember when the Atari came out not the Atari 2600, which was, of course, life-changing for kids my age at that time of you know in the 70s or whatever it was but in the early 80s Atari came out with a home computer where you and it only had 16K I mean like a paragraph really worth of memory. I mean it's so little, but I mean more than a paragraph, but not much. And so you'd write code in basic. You know, that's really all you had. Or there were magazines Atari magazines that would come out that just had pages of literally machine code, zeros and ones. You had to put on all these zeros and ones pages and they all had to be right, and if you did it right you'd have a game. You could play a game. And so I fell in love with computers when they first came out and I would disappear for days writing code. I remember making my own flight simulator using BASIC and I learned how to control the Atari joystick. I'd plug it into the computer and I learned how to know what you know. So I made a game of two ninjas fighting on a rooftop trying to knock each other off. I made a flight simulator where you're flying through an ocean trying to find a aircraft carrier and you're, you know, zooming in on it and it would have to redraw it. You know, step by step as you got closer and you're doing the controls to try to land the plane Crazy stuff. I mean I was only like 11 or something, but it was a blast.
Speaker 3:And then I went through a season of life where I wasn't really technical at all. I went in the Marine Corps, I got involved in a bunch of other things, but then I came back to computers and they had changed so much when I came back to them that now I think at the time that I got my next computer, there was a gigabyte of memory, which now is nothing. But then it was like I can't believe this thing has a gigabyte. And so I fell in love again and I started creating a web design and stuff and I just loved the. I loved the idea, that of creating something that would express itself on a screen that then anyone could see. You know, it's like a built-in distribution model and I loved it.
Speaker 3:But when it really took off was when the iPhone came out. When the iPhone came out and I saw this screen I think it was 480 by 320 pixels. That's how big the screen was, and it was a window to the world. Everybody had the same pixels, and so I started making apps right away, right when the App Store began. Actually, I started before the App Store, my friends and I, to show you how little I understood about business. Then we called ourselves eventually Savage Apps, and we had a bunch of number one hits that were global and everything, but we started ourselves calling ourselves Savage Apple.
Speaker 3:How ludicrous it is that we thought we could use Apple but we were jailbreaking phones. So it was before you had the ability to go through the store. We were jailbreaking phones and like changing the battery icons and changing all the iconography in the system, but we went legit, so to speak, when the store came out, and so that was when things really took off and I just, I don't know what it is the creative came out, and so that was when things really took off, and I just, I don't know what it is the creative impetus when you draw something on a piece of paper. I mean, that's really what it comes down to. I can draw something on a piece of paper super exciting, love it, but if that piece of paper is a window to everyone else in the world. That's like infinitely more so.
Speaker 2:And that's what it's been like for me amazing.
Speaker 3:Wow, I'm in awe. I was already in awe from our last conversation.
Speaker 2:But now I'm even more so because even deeper kind, no, but I mean even you know, apple rolling stone, guitar roll billboard magazine called your creations harry potter type magic it's really easy to see that you've had this innate ability, right Skill set and passion to create worlds for people and to create experiences for people, and I'd love to hear about your time at Nike as well. But how interesting to me is it that you started out coding and doing something you know and having to redo things every time almost to render them properly, and that's somewhat where you are now. I mean, because the world of AI has a lot of those same complexities and just a different level, right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, amazingly so. Yes, I agree. Yeah, I loved Nike. I mean it was one of my favorite roles that I ever had and I was the first person on their digital innovation team, so I helped them. They kind of built the team around me at first, because I'm a designer as well as an engineer, so I do the design work.
Speaker 3:I could really quickly prototype stuff Nike could have. I worked like an in-house agency at Nike. So anyone at Nike whether they were, you know, material sciences or physiology or marketing or experience teams I think they called them they could come up to my desk and say, hey, I need a prototype that does this, that or the other thing. I got to build some super exciting stuff and I build the user interface, the back end, everything, and then they would test it on maybe a thousand athletes thing. And then they would test it on maybe a thousand athletes and if it passed, then it would go to the big team of the true genius engineers.
Speaker 3:Like the engineers that you stand near them and you feel their engineering energy and it's just humbling and just stand in the presence of these people. I just kind of shrink back at the sheer audacity of standing next to people of that caliber but they would take it over and they would build it up towards the client facing stuff and then you'd have the AKQAs and the big design firms would design it. So I would be the kind of like the tip of the spear for any ideas, loved that kind of innovation and that's where my career has always kind of sat, like right at the tip of emerging technology. So making meaningful experiences out of emerging technology has kind of been my game space from the beginning.
Speaker 2:Well, and that takes us to the world of AR augmented reality. You are known as a thought leader from Popular Science Magazine, which is one of my favorite magazines to read.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah, wonderful In 2022.
Speaker 2:So you went from lead for innovation at Nike to working, you know, in all these other areas. So what was that like and what did you see that made you say, ah, this is the next thing that's going to be getting big, popular, perhaps the next thing I need to test what I think my theory is out in.
Speaker 3:A lot of it is intuitive, and I think last time we might have talked about, you know, mantras that we live by or something, and one of them that I think we said this. I don't remember the last time you and I spoke if we talked about this, but I think so. One of the things I kind of live by in the back of my mind is with the little kid you used to be. I was at Nike and I started noodling with AR and my mind exploded and it was like the little kid in me was dancing, like this is the stuff I always dreamed I could be a part of. And so I went and launched my own company and it died during COVID, unfortunately, but very exciting stuff. I built my own AR platform for telling stories with fine art, but the draw to it was that take your breath away, kind of magic. That's what draws me.
Speaker 3:I'm not really a calculated person. I'm not the world's gift. I'm not a gift to the world of business. I'm not the consummate business person. I'm not Steve Jobs, I'm not, and obviously that's the case, but I'm just saying in myself I understand, I'm not super skilled at this quote, unquote business side. So I I don't look at the world as dollars and where am I going to make my next dollar?
Speaker 3:I'm drawn by the passion and the excitement of the creative process and the stuff that just astonishes me. And AI does that. Ai now does that, and I'm astonished with how human. I'm so astonished with how human it can appear to be that I ended up doing the TED Talk where you and I met, where I just explored that human conflict concept, just because AI was astonishing. So when you mix those worlds together the power of augmented reality and making more out of your physical reality, with the super brain or the human reflection, that reflected consciousness of AI woven into it, I mean the sky is the limit on what's going to happen. So my excitement is through the roof and I'm digging into all sorts of use cases for AI and AR Right now mostly AI, right, but still discussing AR.
Speaker 2:Interesting. What are some of the most interesting projects that you can tell us about that you're working on right now?
Speaker 3:Sure. Well, one thing I'm working on is in the game space, so I was kind of looking at the problem sometimes, when you have friends over, and what game are we going to play? All the games take 30 minutes to teach someone about. You know, 30 minutes of learning and they're complicated and all the setup. And then, if it's a digital game, do you have to download it and you have to sign up, and so I started making a platform. Already I've made most of it.
Speaker 3:It's called Spectavo Spectacular, bravo, spectavo and the idea is an AI assisted social game space where there's AI generated content as well. So I made a creator to create games that leverages AI, and then there's ai generated content as well. So I made a creator to create games that leverages ai. And then there's a suite of games that are going to be available where there's no download, there's no, you don't have to sign up. Well, one person does the. Whoever is the person that owns a subscription to the game, they can share it and everybody can play.
Speaker 3:I'm thinking it kind of like the netflix of party games, you, where you play a game at a party. You literally just pull out your phone and immediately have incredible fun, like, have you ever played the game Werewolf or Mafia, those sort of social deduction games? Well, there's a version of it that I want to do, called Zombie Apocalypse, and so the concept is you're the last civilization of humanity and it's just one of these. It's like Among Us you vote to kick somebody out of the game, but when they step out, their phone starts making like zombie noises and chain link rattling noises, and so the people in the circle more and more. As people leave, you get this 3D stereoscopic effect of an environment being made by all these different device speakers, being made by all these different device speakers, and so the idea of exploring all these miniature speakers and all the connectivity.
Speaker 3:How can that enhance the tension and the excitement of gameplay? So, leveraging AI to build basically Tavo as a kind of a anytime, anywhere play like a game closet in your pocket and that's just for fun. I mean, I'm enjoying that and noodling with that. That's what I'm currently digging into. How can you make it just dead simple, crazy fun, crazy simple pull out your phone and play and in the background, all these technologies are just streamlining the fun, and I'm interested in tackling that problem at the moment.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I appreciate that, because it is that mix of in-person and virtual right. But it's creating that connection that we all say that we still need and don't necessarily find online social play, being together, togetherness and AI agents.
Speaker 3:Now, like, imagine a game I'm sure this is the future of gaming, but nobody's doing it yet but the idea being imagine you sit down at a table and you can play games where you play against one another. But what if you're all together, like Pandemic or other games where you play on the same side but there's an actual AI agent playing against you, like there's a super intelligence that you're all playing against? The rallying of the human spirit, together, having fun, and also like a. I picture it being kind of like the Netflix of gaming, with a Pixar-like quality. So there's kind of a light storyline to everything. So, as you play, there's a reason to win and there's something you're you know. It's like there's a cause that you're all fighting for together. I think the fun could be pretty amazing. It's like there's a cause that you're all fighting for together. I think the fun could be pretty amazing no-transcript.
Speaker 2:That's making me think of. In one of our classes in the digital media management program, we talk about user experience. I mean, we talk about that in many classes, but there's one specifically where students really do a deep dive into the interface and the experience and we don't just think about the typical user, you know, whatever our avatars are, but we also think about the atypical user. So if somebody chooses Twitch, for instance, they talk about a grandfather who doesn't speak English or it's you know second language and it's only minimal, but wants to really connect with his grandson who's always playing games on Twitch. Or we think, you know, think about people who might have different abilities. So what you're saying has not just implications for people who think of themselves as gamers, but really for everybody, because you can use AI to translate into different languages. It really can be super expansive.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I love that. I think that I've always had a passion for UX. I mean, that's you know why Apple started. Featuring us at the beginning was UX. I mean, that's really what it came down to. I mean that's what Apple is. How did Apple become Apple?
Speaker 3:Steve Jobs was fastidious about the user experience. That's what set Apple apart. We all know this from PC and all those commercials I'm a Mac, I'm a PC. It was the user experience, the intuitive nature of Apple. People would complain about the limitation of Apple because everything's kind of pre-constructed, like it's its own ecosystem, which is true, and the PC people want to mod everything but the Apple's kind of constricted in that way. And yet the immediate ease of the user experience is what defined Apple and it's what defined my earlier work.
Speaker 3:I tend to have user interfaces with no language at all, like it's just a clear symbology and I do that intentionally one because it's easier to localize when you don't have any language. But secondly, just for the love of people who don't speak my language, how can I make it as broadly appealing and as broadly intuitive as possible? So I love that you're in class discussing that kind of thing with students and AI. I mean that's a segue right into AI. Ai is broadly considered a non-user interface technology, so the UI kind of goes away. So as we get into AI more and more, that kind of handles the unpacking of the experience without a UI at all. So we're at that weird spot right now between the hyper-simple intuitivei of yesterday or today and the non-ui of ai yeah, to think about that.
Speaker 2:and it's funny because when you think about getting a degree in digital media or I'm studying my mba with specialty in ai and ml, but any book right is there's foundation course for digital marketing and digital media management. There are a lot of foundational concepts you need to know, but then you have to keep up to date on so much information. Things are changing every day and same thing. My current class in AI and ML there's no textbook because there can't be. We're solving business cases with whatever. We want to do that, but we have to investigate. We have to have that inquisitive mind, we have to be curious and we have to want to search beyond what we hear about on the news or we see pop up first in our feed.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I agree, I think we might've talked about this in the last podcast, but one of the experiences that I had that was profound to me. I have a friend I think I mentioned him last time. His name is Duke Duke Haba. He's an AI genius. He's been with AI from the dawn of AI, all the way back to when it was conditional statements, before it became what it is now, and I was helping him. I was helping him teach a class. I mean, really I was like his assistant. They called me an adjunct professor, but I was just his helper. He was teaching this class and we're teaching it to CEOs and CTOs. I mean, he's got 70 people in the course from all over the world, done through a company called Elevator really fantastic company. So Elevator puts together all kinds of educational systems. He's teaching AI. I'm helping him and during the course the whole landscape of AI is changing as he's teaching it. Like laws are getting enacted to kind of moderate AI content and it's happening in real time. So we're pausing class to talk about today's news about how AI had just changed right from under our feet.
Speaker 3:Something else or some new product came out. I was doing I think I was making some AI videos. At the time I was working on one for Serge Tankian from System of a Down, and every day when I would go to do some more AI video work, there's another feature. And I was like, what's this feature? And I would try it, and it's another thing that saves me. I'd go back and redo the whole video because it's just upped the entire ante for everything Daily or weekly, new tools that we utilize, different countries, even different states have different privacy regulations, different use cases.
Speaker 2:Meta can use any of our data to train their AI model, whether it's videos, images, the words that we input into any of their platforms, but if you live in Brazil or if you live in Europe, you don't have the same restriction or the same unrestricted viewpoint. Right, and I mean. Even Jeffrey Hinton, the quote godfather of AI has said that it's something we need to be careful of. I see every day how it helps streamline processes. It cuts down on the amount of time I have to do researching. We still have to have the human creativity, but where do you think the balance is? Because I know in your TED Talk it did seem very human when you basically had this conversation. We'll link some things in the show notes, but this conversation between two different chatbots and they formed this amazing story out of the very little information that you fed into them and came to a very human agreement at the end.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and it was mind blowing. Actually, that's what happened was I thought, oh, I wonder what if I have them have an argument, and I was so moved by it I didn't cry or anything, but I mean it was incredibly emotional the moment when I saw them try to bridge the gap and would pause and would secretly talk to one or the other and ask them why are you saying that? And the response I would get that's when I started to really understand. Wait a minute, ai has been scraped from human content. It's got humanity under the hood. It's not human, it's not really thinking, but it's this incredible reflection of humanity as a collective, so shockingly so. So I think I was very strongly moved by that.
Speaker 3:The difficulty, or the danger and I think this came up when I was part of that class with my friend Duke is this I think there are two constraints. I think One is self-imposed, and so that's more like ethics. You know, how do we ethically use AI? How do we not take advantage of people Like right now you think of the videos that have come out that said, oh, you know what? Do you know how Facebook does what they do? You know, you know how they? Or Instagram, or I'm not slamming any of these social sites, but the idea of do you know how they get your dopamines going and you know how they get you addicted and how intentional it is, and all the math behind the scenes going on to addict you to their platform. Again, no accusation, just saying that's what some documentaries say. But grocery stores you walk into a grocery store, they put the milk at the back and they have all these things at kids' eye levels and adult eye levels, all very scientific, to maximize profit. Well, if AI starts doing that to us, you know if those ethical standards of how do we not harm people or just use them or turn people into dollar signs? So there's one constraint self-imposed ethics that we can then impose upon a community, but it's still ultimately voluntary voluntary unless you're in the US and you're constrained by US law.
Speaker 3:And that leads us to the other constraint. One constraint is internalized. We agree to it. It's ethical in nature. The other constraint is the opposite. It's the push like the enemy, and I'm not going to say anybody is an enemy or who the enemy is, but there's some militant enemy who uses AI to empower their drones to kill humans, with very little regard for who's a soldier, who isn't a soldier. They just maximum damage.
Speaker 3:Now we have to fight that level of AI. It's against our ethics to have it, but we have to have it now because we have to fight their version of it. It's sort of like they've got a nuke Well, I need to have a nuke. If they have a stronger nuke, I better have a stronger nuke. Last thing I want to do is use it, but how am I going to stop a war? Maybe it's by having one, and so that's going to happen with AI as well. Internally, we're going to ratchet down ethics to take care of people, but at the same time, we have world predators that have no problem, no qualms about maximum damage from AI, and so we have to be ready for that as well. It's the seesaw of ethics versus global readiness. Yeah Gosh, there's so many rabbit of ethics versus global readiness.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well gosh, there's so many rabbit holes we can go down.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:With this conversation because I'm just thinking now about movies that whether have like an AI security system or you know robot that's supposed to take care of your family, and then they start making decisions that they think are going to be the best for your family and then it takes away that element that parents have of having to care for our kids, right?
Speaker 2:Or having to make decisions or having to think about ethical decision making and what's right and what's wrong. So there's yeah, there's certainly many things that we can think about, and I think sometimes people go to those worst case scenarios when, in class, I'm just asking them to learn how to use Gen AI right now. Right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it makes sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you mentioned doing a music video. You also help large scale businesses and small scale businesses, you know create better systems and processes. What are some of the other projects and things that you're working on and doing outside of your pet gaming project that I think is also revolutionary?
Speaker 3:Well, right now, I think I've got a couple things that I probably can't talk about, but there are a couple of companies that I'm in discussions with that probably yeah, I don't think I could say anything about them, but they're in the prototype space, you know, like creating new novel, again novel experiences, trying to figure out how do you maximize these technologies for you know, enterprise level brands and make the most of these in a way that, again, it's a value add. You, rather than trying to have less staff and pay people less and make more money, which is part of what everyone's trying to do with AI that is part of it. But how is it done? In a way that it's a value add, where you're adding to the world, you're not robbing the world, you're not robbing the people of employment and robbing the world of human-generated, heartfelt, human-generated content, and so it's really around.
Speaker 3:I think the work that I'm doing is around kind of storytelling, branding explorations in kind of branded experiences, you know, helping brands accomplish their mission, leveraging AI in a way that's like we were just saying, ethical, and where you, you take someone's work and you 10X it. So you still have someone doing the work, but they're doing 10X the work, which is what I feel like I'm doing. I'm doing 10 times the work I could normally do, and so that's where I'm interested in helping. There are probably opportunities to try to curtail the amount of engineers you need, and I don't really lean towards those. I don't want to help AI replace people. I want to help AI maximize people.
Speaker 2:What do you think about some of the jobs that people are saying AI is creating, such as there are certifications to be an AI ethicist? Right, there is also a role, that's the AI translator, that supposedly takes what the C-suite is trying to accomplish and what the engineers are trying to say and meets in the middle and kind of helps each learn the language or, you know, come to an understanding so that everybody can do their part and do it successfully.
Speaker 3:The course that my friend Duke is teaching is exactly about that. It's about all the new roles. You know being someone who is representing AI at a senior level, being the voice of AI and representing AI to an entire org, and he's teaching people to do that. So that's what a lot of the conversation was around. So I think that, yes, ai is going to shake up the world of employment. It's going to be.
Speaker 3:I've heard it said and I think it makes sense that it's not going to be. How does it go? I don't know if I can. I wasn't prepared with the quote. Let's see if I can remember the quote.
Speaker 3:Something along the lines of the difference isn't going to be who does and who doesn't use AI, but how you're leveraging AI. Everybody's going to be using it and the amount that you're able to leverage it to bring value to what you're doing, which is a whole nother world of education. And so the idea of, like prompt engineering that at the beginning I don't know that I'm hearing as much about it now, but when AI was first blooming, there was a lot about, ooh, prompt engineers. Those are the engineers of the future and there's some truth to it. I had to learn a lot about prompting and how to write a successful prompt. There is a part of that relationship to AI, but AI is getting smarter at that too Just take human instruction.
Speaker 3:But I think in the end, there is a special role. It's going to be about how do you absorb AI into your workflow, and it's going to change what you can and can't do, and it is going to give birth to, you know, rules and ethics in the AI space. But I think it's like a metamorphosis. I think we're going to need people and the roles are just going to shift to absorb the implications of AI, and there will be some new roles, but largely, in the end, I think it's going to look like it's always looked. You know, you have people back in the day that were in factories and they cranked a crank and they did something, and then they eventually pushed a button and then pretty soon, they're just going to say something, and so you still need a human mind overseeing things. But whether you're physically cranking or pushing a button or speaking a concept, in the end I think that's where the growth is going to have to happen. Mm-hmm, nice.
Speaker 2:Do you have a few beginner favorite programs that you like, because I know some people use OpenAI. I Love Claude Perplexity. Gemini 2.0 is what I hear now is the best of those tools. You know there are different video tools, different avatar tools.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I've used a lot and mostly the ones you're talking about. I mean, I love Perplexity. I love Claude for writing. I still use ChatGPT on a daily basis. I use Claude on pretty much a daily basis. I use Perplexity on a daily basis, and I mean when I say daily basis I mean like all day. I use it all day. And then I use Runway ML quite a bit for generative design. I use the generative design work in Photoshop.
Speaker 3:I use a whole slew of image generators, video generators, different ones. So they're all you know. But I think the ones you named are the big, big players that I leverage, typically Perplexity and Claude. I love both of those. I love Claude's language, I love Perplexity's research. I love ChatGBT's, kind of you know all use cases, kind of a generic go-to. And then I'm constantly impressed with like Midjourney. I'll use Discord and use Midjourney, I'll craft an image, or I use Night Cafe, nightcafestudiostudio, nightcafestudio.
Speaker 3:They're just an aggregate of the different models. They've got one out called IDEO. I don't know what it's called. It's something like that IDEO, I think it's called. Anyway, it's a model where people maybe you already know about this, but it's a model where people they built it for copy, for text, for digital print text, and so you can make banners.
Speaker 3:I use it daily to generate images with text, like I was doing a video for a production for someone, a business, and I had dead space and I was like, oh, what am I going to put there? I had no idea what to put in this video. Dead space and I was like, oh, what am I going to put there? I had no idea what to put in this video. And so I went to nightcafestudio and I used the IDEO or whatever they're called 2.0, I think it is and I said, hey, I give it three words compelling words and make them three-dimensional.
Speaker 3:And standing in an intersection, an empty intersection. So I got this image of these words. They look like they're made out of metal stacked on each other in an intersection, an empty intersection. So I got this image of these words. They looked like they were made out of metal stacked on each other in an intersection. I took that to Runway ML and I said, slowly, zoom in on this. And so I went from a dead spot in a video to this captivating visual of whatever was being said as physical words standing in an intersection. It took me two clicks to make it and it was an insane video filler, so it was. I mean, I'm thinking about making a product just of that, just because it's so Good feeling. Video is amazing. So I think all those tools mostly the ones that you've already mentioned, but I think I would add to it like Runway ML and Night Cafe- Okay, interesting.
Speaker 2:Thank you, and that was my next question. Are you mostly utilizing other people's tools that they've created to create your constructs, or are you doing that and also building out your own?
Speaker 3:Well, that's been the big debate. I mean, the market's kind of saturated. But I wanted to create something called Dream Thing, where it was kind of like a night cafe, itself only tailored to what I want to make. And so I do use AI myself and I have APIs that I call directly. And so, where I'm not using, as a matter of fact, the game engine that I built, it's full of that because I'm building my own games and I thought, oh, I want to use AI, so I just built it right into the code. It calls the API, returns the image and makes the playing card for me and I direct it. But I built the whole thing myself just to make it faster for me to build games, so I leveraged that already. But yeah, I've debated creating my own interface from the ground up, but I haven't pulled the trigger on it. I think there's a lot that could be done there to tailor graphics to the exact thing that you need, but mostly I've been working on user experiences.
Speaker 2:Yeah, fantastic. I feel like there's a lot for people to take in just from even this one conversation. For people to take in just from this, even this one conversation, thinking through the use cases for different products, how to utilize Gen AI effectively, what the landscape could look like in the future in the world of work and in, you know, thinking about the global political landscape. Is there anything else that you think people should be aware of in that world and also else that you think people should be aware of in that world, and also you know whether it's AI, ar, the combination.
Speaker 3:I think what people say, the future of AI is AI agents. You know they're hyper-trained AI modules that focus on a certain vertical, where they're soon going to be. You just tell it what to do and it'll go into your calendar, it'll buy your tickets, it'll set everything. It'll run like very much. You know very in depth what I'm interested in finding out. You mentioned a little bit before about having computers babysitting. Essentially, you know where they're raising your kids for you, and I think that there's. I don't know what's going to happen, of course, but given how human ai already seems and how close it is to that movie, her with Joaquin Phoenix already were pretty much there I think they tried to get you know what was it? Was it Scarlett Johansson to be the voice of open AI? And she said no, and then they picked a voice that sounded just like her. You know modeling after her. But the thing that's coming, I think and I don't know what I think about it yet, I don't know if I like it or don't like it, I just know it's going to come it's the idea of the way that AI is growing and how human it already seems to be. The limitation right now it's like okay, we talked about the very beginning of the conversation. We'll just go full circle. The very beginning of the conversation we talked about the Atari 600 XL computer and now it had 16K of memory and I was writing flight simulators into this thing. Simplistic, simplistic, but it was a flight simulator. My limit was I only had so much memory, so much space. Well, we're up against that now.
Speaker 3:Ai. If you go through any of the AIs I hate to say the word religiously, but I use AI religiously and I'm shocked that in five minutes it forgot what it told me five minutes ago. And I get, I get screaming mad. Sometimes I cuss at the AI. I'm so mad I'm cussing at the AI. And, funny enough, claude will cuss back and I'll be like I mean wait a minute. And I was like don't you cuss at me? And he said, oh, I'm sorry I was taking your tone that you thought that would be funny. I was like, no, I'll cuss. You know, kind of raging mad because if something, if just forgets, three minutes later I'm just telling me the exact same stuff again.
Speaker 3:Well, the future. Imagine with how human it seems when it literally remembers your daughter falling and scraping her knee when she was two and can talk about it when she's 16. Oh, I remember when you fell and scraped your knee and you said this you know that's what's coming. As the memory expands and it's able to hold all these things in a greater and greater context, the mirror of humanity, which is already crazy to me, is going to be perhaps indistinguishable in the future, even though it's still not human. I think it will be indistinguishable from human and the thing that excites me about that.
Speaker 3:So that's scary but intriguing, scary but intriguing, scary but intriguing. And what NVIDIA just launched with their supercomputer that can run AI like nobody's business, and the idea of like world sandbox games, where literally every person in there has their own story and their own agenda, where the NPCs start behaving like people, that's going to be mind blowing and there's some danger that people are going to enter into those worlds and not want to leave. You're going to build connections you feel like real connections in that world and there could be some difficulty coming back into this world. So intriguing also at the same time, like I'm intrigued by just how human they're already seeming and how much more human they're going to seem as their context grows and their ability to hold all things in place like a human does. That's going to be a whole new world.
Speaker 2:Wow, gen, ai and, you know, big AI, llms, all of the different things that we are looking at to make our lives ostensibly better.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I believe we can. I'm still super positive on it, but we all recognize the dangers. It's who's got their hand on the button. That's kind of what it comes down to. You know how do they train it and what do they train it for. So there's a big growth curve ahead, but I'm very positive about it personally.
Speaker 2:Fantastic, and we will have your LinkedIn in the show notes, as well as your websites, johnmaherco and spectavocom, so that our students and other interested parties can learn more about how to work with you or just about your work, and I am looking forward to many more conversations with you in the very near future, to some projects that hopefully we can design together. John Marr, thank you so much for being on the USC podcast.
Speaker 3:Thank you, annika. I really appreciate your time, love what you're doing and it's a privilege and an honor to spend some time with you. Wish you the very best as you continue to champion education and innovation. Thank you.
Speaker 2:And thank you to everybody who's watching this episode or listening to it. Give us a rating review, give us a like, send us an email to let us know what you think, and we'll be back again next week with another amazing guest to share their story next week with another amazing guest to share their story.
Speaker 1:To learn more about the Master of Science in Digital Media Management program, visit us on the web at dmmuscedu.
.jpg)
