That awful thing happened, over there. Have we hit rock bottom yet, is that the silver lining, I dunno. Or will we just keep spiralling downwards with worse and worse nationalist narcissists taking high office until the (hastened) end of all life on Earth?
More mundanely, I was poorly all week with the cold that’s going around, but I muddled through. The kids have it too (they probably brought it home).
Work, work, work
Above woes aside, it was a good week I think. Went in a flash. Main work things were (in acronyms):
OP&I. Our regular operational planning and insights meeting with colleagues from finance, people and business operations teams. Having prepped well (proportionately to the value of this meeting) with Martha’s fab help, it proved fulfilling, bordering on living up to the promise of its name.
ARGC. Mark and I presented to our Audit, Risk and Governance Committee on the outcomes of our recent (first!) cyber security tabletop drill. Much gratitude and recognition from Governors on how hard we’re working and all the progress made, so that was nice.
AI Creative Summit. Wowsers. A blisteringly good AI conference (compared, say, to that CogX one the other week) focused on the impacts, trends and use cases in film, games and TV. Second edition of this conference, conveniently at BFI Southbank in NFT1. A few notes below 👇.
Extended SLT. A 3-hour session with my senior leadership on rebooting our mandate. This felt good, productive and emboldening. We got aligned and clearer about the barriers and anti-patterns holding us back from leading org-wide digital-first culture change and upholding tech and usability standards; and agreed some ways we’ll tackle it.
Re-activating DTAB. We picked the topics we most want our Digital Transformation Advisory Board’s expert input on next, and I wrote a memo to send on Monday to re-engage them, having somewhat ghosted them (accidentally – we’ve been so busy!) since assembling them in July.
A few takeaways from the AI Creative Summit
The tools are getting scary-good. I was blown away by a demo of LTX Studio, a tool for generating moving image storyboards and pitch decks. It feels like a very short hop from this to anyone being able to make a whole feature film on their computer. 😲
A helpful framing for thinking about using AI (like any tech) is to consider two types of value: doing the same things better/more efficiently/on a bigger scale; and doing new things that weren’t possible before.
Amid the very justified fear about job losses, misinformation, bias, climate impact and IP theft, there are huge positives: AI can be a democratising force that lowers barriers and opens doors for more people to achieve more, creatively.
Building a chatbot to help staff interrogate internal policies is a good place to start, to upskill your dev team and staff at once.
Trends: SLMs over LLMs; build over buy; agentic AI is the hot new thing; do ‘consequence scanning’ to identify the intended and unintended consequence of your AI experiments.
Some examples of AI-made content (met with righteous anger from audiences, creatives and their unions) include feature film The Last Screenwriter, and upcoming new Virtually Parkinson podcast.
AI is the fastest growing tech category ever but, unusually, has no product/killer app. It’s a utility, and there’s a scramble to figure out how to use it before your competitors do.
The AI market is currently dominated by tech firms selling products speculatively. It needs to switch to being driven by the needs of creators (which will only happen if we take our heads out of the sand).
Paraphrasing Johnny from Hat Trick Lab, the sweet spot is where AI works as a tool to augment the creative possibilities of the human artist, telling human stories to other humans.
Most of all, I’m interested to see what new forms of liveable stories may become possible, with real-time character interactions and branching open world narratives beyond the capacity of our feeble human brains to create.
It’s not all work, work, work
I was supposed to be seeing Adam Ant at the Roundhouse this weekend but he’s unwell and postponed his tour.
“Service design is about 10% design, 90% creating the conditions for service design to happen”
Lou Downe
Cultural consumption
🎬 Heretic. Fun setup, satisfying atheist diatribes, top Hugh Grant performance, rubbish last third.
🎬 The Contestant. Fascinating doc on a shockingly cruel bit of Japanese reality TV. Interesting to learn this is probably where the 🍆 emoji got its rude meaning. (I saw an industry screener, it’s not out yet but look out for it when it comes cos it’s v good).
🎬 Casino Royale. An enjoyable rewatch having only seen it once in 2006. You forget how long ago it was and how much younger pouty Daniel was.
🎬 Two on BFI Player: Run Lola Run(which I’ve long been aware of as a phenomenon but had never actually seen). Very nineties. Then Sleepwhich I didn’t take to but might try again when in a different mood/less poorly.
🎬 The Vourdalak. New release, based on a pre-Dracula vampire novella by Aleksey Tolstoy.
📺 Still thoroughly enjoying rewatching Veep with the kids. On election night by coincidence we saw the election night episode. Perfect. And Friends. And new Location x3 to nosy around some houses.
