Media Monitor’s Conversation at Cannes| AI Won't Replace Human Creativity| Jonathan Anastas (Rumble)

Jonathan Anastas, Chief Marketing Officer, at Rumble, joins Media Monitor: Conversations at Cannes to discuss why AI won't replace human creativity—but instead make it even more valuable.

Following Rumble's acquisition of Northern Data and the launch of Quake AI, Jonathan explains how creators can use AI to build businesses, why video is becoming the next frontier for AI training, and why human ideas remain the competitive advantage in an AI-powered world.

Media Monitor: Conversations at Cannes brings together leaders from across media, advertising, technology and AI to discuss where the industry is heading.

In this episode, Steve Silvers, Chief Product Officer at Guideline, sits down with Jonathan Anastas, Chief Marketing Officer at Rumble, to discuss one of the biggest questions facing the industry:
Will AI replace human creativity—or make it more valuable than ever?

The conversation follows Rumble's acquisition of Northern Data and the launch of Quake AI, exploring how the company sees AI becoming a platform that helps creators build businesses rather than replacing the people behind them.

Jonathan explains why the future belongs to creators who combine original thinking with AI-powered execution, why video is becoming the next major training asset for AI models, and why authentic human ideas remain the ingredient AI cannot generate on its own.

They also discuss:
• Why Rumble acquired Northern Data and launched Quake AI
• The vision of creators becoming AI-powered businesses
• Why human creativity becomes more valuable as AI advances
• AI as an accelerator—not a replacement—for creative work
• Why video is becoming the next major AI training resource
• The decline of text as the primary source for training large language models
• AI-generated content versus human-led storytelling
• What marketers can learn from previous technology disruptions
• Why businesses that ignore AI risk falling behind
• The importance of authentic human connection in an AI-first world
• Why face-to-face relationships become even more valuable as automation increases

Whether you're a marketer, publisher, creator, media executive or technology leader, this conversation offers a thoughtful perspective on how AI is reshaping creativity, advertising and digital business.

Media Monitor: Conversations at Cannes features conversations with industry leaders recorded during Cannes Lions, exploring the ideas shaping the future of media and advertising.

If you’d like access to the benchmark report or want to suggest a topic for the next part of the programmatic series, reach out to press@guideline.ai.

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to follow or subscribe so you don’t miss future conversations on advertising, media strategy, and cultural marketing moments.

And if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, a quick rating or review helps more people discover the show.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

You're listening to Media Monitors Conversations at Can, a special series that we're dropping just this summer. Thanks for tuning in to Media Monitors Conversations at Cannes. You're about to listen to our Chief Product Officer, Steve Silvers, interview Jonathan Anassis from Rumble.

SPEAKER_01 0:24

Hey, welcome to Media Monitor from Cannes. I'm Steve Silvers, the Chief Product Officer at Guideline. And with me is Jonathan Anassis from Rumble. Jonathan, how's your can going so far?

SPEAKER_02 0:36

I'm about 12 hours in. I landed yesterday, no big delays. I went to the opening night at the Chirac House, which is at this beautiful estate up in the hills, and I'm always happy to be here in the south of France. You can't complain, canning.

SPEAKER_01 0:49

No. So, Jonathan, you guys at uh Rumble, you guys just announced acquisition of Northern Data. Tell me about that acquisition and how you guys are thinking about it.

SPEAKER_02 0:59

Sure. So, in reference to the acquisition of Northern Data, we recently announced the closing of the deal plus a rebrand. Rumble is going to become Rum Inc., sort of the holding company, of which we're now going to run two business units. Rumble, our traditional video business, and all the ancillaries out of that, the advertising platform, the non-custodial wallet platform, and the Northern Data offering in connection with Rumble Cloud is going to become Quake AI. And the big strategic shift behind that is really to start to think of a world in where AI makes human creativity actually the most important thing, right? That you think about what AI can do and what AI can't do. That sort of the power of human creativity becomes the most important resource in the world. And the way we're thinking about the world is think about a world where creators become enterprises, where the quick AI offering becomes the machine that allows them to build agenic enterprises and AI-driven businesses. And that Rumble, the video platform, becomes the last piece of the flywheel. That's marketing, that's sales, that's your customer base. So to think about those two pieces together about AI or how we're looking at the world in the future.

SPEAKER_01 2:21

We've only been here today, a lot of conversations already about how AI is going to augment human creativity. Obviously, up to date, Rumble has been a video business, now moving to AI as well. How do you guys see those things working together? And how do you see using AI to augment versus replace human creativity?

SPEAKER_02 2:43

So I think it's never going to replace human creativity. I think it is going to be an augmentation. It's going to help sort of scale things and build things and add speed. But the sort of out-of-the-box thinking that creates the great shifts are not going to be created by AI. AI sort of works within the rails of which it's trained. And it is often those outlying ideas, right, that become the most powerful things. So we're looking at the combination of AI and video in two ways. As I noted earlier, we're looking at quick AI driving the building of tools and agentically driven enterprises that allow, in essence, our creators to become agentic Mr. Beasts, right? They can launch hundreds, thousands, millions of businesses using agents. And secondarily, the video platform, then as I noted, becomes the flywheel. It becomes distribution, it becomes marketing, it becomes sales, it's the customer, and that creates a flywheel. The second piece is as widely quoted. The LLMs have learned about all they can from words. You know, there's a famous quote of the now X uh head of AI from Facebook, which is an LLM has seen less of video than the average four-year-old, and a four-year-old is not very smart, right? Sort of the classic poll quote. So people like Rumble that disproportionately only control huge terabytes of video platform data becomes training data for where the LLMs need to go. If you're building drones, video game engines, robotics, video is going to be what's going to train the AI in the future. So I think that's a whole second layer beyond the vision of like powering human creativity, where we own a trove of data that's now more important than the words that have trained the LLMs to date.

SPEAKER_01 4:43

And that it had flattened out, where we had all were afraid when the LLMs came out that it was going to overwhelm, that was going to be almost 100% AI generated. Now, obviously on the video side, we've seen little bits and pieces of AI-generated video, but it hasn't started dominating the space yet. So there's a huge opportunity here, I think, to with the content to train models so that we get more good AI-generated content that actually connects with humans. Obviously, some people are comfortable with that, and some people are not comfortable with that. Like, how do you feel about AI-generated content? And do you think it's the future, or do you think there's a watch out, or is there a balance? I think there's going to be a balance, like a lot of things.

SPEAKER_02 5:29

I am neither, you know, an AI super optimist or an AI doomer. I've been through a whole bunch of technology disruption cycles as a marketer and as a business person. And you know, did CGI replace human filmmaking? No. Right? And I think it becomes like that. Like we just came through an electoral cycle in Los Angeles where AI was really powerful for an outsider candidate. And I think he leveraged AI in a very powerful way, which is like compressing the time of production and compressing the cost of production. Where he was able to like, I've never seen somebody be able to respond in advertising to like a news cycle so quickly, right? Where like for the first time you could see a 90-second AI-genated spot at super high production value that answered literally an opponent's quote from 12 hours ago, right? Super powerful. But there was an idea behind all that messaging that AI didn't create, right? A human created the idea. A human created what the response was going to be an AI-enabled quality, speed, cost compression.

SPEAKER_01 6:38

I mean, that makes sense. Like, why would you show up to a competitive political race like that and tie one arm behind your back and not use AI tools if they were available? Right. But but you're still having human ideas and you're using the AI to amplify those ideas. So you you don't think that you think people that are prohibiting themselves from using these tools are disadvantaging themselves?

SPEAKER_02 7:05

I think anybody that is didactically prohibit themselves from these tools are making the same mistake that we've seen every time. I get into a number, I used to be a musician, and I think the digital disruption in musicians in music has been super powerful. And I often debate older musicians who think streaming ruined music, I think streaming democratized music, right? Like we can talk about the discovery challenges of 100,000 songs being released a day. But as somebody who came from like alternative music, the idea that there is no gatekeeper, that there's zero cost of distribution, like musicians should be thanking whatever power brought it here, that you can press a button and have potential reach of up to a billion people for basically free. And if you don't view AI the same way, you're in deep trouble for a couple of reasons. Genie's aren't going to go back in bottles for starters, right? Like streaming's never gonna go away. AI is not gonna go away, there's not gonna be a global ban on AI, there wasn't a global ban on Bitcoin. And B, if you're not leveraging those tools, you are simply gonna be left behind. And another music analog I'm gonna make to that is I really ascribe the rise of hip-hop along with fall of rock to a genre that leaned into technology like disruption and a genre that thought technology disruption. And because hip-hop was like, oh, we're going back to a single cycle, oh, like I need to be out there as much as possible. Oh, I'm gonna own streaming the way they used to own free mixtapes on the street, where rock was resistant. That's the case study for AI. Like the categories, the people that are truly resistant, there's no way to keep up.

SPEAKER_01 8:48

There just isn't. I mean, I think that makes sense just to follow that metaphor. When they invented the drum machine, it's not like there aren't drummers now. Like they're still good drummers, but drum machines unlocked a whole new set of musical genres like EDM that we would not have had if we didn't have the drum machine. So you could obviously embrace it or not. Right.

SPEAKER_02 9:10

And I'm gonna take that even further, which is also it made live drummers or great live drummers even more important. Like the great irony is now hip-hop has gone back to like drummers on stage. Right, right. Right. Over the genre that never had drummers on stage. And so I think that goes back to where we started, which is human creativity and the value and the power of human creativity is not gonna vanish. This is just another tool to unlock it. This is just another tool to accelerate it.

SPEAKER_01 9:39

I think that makes sense. Um, and I think human connection is also a really important part of what we do in advertising. And while you can use AI to augment that connection, you still need to have it for it to be a successful creative piece, right? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 9:56

I mean, it's funny. We're we're recording this in the south of France that can. It seems more crowded than it has in a number of years, because human connection becomes increasingly important. I was in a uh VC event a few months ago, and that VC was sort of saying, you know, because of AI, largely because of AI, if I've never met you in person, I likely won't return your email. Right? Like if I haven't met you in person, I'd likely won't book the meeting. You know, because I just get all these automated inbounds now, right? And so, yes, AI is gonna only make real human connections on a number of levels more valuable. I mean, it's a big reason why I'm here, right? Because you still have to make face-to-face connections to move things forward in the world, probably more than ever before.

SPEAKER_01 10:41

Well, it's great to actually meet you in person because we connected before this on Zoom. We did. And I didn't reach out to you with an AI-driven. No, and we have not AIs. AIs do not write this, we're not generated. Uh, but maybe next year we'll be AI generated. Um, anyway, Jonathan, thank you so much for the time. Thanks for being on the pod, and uh, you know, hope to hang out with you some more. Absolutely. I appreciate you having me, and I appreciate being there. Thank you. Thanks.

SPEAKER_00 11:08

Thanks for listening, and don't forget to also subscribe and listen to our Wednesday podcast, Media Monitor, where we go deep on trends, look into the data, and try to understand where the media market's going.