Can human creativity survive the AI era? with Jesse Feister

In this episode of Delivered, you can learn learn what happens to human creativity when AI enters the creative process.

Can it thrive in a world shaped by speed and algorithms? When everyone has access to the same tools, what truly sets great creative work apart? And what can artists bring to an efficiency-driven business world?

We sat down with Jesse Feister, executive director at the Webby Media Group, to explore these questions. Drawing on his experience as a musician, entrepreneur, and former Head of Creator Marketing at Twitch, Jesse shares his perspective on the evolving relationship between human creativity and emerging technologies.

Key learnings:

• Understand the impact of AI on creativity, from opportunities to trade-offs
• Discover what makes creators succeed beyond talent alone
• Learn how creative skills translate to business success
• Explore key lessons from Jesse’s journey from artist to entrepreneur
• Find out how they’re approaching AI at the 30th Webby Awards

Delivered newsletter
Delivered episodes are recorded live. Subscribe to our newsletter to stay informed about upcoming live events. When you join a live event, you can ask our guests questions and get instant answers, access exclusive content, and participate in giveaways.

About Infinum
Delivered is brought to you by a leading digital product agency, Infinum. We've been consulting, workshopping, and delivering advanced digital solutions since 2005.

Let's stay connected!
LinkedIn
YouTube

Transcript

Hello, Jesse.

Great to see you. Thank you for having me.

And thank you for coming over. Jess is over from New York for hosting the Lovies, right? Tonight?

Lovie Award winner event. Yes. Right here in Amsterdam. First time. My first time in Amsterdam. London for 14 years. This is the first year that we have gone outside of London, which I think is appropriate because there's so much amazing work that we recognize at the Lovies, but particularly here. Amsterdam have such a phenomenal creative community. So it felt like a good time to switch it up.

Yeah. And it's going to be done in the city tonight, right? So thank you for making the time to come here and chat. Yeah.

Thank you for having me.

So we're here to talk about yourself, the web is, and I want to start there by asking you to tell a little bit about Jesse Feister. Yeah. Who are you and how did you end up here? So I actually, I grew up in a part of the United States that has recently become internet slang for weird and bad. And that is Ohio, which it's not completely fair, but it's also not completely untrue. There's definitely some weird parts of Ohio. It's Midwest to the US. And my story really is about coming, growing up in a relatively isolated part of America and having the internet. I was a teenager when I downloaded Napster for the first time and a music lover and musician. So I downloaded Napster and decided I want to be a professional musician. I was also a very serious kind of student musician at the time, but Napster opened up this world to me that I never would have had access to.

Do you remember your first song you downloaded?That's a great question. I don't, but I can imagine the genres that were being downloaded. And it was a wide range of some stuff that was amazing and some stuff it was bad. But as I always explain it, we had our parents' record collections. So my parents had good taste, but it was limited. It was very ... Paul Simon, singer/songwriter. You download Napster, you could really listen to anything across the world. And while that had so many significant implications for the music industry and piracy, like the fundamental good of just having access to so much inspiration and so much music had a big impact on me. And it was a big part of my career over the next 10, 15 years because I did play professionally. I grinded as a DIY artist for many years, but then eventually had deals with MySpace records, which now defunct and then eventually Island Def Jam.
And so I really witnessed the sort of downfall of that era of the music industry, which was a direct result of piracy and the internet changing everything. But at the same time, I was really influenced by it and believed in it. So as that sort of digital transition took place over the course of about 10, 15 years, I was right in the middle of it first as an artist and then as an entrepreneur, I was always a big believer in Spotify and that model because it really, to me, solved the problems that we saw, but also captured the opportunity really well too. So a lot of my music career, first playing and then eventually working in around technology, which was solving all sorts of problems, also creating new problems. So that's a lot of what my startup was about.

Yeah. Talk about that. Talk about Songspace.

Yeah. So song space still is fundamentally a creative workflow tool for music teams and creative collaborations. The real insight, the driving insight was the music industry had traditionally been physical and the information about who was involved in the music was primarily in liner notes or in Word docs at that time. So there wasn't a lot of structure around the credited individuals in music. And it wasn't a huge problem because of the way that the industry worked, you could buy records and people made big payments that sort of paid off over time. It didn't need to be super, super precise, but once we transitioned to digital and streaming, every stream needed to be quantified and how you were paid was really a direct result of if your metadata and your information was in the sort of big system that was still being built. So Songspace was really fundamentally about connecting the creative process of making music back to the right data and took the shape of sort of like a hybrid of iTunes, which was very popular at the time, but also Google Drive, but then underpinned by this pretty significant metadata structure that could feed into the sort of systems that would help people get paid.
But we really focused on the creative workflows because we felt like the problem would only get worse if we didn't have a solution for moving forward. So as we make music, as we collaborate, how can we make sure that our credits are archived the right way and that those credits have the right data so that I eventually can be paid if that music is ever performed. So we eventually sold Songspace to a company here, Fuga, which is a

Music

Kind of B2B, I guess, infrastructure company, and that company is now part of Virgin Music Group.

Ah, all right. And this was, was this before or after AWOL and? This was before. So

That led me to, again, this was a very interesting time for music because there was so much change and there was almost this big divide at the time. The people who really loved technology and just saw this future and the many of us were younger. And then there was sort of the old guard, which was skeptical because it was a really big change and the incentive structures for who was getting paid changed and really there wasn't as much money as there was in the heyday.

If you think about the end of the 20th century, the music industry was doing very well. So the transition to streaming was like slow and painful and took a long time to get to where it is today where the music industry is thriving. So there were all these opportunities throughout that time to be involved in projects that sort of supported that transition. Songspace was the first one that I was involved with. And then after Songspace, I had become friendly with the team at Cobalt Music Group, which was founded by a Swedish founder, Willard ad hits. And Cobalt was in the same world, but on a much, much larger scale. VC backed, Google Ventures, Hearst Ventures, and really was dedicated to sort of disrupting how leverage worked in the music industry. So giving artists more control over how the type of record deals that they signed, the type of publishing deals that they signed, and ultimately making sure that ownership was retained by the creator through a different sort of licensing structure.
So very enabled by technology. It was very interesting to me at the time. That's also where we met. It is. We worked with AWOL, which was part of Cobalt.
And AWOL was this sort of record label hybrid distributor sort of enabler for this new ecosystem, which was so many new creative people now with the internet and with the cost of creating music going down, we had a whole new class of people who could make music from anywhere, which really spoke to me as someone who had sort of not grown up in a big entertainment market, but it required new structures and new support systems. AWOL allowed artists to retain the rights as they grew their career and then eventually just have all sorts of optionality once they got to the point, if they were lucky enough to get to the point where they were succeeding, they were doing so on their own terms and had a lot more flexibility. So we had a very complicated story to tell though because we were trying to explain how this service could work for artists at very different stages of their career and we had a lot of fun together working on that.
I love that project still. And

The site is still live. The site is still alive speaks for itself. It lives on. So AWOL eventually sold ironically to Sony Music Group, which at the time, it seemed like the opposite of what we had been trying to do in that, hey, we were very anti-establishment, anti-major label. We were building these structures to sort of be a counter to that.
But in reality, the music industry changed significantly as a result of not just AWOL, but a lot of that innovation changed how artists do deals with major labels. So it is a much artist friendly music industry than it used to be. And I think it's a result of a lot of companies working together, but Sony Music sort of buying the model to me was sort of validation for, we've actually changed the industry now that you're going to go to Sony and get the same sort of terms that they never would have done 10 years ago without companies like AWOL coming to the space.

So going from this, because I mean, now you're kind of left the music industry, but if you would, or left, but in your professional career, but going from artists to working in the industry, what's your big learnings from that experience?

I think that the big learning, and I saw this at Twitch, so I spent five years at Twitch where I worked in music, but then eventually was global head of creator marketing as well. There is a tremendous entrepreneurial spirit to the artist journey, particularly the artist on the internet journey, because you are given the capacity now to go make something and potentially make a career doing what you love, but it's on you. So if anything, the internet has given you options, but it's more pressure on you as an individual entrepreneur to make it happen for yourself. And that really lived with me. I think that my experiences as an artist, again, it was very DIY at first. MySpace was new when I was coming up and it was amazing because you could reach your fans and your music could go viral, but you really had to put the time in for it to work.
And those lessons are still what we talk about now when we talk about the creator economy and the grind of being a content creator. It looked a lot like what it looked like for me back in those days of the music industry. So the entrepreneurial values that you sort of develop as an artist are, I think, very applicable to what the rest of your career can be. I mean, not everyone wants to do the same thing for their whole lives. We think when we're at 17 that we want to be a drummer forever, and some people do, and it's amazing. It's very difficult to make a long-term living that way, but also even if you are successful, your priorities can change and it's okay.That's the one thing. It's difficult to make that transition. It was for me, but the values and sort of the skills that you build as an entrepreneur, I found to be very applicable to other types of work.
And so I now use those sort of values in most of how I approach work today, how I approach startups, how I approach even leadership and sort of getting projects over the line. I think it was all instilled in that sort of, it's on you or it's not going to happen
And no one really owes you a music career. No. It's on you to make it happen.

So on that, I wanted to double click on your ... You talked about the creator economy and seeing the artist journey and applicable now to the creator economy, is there any recipe you're seeing in successful creators? Like they are, of course they need to be creative and good at what they do, but there's this other hustle aspect to it. So what are the ... Do you have any

... I think it is a continuum. So I don't think there's any one guaranteed path, but I think there's like a continuum, which is to me empowering. On the one hand, you could be so brilliant and so amazing and so like phenomenally sort of like 0.001% of what you do that your success is inevitable.

Yeah. Then it happens by itself, right? And that does, you see that across every domain, like there's just rare talent that finds its way up to the top, but there's also a lot of really, really good talented people that change culture, that really have impact, that have to bring other qualities to the mix. And that is on the other end of the continuum would be like pure hustle and maybe the extreme end, no talent, all hustle at the other end, all hustle, no talent.

So both of them can exceed. It's kind of the mushy middle.

And so they both matter, but I think that there is more opportunity than ever for people who are really motivated, have a vision and stick with it. I think it's the same in music as it is in the creator economy. You don't know when the opportunities will show up. So a lot of succeeding in this sort of volatile space is just sticking with it.

Showing

Up. You show up often, you don't know when something's going to happen, you might need another year for this random opportunity to show up that really puts you on a different trajectory. So being able to sustain what you're doing over time, you also get better as you practice. I think the challenge I see is that people burn themselves out because it is a grind. And the trade off that you need to think about, at least as a creator, is you don't know when your opportunity is going to come and you might go really- Or

When the trend will turn.

Yeah, exactly. Whatever that opportunity looks like. So you could be grinding as hard as you can for three months and maybe have a higher output for a while,
But if you burn yourself out and your opportunity was actually nine months later and you can't keep going because you're either burned out or also what I see often in music, I want to quit my job. I don't want to work. Of course, none of us, I didn't want to work at Subway or all these jobs, but you got to stick, you got to be able to sustain so that you can be there if and when your opportunity does show up. So I think burnout is the biggest, and that goes hand in hand with sort of the mental health challenges that you see in the space too, where it's a grind, there's no guarantees and people are pushing themselves extremely hard, which in the right dosage is good, right? Being able to push yourself.

And also, I mean, the algorithm is pushing the content that makes them believe that everybody succeeds overnight, right?

Right.

Of course, it feels like that

Because you only see the people who have succeeded by definition because that's what you see.

I saw some incredible stat that just blew my mind was that the average view length on a YouTube video, like all YouTubes, it's 42 seconds. So the average viewing time on all videos. Across the

Seven hour sleep cycles, like the sleep, the white noise.

So there's so many videos that has zero

Views.

And

It's the same on Spotify too, I can say for sure. The majority of, I don't know, the majority, but a large, large percentage of the Spotify catalog has zero listens. It's just the nature of ... That's what happens when anyone can create. It's a good thing, but not-

Yeah. And also when algorithms is running.

And with algorithms too, right?

Yeah.

So algorithms have really come to play a much more significant role since I was sort of in the creative, since I was a creator.

Yeah. So switching things up a bit, now you're at the Webbys. Yes. And I mean, the Webbys is kind of like the number ... I mean, we refer to it as the Oscars of the internet, right? But it's many different things. Talk a little bit about the Webbys and why it matters. Yeah.

So Webbys are sort of the most prestigious international award recognizing excellence on the internet, which immediately begs the question, so what does that mean now? So the Webbys are 30 years old, it's our 30th season this year. Wow,

Awesome.

We've been around since 1996. And so you think about the early internet, it was like websites. So it started out of just recognizing really good work in early websites. And so saying excellence on the internet was clear, very defined because the internet

Was one- Someone saw that opportunity.

It was an incredible, incredible moment. And so even as the internet's evolved, we've been evolved with the internet. We're much, much larger. We recognize a lot of video and film now. We recognize podcasts. We have advertising. We have creators, which is a media type that we launched last year. We're now going much further into AI because it's a part of how people are creating and need some definition around what good is. But the challenge is to continue to define what excellence on the internet actually means. And to us, it's primarily about innovating with new technology, and that's still broad, but that's really what we do best is we find the work that has been made in some innovative way using technology and we shine a spotlight on it and we make sure that excellence is defined in that space and then we're showcasing the best of the world in that, whatever that specific domain is.

Yeah. And now you're in Europe and that's the love is, right? So is that ... Talk a little bit about the loves and how it differs.

So the Levees are a sister company of the Webb Awards. We're all under the Webby Group. So I oversee the Webby Group, which is the Webby Awards, the Lovey Awards, and then the Anthem Awards, which recognize excellence in social impact work, primarily digitally. And they're also just wrapped up, right? Yep, we just wrapped Anthem Awards for the year. We'll be announcing winners soon. The Lovey Awards are focused on excellence on the European internet. The definition is a little more narrow because there's a language barrier for a lot of work that's created here. And so both the Anthem Awards and the Lovey Awards came out of insights from the Webb Awards that there were like these specific communities that were doing distinctive work, but it needed to be sort of evaluated on its own terms. So the Lovey Awards, we support seven languages. It's still not all languages, but it's much more than just English, which is primarily the Webbys are in English.
So Levees are really designed to recognize work that's happening in different European markets and making sure that we have judges and criteria that fit what excellence is in that specific territory and we'll evolve it, right? So I think that there's also opportunity to change and grow. The Levees are 15 years in,
So it's also had a really tremendous run. But again, the fun thing about working around the internet is that it changes all the time. And so there's never a dull moment. There's always an opportunity to take the brand and the awards into new spaces. And that's part of what makes it really fun, but also that's the sort of duty of the team that is behind the awards is that we have a responsibility to make sure that we're showing up in the new spaces where technology is changing how people create.

I mean, seeing that it's European centric, are you seeing any differences in the type, like in work or point of view or expression across, compared the US and Europe?

There's a lot of similarities. And again, we get a lot of Webby submissions through Europe, as we know. And I have my Webby there, right? So Webby's on the way here for Your Majesty in terms of- Yeah. I'm crossing my fingers that we'll snag Anthem

Awards as well. Yes. So let's see, where were we? Differences across Europe. What I've recognized so far, and I have a lot of ... I've been here for eight months, I've seen a lot of work, but not everything is ... It's culturally specific. So if you're building for a European audience, you're going to be using technology slightly differently. You have a point of ... There are expectations from the audience for how technology is used, and there are cultural differences in how you communicate and how you market. So that's primarily what I've seen. I think that there's also still a lot of overlap. We are a pretty unified internet, but I think that it is easy for work to get overlooked on a global scale if the point of that work was to sort of reach an audience that the judging body doesn't fully understand.

Yeah. And I think from my perspective ... I mean, as an agency designing for both European companies and American companies, I see there's a lot of desire from the American market to get European influences on things in design and taste and those kind of things. And I think from European brands looking to expand to the US, I think they look for this kind of like the scale of American way of doing things. And I think of course the Silicon Valley way of expressing ideas or just moving fast, I think is what's looked up upon from the European.

And it's a ... There's trade offs and I actually think that what we see in the US right now, that the European perspective on the internet, especially with all of the changes with technology and the deep philosophical questions about humanity and how humanity expresses itself and what gets valued and why, the Europeans I find to have really thoughtful, different point of view from what you might think of as like the average American point of view. So if anything, as this technology is not specific to a culture necessarily, you see now that AI is across the world, it's being used in different ways in different countries. It's being applied in Asian cultures quite differently than in the US and even in Europe. And I think that if anything, it's more important than ever for those points of views to sort of interact with each other because it's too easy for the tech to just go one way and then we are all left cleaning up the pieces of what this one person who's never stepped outside of his office has decided.
So I'm very like ... One small way I think that we can contribute to a better internet as the Webbys is to just make sure that diverse perspectives are sort of elevated, points of view on creativity and technology are brought into the forefront. We're one entity, but that's a role that we can play.

Yeah. So I want to dig into a core piece of the type of work. I mean, that's creativity and connecting the dots in unexpected ways and doing things that has not been done before. So you actually, you wrote an article about creativity for Harvard Business Review, which is super awesome, by the way.

Congrats. It was a lot of fun. It was. And tell us about that and how did that come to be and what was the key points of that part?

So it goes back to the kind of what I was telling my backstory as an artist, as a person that felt like I was entrepreneurial, but the world didn't necessarily see being a drummer in a band as a sort of like viable skillset. But in reality, you're picking up a lot of the skills that I've found to be really impactful to having a good career. I always sort of had this feeling percolating that it's somewhat misunderstood. I was fortunate that I stayed in the creative industry, so it's not as far of a stretch and I could sort of speak to my creative background and still have some credentials, but I met a friend at business school of all places who was also a former music producer and a very successful one and he had since moved completely into a different world. He is a venture capitalist, he invests in healthcare innovation, which you would think is really far away from music, and it is in many ways, but he had the same sort of feeling, which was, "I know that I'm able to do what I do today successfully because of those like eight years that I spent grinding it out as a music producer." I think that is so core to how I approach work that I can't, but I can't explain it to anyone.
And I can imagine how if you're talking to doctors and people in the healthcare industry, no respect, no respect for that. But we agreed that there was something there. And I had also at the time was working at Twitch and I was seeing all of these live streamers, which again, I was not a gaming expert, but I had been a longtime musician and I related to these streamers on the level of, you are trying to build something from zero based on your own creativity and your own sort of vision for what you want to do with your life. And I love that. And I could see that it was so real, even in a world that most might not understand, like there is a whole ecosystem of people who are playing games, but building really interesting creative careers, connecting with people and sort of like seeing through their own creative vision.
So I saw those same qualities sort of playing out with the creator economy. And I thought, well, this is interesting because we experienced it as musicians, but now we've like 10Xed who is trying to do this path and there are going to be a lot of people over the next 10 or 15 years that will want to integrate themselves into another career.
And so we wrote this article about, we went out and interviewed 150 people who had had similar experiences to us. We pulled out some of the sort of core themes and we mapped it out into sort of a framework that we hope if you are someone who has this background, you can look at and say, "Okay, I know how to make sense of the next phase of my career, whenever, if and when I decide to go there." But we kind of pulled out three core characteristics that we think are pretty universal. And the first is that pursuit of a vision for yourself, so that you have this story early that I'm going to be a live streamer, even though it's ambitious and unlikely, but I see myself on this path and I have a vision for my life that involves being really successful in this somewhat difficult space.
You then develop the qualities of practice. So you understand, you end up building skills because you have to, you have to edit videos, you have to learn how to show up on screen even. Like you just get very good at quickly developing the skills you need to have to make your vision come true.
So that's sort of It's like capacity for practice and the capacity to build habits
That then can propel you into whatever you need to go. And doing all that sort of also it becomes a deep part of your identity. So you end up seeing a lot of yourself in the work that you do, which makes sense in a creative setting. It's like I'm an artist, it's who I am. Or this is a part of who I am. And those are the same qualities if you just translate them to business speak, it's what every corporation, it's what every hiring manager, it's like they're almost to a T, the core characteristics that you look for in like a successful professional. And so we were studying in business school and we were reading all of this literature on like what makes for good professional development. And we're like, well, these are the same skills that just need to be translated.

Yeah. And I mean, that's also all the qualities that we would look for in a-

Well, we use different words. Intrinsic motivation, that's why I have identity in my work. The capacity to quickly build new skills, like you have to know how to practice and get good. And then we call it bias for action is an Amazon term. I'm going to use widely at Amazon, but that is what that means when you are out just doing things to make things happen. That's what a personal vision is. You'd have to take the action to make things happen.

It's like a word that I popped up in my head as you were speaking is grit also. Great. Also just, you have your vision and ... Right.

It's a north star. Yeah, exactly.

If you have a north star, you can place it- And then you're going to slog through. You can stick with it because you know where you're going. And that's actually really hard to develop. So if you've experienced it in some way, even as an artist, if you can figure out how to translate that to your career, you can really be successful.

And now there is AI. Now there is AI. Impacting all of this. No. It seems like it's coming whether we want it or not, and it's seeping into all parts of the business and our line of work and our day to day. I mean, in preparation for this conversation, use AI to build that script, all sorts of things. With those three characteristics that you just talked about, do they still hold in the AI?

Certainly. I think they're universal. They're not really dependent on a particular foundational technology necessarily, but it will likely look very different. I think the skills that you need to develop will be different.

You're not going to need to learn how to edit a video the same way that you did five years ago, but you shouldn't. But what I do think may be an advantage is when you are chasing your personal vision, if you have sort of a dream of where you want to get to and you're going to take the steps you need to get there, you're going to just figure out how to do it as efficiently as possible because I'm going there no matter what. I'm not going to let anything stop me and I will use the available tools, whatever they are today to get there right now. And I'm not going to sit and worry about anything except chasing my vision. And if the tools are available for me to do it differently, I'm going to do it if it makes it work. So I think that if anything, it may be an advantage by the entrepreneurial spirit of being able to just jump into a new opportunity and use a new technology in a way that can help you achieve something that you really are attempting to achieve.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's something we talk about here. We're trying to figure out what are the skills or behaviors that are enduring. And I think the top three we're getting to is the vision, but not only having a vision, but being able to express it clearly, because you're not going to only express it to humans anymore. You will also brief agents or whatever. And we have this other thing that we call like everyday school day, which means that, because the value of making things, like the editing and the moving things in Photoshop and those kind of things is going down because we're going to have automations doing it. But there is so much new tools of these things coming out all the time. So you need to be able to open to learn those things really fast and then also being willing to let them go when there's something new because six months ago we talked about me journey and now everybody talks about nano bananas and whatever.

Every day there's something.

So it's just constant learning. So on that, talking about AI, where do you see the biggest potential for AI in creativity? And is there all, on the other side of that, is there any downside?

So I think it's so early. I'll say that. It's an easy thing to say, but we don't know exactly. I think what we're feeling right now is a combination of all valid sentiment, one of which is we have tools now that can allow us to write, they can allow us to make visuals, edit videos, make music. And a lot of that knowledge is our knowledge that we put out into the world. Yeah, exactly. And so if you're like a creative person who spent years putting your work into the world and on the internet, now you have this technology that's like utilizing it to kind of empower everyone else to do what you do, that's like unsettling. And I think we're in the first inning to use the kind of American baseball analogy, but it's very early. So I use this example, I always go back to the music metaphors, but when Napster was essentially ravaging the music industry's business model, that wasn't right.
We were stealing music like in just as full stop, we were taking people's music that they had put their resources into making, and we were just taking it. And so at the same time, the internet was giving us this potential to do it in this way. The poll was like, I can get the song right there. It's right there.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

I don't even have to leave my house. It's right there. So why wouldn't I do that?

Yeah.

And so that's where I say the two things could be true at the same time. And I look now in retrospect saying, well, yes, there were fundamental problems with piracy. It was morally wrong in many ways. On the other hand, the technology was there and it needed to evolve.

And amazing.

And amazing, right? And phenomenal and life changing for so many of us. So how do those two things work themselves out?

Yeah.

And they did in music over a long period of competing points of view, sort of debating and suing each other and like really working through all of the gnarly problems to make sure that the people, everyone was fairly compensated for what they had been contributing and you could build a better creative industry as a result. So I think that some version of that will play out with AI. I think we're like really early. Everything just is coming so fast, but the law takes a long time to play out. The technology moves much, much faster than our laws. So we don't have the structures in place yet to really make AI fair for the people who made the work that underpinned it.

But

I also don't think that that's a reason to put your head in the sand and not engage with it. And that actually, that dialogue between different interests is what's going to make the whole system work. So it's a little bit outside of the question I think that you asked about where are the opportunities and where are the, I guess, risks, but the risk is that you end up without, that creativity becomes dollar because we don't have the capacity to like speak on our own behalf anymore. I don't think that's going to happen. I

Just don't think- And also it can be a vicious circle, right? Because there's pressure from ... And then a business of efficiency pressure from business to do things faster, blah, blah, blah. And that puts pressure on the creatives, which needs to meet those constraints with the client. So taking the time for thoughtful process and creating something original doesn't make sense from a business context, if we value efficiency all the time.

But I think it'll work itself out because efficiency is just one component of like value creation.

You can do something really efficiently or you can do something better or completely different. Or completely indifferent, different being better. So they're like part of the same matrix, but it's not like efficiency alone is the only way to create value. No. And in reality, most value, the value creation that we love is new. And so I think there will always be like an economic incentive to do new things and innovate. It'll look differently. The tools you use are differently, but even when it comes to like a creative setting, when everything is normalized back to a mean, there's a lot of value in doing something differently. There's risk too. It's harder to do, right?

Yeah. And I think that's the opportunity and that's, I think, what I'm hopeful about the democratization of things like the AI generative video promises like, oh, the next Hollywood blockbuster will not be made in Hollywood. It will be made somewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa, right? And that's cool because that allows new ways of thinking so creative processes to just have the means of production finally. So I think that's where we will see the unexpected. I think us in the Western modern privileged parts of the world- We're like, wait a second. For us, it's more competition, but for developing worlds, that's the big opportunity.

We moved from analog recording studios, this is in my world, to digital, and that was right around the time I was first in the recording studio. I remember working in an analog studio where we recorded on two inch tape. It was a wonderful experience. It was a privileged experience. It was expensive, but it had an amazing vibe and it was special to do it that way. And the people who really built their careers around it really valued it. As digital music was coming into the picture, I was young enough to be like, "Well, this seems cool." I can just go record at home and they're like, "Well, it's going to sound like it's not going to sound good." You can't really make a record on a computer at your house. It's not going to sound right.

No.

And they weren't wrong. It didn't sound as good. Most of the stuff that's been made in home studios is not as high quality, but look at what we got. We got 10 million new musicians who could make music and have access to reach the world in a way that they never would have been able to do. So I don't know exactly how that plays out with AI, but I feel like that's the overarching narrative is that you're democratizing access to opportunity. I hope that's what it is. I want the next version of the internet to be more of that. I just don't know. It's too early to know exactly what that means, but I do know when you reduce the cost of creating, you get more people participating in the system. You also get a lot of bad stuff, but that's the trade off. Yeah, exactly. The shit pyramid keeps them growing.

But you've got the people making excellence. They can do that now from different places. They don't have to live in Los Angeles. They don't have to live in. You can do that. I love that. That's like the internet story. I hope that that's what AI leads us to in some new way that we haven't seen yet, but it's too soon to know.

Yeah. So this, we're running out of time, but I have two questions. So the final question on AI, now in the Webby applications and Lovies and stuff, is there a lot of AI content in there and also is there, does it matter or like ... Let me rephrase. I have the impression that the creative industry and the website industry or our industry is using AI is almost frowned upon still, I think that's changing, but do you see that from in the Webby judges and those kind of things, do people care if it's made with AI or not?

I think it's very audience dependent, which is kind of an easy thing to say, but it also is true. When you make work for other people, the reason that you're ... When it works, it works because you've earned or retained trust with your audience. And that can change based on where the audience is. I think right now people are sensitive around AI for good reasons. It's unproven. There's a lot of distrust around. Uncanny.

Uncanny. There's a lot of reasons to not trust work that's been made using AI. On the other hand, there's so much opportunity. So I think we don't require disclosure. We have AI specific categories for work that wants to be evaluated based on its innovation in that space. Yeah, I think it's a category in itself. Right. So there's AI innovation. There's a number of categories that sort of make sure that if you're doing something really new and innovative that we can give you credit for that, but we also don't require you to make a distinction on how you made the work that you submit. So you could submit an AI generated video and a video category and you're allowed to do that. The judges will just have to decide if it's retaining the trust of its audience. I think that that's the only rubric that works because it's actually flexible enough to evolve.
I think in five years, the expectations of people will change. I don't know what they'll be, but right now have a stat 94% of consumers expect AI content to be disclosed. I didn't know that. That was from a Sprout social pulse survey. So, and I've seen other stats that are similar enough that it's pretty high,
But that's on you to understand your audience. I also think there's a wide continuum of how you can use AI. So to require disclosure is going to quickly become almost meaningless because did you use it to gut check your notes before you started? Yeah, exactly. To just fix the sound quality on this recording.

Right. And I think what people really mean is I don't want to be tricked. I don't want to be duped by something. I want to be able to believe what I'm seeing. And that just means different things in different contexts.

Yeah. All right. So last question, as this show is called delivered, I have to ask, what is the best thing in your career so far that you have delivered?

So I'll give an example. I think I'm proud of it with a team effort, of course, like everything, but the scale of this delivery, I guess, is something that makes it significant for me. So one of the last projects that I led at Twitch was the launch of the Twitch DJ program, which was incredibly complicated for all these different reasons, some of which are social, some of which are like legal. There was a technology challenge and then there was sort of like a user community challenge of expectations. And so the core problem was the way that music was used on Twitch by DJs needed to be licensed. And there were no structures in place, no legal structures to allow you until our team came together to do this, to actually be a DJ live on stream, monetize your content through fans subscribing and tipping, et cetera, and then remunerate the people whose music was being used by the DJs, right?
It's a really special use of music. When you're a DJ. Very complex also.

You're using someone else's music to do something new. And so how do you make what structure is involved there to make that work? So there's the legal challenge. We built a structure around the legal framework. We had an amazing team that went out and did the deals with the major labels and all the rights holders, which in and of itself was a challenge. And then we had the technological challenge of figuring out what music was used and making sure that it was paid out the right way. But more than anything, and this was really what my role in the sort of product process was, we had to go convince these DJs. We had tens of thousands of DJs all over the world that were making a living on Twitch because we were in this sort of years of sort of a status quo that could not continue.
We had to go back to that community and get them to buy into this new model that required them to give up a pretty significant chunk of their revenue back to the rights holders. And it worked because we spent so much time with the community. They really put the time in to understand what they cared about, who they were, but more importantly, just to level with them and say, "We can't proceed this way."
And we had to put many of them under NDA. And under NDA, I could just say, "Look, here's what's really happening. We're going to have to shut down this whole format." And it took a lot of trust building with the community, but eventually we did roll the product out and it's a huge success. So there's now DJs still making a living on Twitch. They did have to adjust their revenue. They had time to forecast for it, but the format lives on and now you still have DJs all over the world using Twitch to reach their audiences and many of them make a living. So it was a fun project to be a part of, but it was so complicated and yet so fulfilling. Very cool. That's awesome.

And you've been awesome. Thank you, JC. This was great. Thank you for having me. I love being here. Always a Your Majesty fan. Love the work that you do and the team. So thank you for having

Me. Oh, thank you.