Everything is a Remix (2023 Edition)

Summary

In the 2023 edition of "Everything is a Remix," Kirby Ferguson explores how remixing—copying, transforming, and combining existing materials—permeates our creative world. From music and memes to movies and even artificial intelligence, remixing plays a crucial role in innovation and cultural evolution. The documentary takes us on a journey from the birth of hip-hop to the development of AI art, revealing how old ideas are repurposed to spark new ones. Ultimately, it emphasizes that creativity is a collective endeavor, deeply rooted in human experience and emotion.

Highlights

• TikTok exemplifies remix culture where users imitate dances and lip-sync audios. 🤳
• Hip-hop emerged from remixing, using turntables to innovate new music. 🎧
• Samples from various music genres have shaped the evolution of popular music. 🎵
• The Marvel Cinematic Universe thrives on remixing familiar superhero tropes to connect with audiences. 🦸‍♀️
• AI art challenges notions of creativity by remixing inputs to create new outputs. 🎨

Key Takeaways

• Remixing is the foundation of creativity, allowing us to build new ideas from old ones. 🌱
• Music, movies, and memes are all examples of remix culture, showcasing its pervasiveness in our lives. 🎶
• Artists like Led Zeppelin and The Sugarhill Gang have used remixing to revolutionize their music. 🎸
• AI is becoming a major player in the remix culture, transforming how art is created and perceived. 🤖
• Despite the rise of AI, human creativity remains unmatched because it is deeply connected to human experience and emotions. 🧠

Overview

"Everything is a Remix (2023 Edition)" takes a deep dive into the essence of creativity, showcasing how everything new is inspired by something old. Kirby Ferguson illustrates this with vivid examples across various domains such as music, film, and digital media. By analyzing the early days of hip-hop, the documentary elucidates how remixing has been a powerful tool for innovation.

The film explores how sampling in music has blurred the lines between different genres, leading to groundbreaking creations. It highlights the transformation in the film industry, where familiar story arcs are reimagined in superhero movies, ensuring perennial audience engagement. Kirby Ferguson makes the point that the essence of creativity lies in the blend of familiarity and novelty.

As technology evolves, AI is presented as the latest player in the remix culture. While AI-generated art stirs controversy, the documentary argues that creativity is still a uniquely human trait, born from emotion and experience. "Everything is a Remix" serves as a reminder that while tools and mediums may change, the creative process remains fundamentally human.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction to Remixing The chapter 'Introduction to Remixing' discusses the concept of remixing, defined as the act of copying, transforming, and combining existing materials to create something new. It highlights that remixing is a pervasive phenomenon, exemplified by platforms like TikTok where users create their own versions of dance moves or lip-sync to popular tracks. The section also mentions 'Everything is a Remix' as featuring the best shirts on the internet, now available in styles for infants and youths.
• 02:00 - 08:00: Birth and Evolution of Hip-Hop and Sampling The chapter titled 'Birth and Evolution of Hip-Hop and Sampling' discusses the concept of remixing in music and culture. It illustrates remixing through examples such as duet performances, memes, and audio sampling, highlighting how something old is transformed into something new through iterative and collective creativity. This practice is likened to the evolution of hip-hop, where artists build on existing sounds and ideas to create novel expressions.
• 08:00 - 16:00: Influence of Remixing on Various Music Genres The chapter discusses the transformative power of remixing in the music industry. Remixing is highlighted as a creative process that goes beyond simply copying; it's about reimagining and recreating existing works. It empowers individuals to be creative without the traditional constraints of needing extensive resources. The text illustrates how remixing allows people to make music without playing instruments, develop software without coding, and build complex ideas from simpler ones. The emphasis is on accessibility, as remixing does not require expensive tools, distribution channels, skills, or even traditional good judgment, thus democratizing creative output across various music genres.
• 18:00 - 25:00: The Art of Copying and Mixing in Film This chapter discusses the pervasive nature of remixing in various domains from music and film to technology and life itself. Starting with an exploration in the Bronx, it emphasizes how remixing is a fundamental aspect of creation and evolution across different fields.
• 25:00 - 35:00: The Meme and Its Power in Modern Culture This chapter explores the emergence of a new music technique in 1970s New York City where DJs loop favorite parts of songs using two turntables, marking a pioneering moment in music culture.
• 41:00 - 49:00: AI and Its Role in Creativity The chapter titled 'AI and Its Role in Creativity' explores the historical roots of rap music, highlighting DJ Kool Herc's technique of extending instrumental breaks by using two copies of the same record. It also touches upon the role of MCs who would rhythmically speak over beats, a method rooted in traditional black entertainment. The chapter underscores how these innovations laid the foundation for rap music's evolution, leading it to become a transformative force in popular music and culture in the latter part of the 20th century.
• 49:00 - 61:00: The Future of AI in Creativity and Human Innovation In this chapter, Sylvia Robinson identifies an emerging trend in music and forms The Sugar Hill Gang. They use the rhythm from Chic's 'Good Times' to produce rap's first hit, 'Rapper's Delight.' Meanwhile, Grandmaster Flash builds on DJ Kool Herc's foundational concepts, evolving it into a novel art form and recording music that further innovates the genre. This chapter highlights the inventive and transformative rise of rap music, pointing to the broader theme of creativity and innovation in the arts.

Everything is a Remix (2023 Edition) Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 everything is a remix has the best shirts on the internet and we now have styles for infants and youths see the link below [Music] remix to copy transform and combine existing materials to produce something new remixing is everywhere you look [Music] Tick Tock is remixing you do your version of dance moves you lip sync to
• 00:30 - 01:00 someone else's audio [Music] you duet literally [Music] memes are remixing you take a photo you repurpose it then someone else tries it then there's a flood of everyone trying out combinations including remixing other memes when you take something old and use it in something new that's remixing it
• 01:00 - 01:30 might seem like just copying but it's actually something much more remixing can Empower you to be more creative [Music] remixing allows us to make music without playing instruments to create software without coding to create bigger and more complex ideas out of smaller and simpler ideas you don't need expensive tools to remix you don't need a distributor you don't even need skills or good judgment
• 01:30 - 02:00 everybody can remix and everybody does from our songs and games and movies and memes to how we train computers to create to the way we make sense of reality to the evolution of life itself everything is definitely a remix [Music] [Music] to explain let's start in the Bronx in
• 02:00 - 02:30 1972. [Music] in the early 70s in New York City a new technique for creating music starts to form at parties DJs are looping the dancer's favorite parts of songs so he plays the same record on two decks while the get down plays on one he cues the same part on two an early Pioneer is
• 02:30 - 03:00 DJ coolhirk who extends instrumental Breaks by switching back and forth between two copies of the same record and he has Partners MCS who sometimes speak rhythmically over these beats just like many black entertainers have been doing for a long time boom rap music is born and starts to grow and in the last few Decades of the 20th century it will transform popular music and the popular imagination
• 03:00 - 03:30 Sylvia Robinson spots this new trend and assembles a team to record an actual rap song she creates a group called The Sugar Hill Gang they copy the Rhythm from Sheik's good times and score raps first hit rapper's delay [Music] the B and me the groove and my friends are gonna try to move your feet Grand Master Flash takes cool herc's simple idea refines it and turns it into a new R he records the First music
• 03:30 - 04:00 created with turntables this technique of taking old bits of music and using it in new music becomes known as sampling at first wrap samples are mostly r b soul and Funk lots of James Brown but soon artists are sampling different sorts of music like Rock Run DMC and producer Rick Rubin sample the Knacks My Sharona in It's Tricky [Music]
• 04:00 - 04:30 A Tribe Called Quest uses the bass line from Lou Reeds Walk on the Wild Side in can I kick it can I kick it can I kick it the sampling gets more and more eclectic and more and more Complex public enemy uses non-musical sounds speeches sound effects noise and the Beastie Boys and producers the Dust Brothers unite hundreds of samples
• 04:30 - 05:00 in their album Paul's Boutique [Music] sampling spreads outside hip-hop into some of the biggest pop hits Sly and the Family Stone gets sampled in Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation foreign Club is used in Mariah Carey's fantasy
• 05:00 - 05:30 the group lens samples a long forgotten disco hit by Andrea true Connection in Steal My Sunshine in myself Britney Spears Toxic uses a highly modified sample from an 80s Bollywood Musical
• 05:30 - 06:00 but one of the most famous and least recognizable samples in pop is in Daft punks one more time [Music] which slices up a song by Eddie Johns [Music] firstly three parts are isolated then the song gets slowed down the second part then Loops three times then the
• 06:00 - 06:30 first part plays once this little sequence then Loops two more times then the third part Loops seven and a half times then the first part plays this whole sequence Loops throughout the song Eddie John's song becomes a Daft Punk song by just chopping it up stretching it and rearranging the parts cling reached its Pinnacle with the Avalanches album since I left you which merges perhaps thousands of samples into
• 06:30 - 07:00 a swirl of sound unlike anything else is layered together from distorted bits of obscure songs sketch comedy and movie dialogue there's the opinion of the entire staff that Dexter is criminally insane title track loops and speeds up a variety of Forgotten songs from the 60s and 70s then slices up Pitch shifts and rearranges a vocal into an entirely new
• 07:00 - 07:30 Melody since I met you [Music] and finally sampling leaves behind the 20th century and the world of CDs and vinyl and physical media and takes to an explosively growing new medium the internet Greg gillis's project girl talk challenges the entire concept of musical
• 07:30 - 08:00 ownership with a series of flagrantly illegal mashup albums that can be downloaded for free each song is composed entirely of uncleared samples by popular artists [Music] hello hip-hop began at watch parties in the Bronx and grew to dominate popular music and along with it so did sampling and so did remixing remixing is now a core
• 08:00 - 08:30 element of Music even when artists aren't remixing they're often curating and manipulating sound in a similar kind of way [Music] but remixing didn't begin with hip-hop earlier musicians were remixing too they couldn't sample but they could still cop just like rap is a remix so is Rock to explain let's travel to England in
• 08:30 - 09:00 1968. [Music] after the breakup of the band The Yardbirds their virtuoso guitarist Jimmy Page starts a new group he recruits John Paul Jones Robert Plant and John Bonham to form lead Zeppelin they play a new kind of incredibly loud Electric Blues and within just a few years they're the biggest band on the
• 09:00 - 09:30 planet and yet Led Zeppelin are dogged by controversy many critics and peers label them as rip-offs the case goes like this dazed to confuse features Different lyrics but is clearly an uncredited cover of the same title song by Jake Holmes Holmes files suit over 40 years later in 2010 a settlement is reached and home's name is finally added to the credits is the confused for so long it's not
• 09:30 - 10:00 true I'm dazed and confused Hanging On by a thread the iconic guitar riff of hola love is the creation of Jimmy Page but Robert Plant lifts some of the lyrics from Willie Dixon's you need love [Music] [Applause] The Lemon Song is also mostly a zeppelin
• 10:00 - 10:30 original but includes more copied lyrics this time from Howlin Wolf's Killing Floor [Music] should I quit you a long time and the most famous example is Zeppelin's biggest hit Stairway to Heaven the opening of which resembles Spirits Taurus [Music]
• 10:30 - 11:00 a battle is waged in court for years and Zeppelin finally prevails in 2020 when the song is found to not infringe copyright Zeppelin toured with spirit in 1968 three years before stairway was released in his sworn testimony Jimmy Page claims he never heard Taurus before writing
• 11:00 - 11:30 stairway [Applause] [Music] made mistakes but they were also just doing what artists do copying from others transforming these ideas and combining them with other ideas artists were doing the same thing a decade later and they too would sometimes get in trouble for failing to credit other artists hip-hop artists would sample actual recordings while rock artists would recreate Melodies
• 11:30 - 12:00 chords arrangements and more chic's good times one of the early major hip-hop samples was itself synthesized from various influences throughout culture like the funk and Jazz of the 70s and the Glamorous sophisticated aesthetic of Roxy Music [ __ ] it's in store love is the dog and I need to score Good Times famous Baseline was inspired by the one from Kool and the gang's Hollywood Swinging
• 12:00 - 12:30 [Music] this is a song I wish I had written so where do I do I go well damn if I wrote Hollywood Swinging it would go like this and then I write I write good times that goes and I stay on that note good times like every other song remixes the musical ideas of others it was once rare for musicians to admit they copy but it's become common
• 12:30 - 13:00 like Dave Grohl has spoken openly about copying Beats from disco bands when he was the drummer in Nirvana I pulled so much stuff from The Gap Band and Cameo and Tony Thompson on every one of those songs all that what its own Disco that's all it is and when a controversy emerged over
• 13:00 - 13:30 Olivia Rodrigo's song brutal perhaps copying an Elvis Costello riff Costello said this was fine and he did it too it's how rock and roll works you take the broken pieces of another thrill and make a brand new toy musician and DJ Questlove has said that the DNA of every song lies in another song All creative ideas are derivative
• 13:30 - 14:00 of another but past musicians have certainly known this as well the folk singer Odetta refused to condemn Bob Dylan for copying from her and instead said this copying is a form of tradition because he stole no no no no no no we call it folk music we we call it what do we call it we don't call it stealing appropriation well we could but we don't uh it is passing on the folk tradition
• 14:00 - 14:30 that influence was just like a key that opened up something that was of his own stuff so I can't even take credit for that I can't take credit for how he heard something all musicians are connected and these connections across continents and oceans and decades and centuries they transcend the barriers that divide people and even unite the living and the
• 14:30 - 15:00 dead whose creativity lives on through us when we create we often seem alone but we are in fact together and yet copying is complicated one of the most boring things about popular culture is all the Relentless copying there's very clearly many many many bad ways to copy and that's where we're headed in part two
• 15:00 - 15:30 [Music] [Music] share [Music] [Music] memes are famous for being funny or clever or goofy or even amazing like these things that look like objects but
• 15:30 - 16:00 are actually cake memes are fun but what you might not understand about memes is that they are profound let me school you for a moment don't worry there will be more memes Richard Dawkins seen here in this exclusive footage coined the term meme in 1976 in the book The Selfish Gene meme means imitated thing memes are just ideas that get copied and the copies they mutate and then these meme mutants compete with
• 16:00 - 16:30 each other in a global Battle Royale and the winner is whichever meme gets copied the most so memes want your attention memes want to spread above all memes want to get copied class dismissed here have memes memes are now the dominant method of broadcast among young people they're often just photos and texts but memes can actually be anything whatever happens on Tick Tock Instagram YouTube or the internet in general is a meme
• 16:30 - 17:00 dumping a bucket of ice water over your head is a mean skateboarding and drinking juice while listening to Fleetwood Mac is a meme swinging your arms from the back of your body to the front of your body repeatedly is a mean even buying a stock is a potentially hazardous mean the slang words we type are memes sus came from people playing the game Among Us Stan came from just Twitter in general and was inspired by an Eminem song and terms like Karen and woke and flex and fire and slaps and
• 17:00 - 17:30 Yeet and lit all came from Black Culture it's not just slang words that are memes every word we speak is a meme that triumphed in the great meme Battle Royale the English language and every language is a mega remix of mouth sounds from around the world you're paying attention so well have another meme [Music] think of memes This way everything you do and then share with the world is a meme the gestures you make the dances
• 17:30 - 18:00 you dance the Emojis you type the clothes you wear the phrases you speak the clickbait right the thumbnails you create the nonsense you share these are all things we copy and share and modify they're all memes it's our natural drive to copy from each other that creates memes and creates culture we love to copy and we love it when others copy too just not from us more on that later why do we love copying why do we love copying why do we okay I'll stop to explain let's go to
• 18:00 - 18:30 the movies [Music] popular films are all about copying pretty much all of them are new versions of old stuff they are sequels remakes or adaptations and that includes prequels reboots and spin-offs which are just rebrands of the same thing of the top 10 box office hits of 2021 thus far nine of them are sequels
• 18:30 - 19:00 remakes and adaptations jungle cruise is sort of original but it's also based on an amusement park ride as most great films are congrats to free guy the lone original movie in the top 10 here have a Leo meme the domination of sequels remakes and adaptations is not new from 2012 to 2021 92 out of 100 of each year's top 10 hits are either sequels remakes or adaptations and in four of these years
• 19:00 - 19:30 it's every single film in the top 10. we have an endless appetite for more of the same but different we don't just want the same thing over and over but we definitely like things more familiar than unfamiliar I think that is the thing that people want we've got nine Fast and Furious movies and Counting we've got 17 Batman films we've got 36 Godzilla movies
• 19:30 - 20:00 we've got roughly 300 Dracula films I couldn't count them all and some movies and shows are now adaptations of fan fiction stories written by fans based on their favorite characters and if you think that kind of sounds like all fictional writing yeah it is oh and the video you're watching right now is my second time doing this series or maybe even third it's debatable even when movies and TV shows aren't sequels or remakes or adaptations they're still designed to be like other
• 20:00 - 20:30 movies they stick to the rules of genre a tray ball French word genre films give us familiar stories with familiar characters in familiar situations when you watch a genre movie you expect certain things just like someone playing a new role-playing game expects a quest where they level up their stats someone watching a genre movie expects the story to deliver the standard elements of the genre like if it's a sports movie the team's gonna suck really bad they've got
• 20:30 - 21:00 to be truly pathetic then there's a new coach but more losses then a montage then a string of wins then the brink of defeat maybe an inspiring speech then Triumph in the end or at least a moral Victory all genres come with these sorts of rules these sorts of expectations the movies don't have to do all these things but they gotta do most the genre that now Reigns Supreme above all others is the superhero genre
• 21:00 - 21:30 the Marvel Cinematic Universe in particular has grown to become the highest grossing franchise in cinema history at over 23 billion dollars superhero films are built around superheroes thank you for coming to my TED Talk all superheroes are similar like they all have trademark Powers Superman flies and he's crazy strong Wonder Woman is also super strong but has really weird equipment too like an invisible jet but she wasn't invisible she was just a soaring seated person
• 21:30 - 22:00 Sidetrack sorry so they all have special powers they protect the public and do good deeds they have a dramatic origin story the bad guy is like a superhero but evil and their costume is kind of like underwear suit of armor scuba suit fetish wear and yes this clip is from a real Batman movie first and foremost though superheroes are about Justice of the Fist they fight a super lot endlessly it's their thing
• 22:00 - 22:30 they could definitely de-escalate more often sorry sidetracked again when we watch a superhero movie we expect all this and more even movies and shows that subvert the traditional genre still honor these rules character of the superhero is actually the only thing that defines the superhero genre superhero films can be a variety of genres as long as there's a completely mind-numbing amount of fighting do they get paid per face punched
• 22:30 - 23:00 sorry I keep doing this but seriously what is wrong with you people superhero films can be different genres and Avengers end game actually has scenes in a variety of genres there's even a moment that feels like a quirky indie film [Music] beyond the character of the superhero these movies aren't that different from any popular film they aren't that different from Frozen or Moana or Dune or The Hunger Games or The Lion King or
• 23:00 - 23:30 Avatar or Harry Potter or the Matrix or the Lord of the Rings or The Shawshank Redemption or Groundhog's Day or the Godfather or the Silence of the Lambs or Spirited Away or Star Wars or Alice in Wonderland or Seven Samurai or To Kill a Mockingbird or It's a Wonderful Life or The Wizard of Oz all these and loads more are just versions of What Joseph Campbell called the mono myth or the hero's journey a series of common plot points found in myths this underlying structure has been used around the world since pre-history
• 23:30 - 24:00 superheroes are simply the newest most sophisticated most spectacular most face punchingest version of this ancient formula the mother of all genres genres are sets of loose rules that Define different types of films writers and directors play a game with a viewer where they follow these rules or twist them or outright subvert them all movies build on the movies that came before them in a way all movies are
• 24:00 - 24:30 sequels here is what we want we want characters we know we want stories we know we want the familiar why [Music] we want familiar things because we use old things to understand new things just like you use words you know to understand the words you don't know we use old stories to understand new stories Douglas hofstetter argues that we make sense of the new and unknown in
• 24:30 - 25:00 terms of the old and known hofstetter claims this process of analogy is the fuel and fire of thinking SpongeBob Wanna Be ingenious abilities of humanity is seeing connections between similar but different things at the very core of human intelligence we are seeking
• 25:00 - 25:30 similarity we are comparing new things to old things in order to understand them and we understand new stories better when they are made to resemble old stories foreign and now here is the point of all this hold on to your butts the reason that memes and sequels and genres are so overwhelmingly popular is because they make new information easier to understand they play to our desire for
• 25:30 - 26:00 familiarity and just like we understand new things by building on top of old things we create new ideas by building on top of old ideas when we consume we mostly consume more of the same but different and when we create we are mostly creating more of the same but different there is only one way to start creating and that is to start copying some of the most Innovative influential and popular films did a lot of copying
• 26:00 - 26:30 Star Wars pioneered a new genre of Science Fiction by merging together sci-fi with Adventure serials westerns War films and Samurai films Quentin Tarantino's early films clearly copied elements from countless other films Jordan peels get out follow the template of The Stepford Wives and transformed the feminist horror drama of the original into a nightmare about secret of racism
• 26:30 - 27:00 and the best superhero film was created in this same way by remixing ideas from the past to create something that is both new and familiar that film is I am so sorry that is not the right clip that film is Spider-Man into the spider-verse all right let's do this one last time into the spider-verse is inspired by a pair of disrespected art forms that have conquered popular culture hip-hop and
• 27:00 - 27:30 comic books the movie has a strong Spirit of early hip-hop and uses a kind of sampling throughout it copies from live action film from 2D and 3D animation and especially from convicts first and foremost into the spider-verse is a movie version of a comic book all the graphic elements of comics are here the panels speech balloons captions these squiggle things words for sound effects this Trope is so old they made
• 27:30 - 28:00 fun of it in the Batman TV show from 1966. [Music] into the spider-verse loves the printed quality of comics like it uses Ben day dots throughout these small dot patterns are used in printing to create different colors Roy Lichtenstein did a version of them at large scale and made them a style there's actually a lot of dots in the movie the portal to the Multiverse is inspired by the dot patterns created by Jack Kirby the movie also uses misregistration
• 28:00 - 28:30 which is when printed colors didn't quite line up it's used throughout the film to create blur so sometimes it kind of looks like a 3D movie without the glasses into the spider-verse is strongly influenced by classic hand-drawn 2D animation and Anime the film uses lines to create definition which is typical in 2D but rarely done in 3D films even more unusual a lot of the animation is done on the twos that means the characters move on every second frame which is how classic animation was done and it gives
• 28:30 - 29:00 the movement a sharp Snappy feel lastly into the spider-verse pulls lots of techniques from live action film there's a lot of roaming camera movement Alfonso coron's Children of Men is the biggest influence on this style there are time lapse shots Requiem for a Dream was Innovative here there's Eden zooms which is when the camera doesn't move and the image just gets magnified this was a popular technique in the 70s especially in kung fu movies [Music]
• 29:00 - 29:30 you can't really point to anything in this movie that is original how many more spider people are there and yet as a whole it is original what makes into the spider-verse unique fresh and Innovative is its combination of influences [Music] and the film isn't the isolated creation of a single genius it's the product of many many many artists and writers who draw from the deep lineage of Spider-Man stories and copy countless ideas from
• 29:30 - 30:00 Comics movies music and art [Music] copying is the Wellspring of all creativity this is where it all begins as we copy and copy and copy our own voice and our own style emerges fashion designer Yoshi Yamamoto has said
• 30:00 - 30:30 start copying what you love copy copy copy copy at the end of the copy you will find yourself first we copy then we create Stephen King began writing by copying the text from comic books into his notebooks at some point I began to write my own stories imitation preceded creation 18 year old Olivia Rodrigo has been harshly criticized for copying from other artists but this is what all young creators and beginners must do
• 30:30 - 31:00 and sometimes young creators will go too far would we prefer that they not go far enough but copying alone is clearly not the answer we seek there's obviously a lot more going on in great creative work than just copying how does the magic happen how do innovative ideas emerge from the seemingly derivative Act of copying we find out in part three
• 31:00 - 31:30 [Music] The Act of Creation is surrounded by a fog of myths myths that creativity comes via inspiration that new ideas of the products of geniuses that they come from nowhere and appear as quickly as electricity can heat a filament [Music]
• 31:30 - 32:00 but creativity isn't Magic it happens by applying ordinary tools of thought to existing materials when we create we use just three simple tools the first of these forms the soil from which all creations grow we copy we think of copying as being uncreative but copying is at the core of creativity and the core of learning we can't introduce anything new until we're fluent in the language of our domain and
• 32:00 - 32:30 we do that by copying for instance many of Technology's biggest successes began as copies Minecraft began as a copy of another game its creator initially referred to what he was working on as an infiniminer clone the operating system Linux began as a free clone of the Unix operating system Linux is now the backbone of basically the entire internet
• 32:30 - 33:00 and the clear strategy of Apple is to create better versions of established products and features before Apple music there was Spotify before airpods there were many other bluetooth earbuds before Apple watch there were many other smart watches and lots of iPhone features first appeared in Android although it was Apple that invented the smartphone to begin with this strategy extends all the way back to the early 80s and the creation of the Mac which copied many of the best ideas from the Xerox Alto
• 33:00 - 33:30 nobody starts out original we need copying to build a foundation of knowledge and understanding and after that the sky's the limit [Music] after we've grounded ourselves in the fundamentals through copying it's then possible to create something new using the second creative tool transform taking an idea and creating variations
• 33:30 - 34:00 this is time consuming tinkering but it can eventually produce a breakthrough many of the biggest successes in Tech began as something very different and didn't find success until they were transformed this chord began as a feature for a game the game wasn't that successful so they dropped it and only kept its chat feature Pinterest started as a digital replacement for paper catalogs again didn't really work but people liked one
• 34:00 - 34:30 of its features collecting and sharing clippings so this became the site's core function and Tick Tock began as a lip-syncing app for short music videos but over time it pivoted to what people really wanted short form video you're done these are all huge successes but they aren't major Innovations so much as variations on existing ideas but the massive breakthroughs that change the world rely on the final creative tool
• 34:30 - 35:00 combine taking the elements you've copied or transformed and bringing them together Johannes gutenberg's printing press was invented around 1440 but almost all its components had been around for centuries [Music] Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company didn't invent the assembly line interchangeable parts or even the automobile itself but they combined all these elements in 1908 to produce the first mass-market car the Model T
• 35:00 - 35:30 and the internet slowly grew over several decades as networks and protocols merged it finally hit critical mass in 1991 when Tim berners-lee invented the World Wide Web by combining several well-established ideas these three tools are the basic elements of creativity copy transform and combine and nowhere is all of this more obvious than in the realm of games
• 35:30 - 36:00 video games don't really try to conceal their copying and they copy from everywhere video games copy from tabletop games Alexi pajitnov began Tetris as a version of the game from his childhood called pentomino to make it simpler he made the shapes out of four squares instead of five which greatly reduced the number of pieces video games copy from game shows Wordle is very similar to the game show lingo in both you try to find a five-letter
• 36:00 - 36:30 word within six tries and the game tells you when a letter is correct or when it's somewhere else in the word but mostly what video games copy from is video games the history of video games is a chain of new games taking ideas from old games transforming them and iterating on them or sometimes it's a single designer iterating on his own ideas like Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto who created a series of hugely influential platform games
• 36:30 - 37:00 the most Innovative games combine multiple sources Deus Ex combined three game genres all of which were done better by other games but when combined in a single game the result was unique and Innovative and became one of the most acclaimed titles in gaming history other games copy from sources outside gaming cuphead is a run and gun shooter but it combines 30 style animation with a jazz score giving it a look and feel that's never been done in games
• 37:00 - 37:30 [Music] some games even allow the players themselves to modify the game mods are customized versions of games which can be shared with other players plenty of classic games began as mods employee number 427's job was simple he sat at his desk in room 4027 and he pushed buttons on a keyboard The Stanley Parable is a surreal Adventure game that
• 37:30 - 38:00 subverts players expectations of gameplay it began as a free modification of half-life 2. Dota 2 otherwise known as defense of the Ancients a hugely popular Esports game is a sequel to a game that began as a custom map for Warcraft 3. and sometimes mods even turn into entire genres one of the biggest phenomenons in gaming
• 38:00 - 38:30 has been fortnite a free to play Battle Royale game but the origin of fortnite isn't really fortnite it didn't even start with game developers it started with modders in a seemingly unrelated Realm the military simulator ARMA 2 LED players make mods and one of these was Daisy a survival game with zombies at this point in American pop culture history we were obsessed with zombies
• 38:30 - 39:00 Daisy then became a standalone game and people could make mods for it Brendan green better known as playerunknown was a web designer not a game developer and barely a programmer my code is terrible like if people tell me to fix the game if I try to fix the game the servers would explode he saw these mods and wanted to make his own so he created Daisy Battle Royale which was inspired by the book and movie Battle Royale where it's all against all until there's
• 39:00 - 39:30 one winner if this sounds familiar to you it's also the plot of The Hunger Games eventually Green's mods turned into a new game player unknowns Battlegrounds or Pub G which also goes on to become hugely popular it's only at this point that fortnite finally enters the scene but initially it's something very different it's a game where players make a fort during the day in order to survive night attacks but you guessed it zombies but once fortnite's developers epic
• 39:30 - 40:00 games got a load of Pub G they created a new version that copied pubg's best ideas but epic then turned it into something quicker more casual more cheerful something that looked great in live streams and was less buggy I got a bug then because there's a floating SLR on my screen here and it's shooting right now an epic added plenty of creative takes on other ideas they Incorporated complex building they made the game free to play on pretty much any platform and generated income from in-game purchases
• 40:00 - 40:30 fortnite eventually grew into a rich virtual environment that many consider an early example of the metaverse an open VR World it may be the future of the internet or maybe nothing whoa we're floating in space who made this place it's awesome [Music] fortnite sometimes takes copying too far players signature moves known as emotes were sometimes duplicated without permission from popular videos movies and television shows
• 40:30 - 41:00 but overall it can't be denied that fortnite is a unique creative and historic title within gaming history and this phenomenon was created not just by a major video game developer but by modders by pop culture and by players fortnite's Roots even predate pubg and the Battle Royale genre they extend back to games like Minecraft and unreal and countless others to be movies like Death Race 2000 and even to pro wrestling
• 41:00 - 41:30 where dozens of guys would compete to throw each other out of the ring until one remains [Music] technology has always fueled creativity but now technology is becoming more than just a tool technology is becoming our collaborator our competitor and yes our replacement in our final episode we'll see how artificial intelligence creates
• 41:30 - 42:00 by remixing us [Music] in 2015 artificial intelligence started making images based on nothing but text input this was basically like reverse engineering photo captions the results were very low quality but then it worked at all was stunning by 2021 AI image
• 42:00 - 42:30 generation was doing things like this it's better art but still mediocre at best what was historic was that the AI combined ideas together in a variety of ways the AI seemed to exhibit creativity [Music] 2022 was one of the most Whiplash transitions of the modern technology era there were now several image generators and they were making images like these no human hand drew a stroke here all of
• 42:30 - 43:00 these were created with nothing but text prompts creating a sophisticated illustration was suddenly as easy as typing a word or two enter joy and you get this enter cat and you get this enter brainy eyeballs and you get this then you can combine words together for infinite variation AI created art is no longer cute and clumsy it still has weaknesses like human anatomy especially hands and it mostly lacks the expressiveness and the
• 43:00 - 43:30 storytelling of real artists but AIS are creating art and they are doing it with Beauty with stunning versatility and even with subtlety AI has had similar breakthroughs in text generation and coding but it's a IR that has sparked the fiercest debate and generated anger and fear in the ark community I can't imagine that there is any writer or artist on the planet right now that isn't really thinking about this and
• 43:30 - 44:00 wondering where they're going to be in five years this anxiety was triggered by a profound development in human history machines have breached a sacred realm we thought was solely the domain of people the first battleground of the age of AI is Art will AI replace human artists is AI image generation ethical will the future of creativity be ruled by AIS in
• 44:00 - 44:30 this final episode of everything is a remix we venture into the newly emerging field of artificial creativity let's begin by addressing the most common emotional reaction to artificial intelligence fear
• 44:30 - 45:00 storytellers have long warned us about the seduction and danger of Technology the Greek Titan Prometheus stole fire from the gods and was brutally punished by Zeus in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein which was subtitled the modern Prometheus Dr Frankenstein is obsessed with uncovering the secret to life Frankenstein creates a man but is horrified by his creation who then seeks violent Revenge stories like these are a warning about
• 45:00 - 45:30 meddling with the sacred and unknowable they're a warning about arrogance in recent decades the subject of these Tales has taken on a particular form the computer HAL 9000 appreciant imagining of a computer assistant was one of the first popular fictional computers I know that you and Frank were planning
• 45:30 - 46:00 to disconnect me and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen Hal ultimately decides to sacrifice its crew for the sake of its mission the Terminator films feature a powerful AI defense network they say it got smart a new order of intelligence sought in Our Fate in a microseconds extermination
• 46:00 - 46:30 our dream of technological progress has reached a nightmare conclusion everyone creates the thing they dread we are now Imagining the day when we are supplanted by our creations thank you one day the AIS are going to look back
• 46:30 - 47:00 on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons and the plains of Africa an upright ape living in dust with crude language and tools all set for extinction the topic of human extinction by AI is no longer limited to Science Fiction it's widely discussed by Leading intellectuals we
• 47:00 - 47:30 most I guess that humans like you and me will disappear and Earth will be dominated by very different kind of beings or entities many of the leaders of the field of artificial intelligence claim the time when our Creations will match us is rapidly approaching some think human level intelligence known as artificial general intelligence or AGI will be reached within a couple decades I think that it's coming relatively soon in the
• 47:30 - 48:00 next you know I wouldn't be super surprised the next decade or two after AGI comes an intelligence explosion with AI rapidly improving itself and spawning super intelligence Humanity will then be the parents of Gods [Music] the belief that AI will soon surpass us and take our place is widely held among many brilliant people so why not believe them because similarly brilliant people
• 48:00 - 48:30 have been making similar predictions for as long as there has been artificial intelligence and they have all been wrong many people in AI fall into the same old trap that True Believers always fall into they think the great whatever is almost here I swear it's just about to happen let's take a brief tour of ai's many
• 48:30 - 49:00 failed prophecies many of the pioneers of artificial intelligence predicted that machines would attain human level intelligence by about the 1980s and more recent predictions have been just as wrong Shane Legg co-founder of Google deepmind said in 2008 human level AI will be passed in the mid-2020s it's 2023 now and I think we can safely say no in 2015
• 49:00 - 49:30 Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said their goal by 2025 was to get better than human level at all of the primary human senses Vision hearing language General cognition this is looking like no no no and no an engineer even claimed a Google chat bot was sentient in 2022 in order to be capable of convincingly arguing that you are sentient requires sentience I have no idea why
• 49:30 - 50:00 this is supposed to make sense one of the most prolific and optimistic forecasters is Ray Kurzweil he spent decades predicting the arrival of the singularity which entails AGI among other things and his date for the arrival of AGI is right around the corner I've set the date 2029 a machine an AI will be able to match human intelligence and go beyond it I'd like to get in on the prediction fun too so I'll say AGI in 2029 is
• 50:00 - 50:30 exponentially wrong of course there are plenty of people in AI who believe AGI is nowhere in sight Eric J Larson author of The Myth of artificial intelligence argues that current AI Technologies are not going to lead to AGI any foreseeable extension of the capabilities that we currently have do not result in general intelligence just point blank they just don't orenezioni an esteemed figure in the
• 50:30 - 51:00 field of AI flatly states that we have no idea when AGI is coming my answer to when is take your estimate uh double it triple it quadruple it that's when matter of fact expert projections on the arrival of AGI range from now to never translation they don't know [Music] and here's a very unpopular opinion we
• 51:00 - 51:30 should at least Ponder maybe human level artificial intelligence is impossible maybe the universe can do things we can't we don't know when or even if AIS will match human intelligence it's unlikely they'll murder us anytime soon but there is something they want to murder now your job and they don't need anywhere near human level intelligence to do it this is why
• 51:30 - 52:00 illustrators are so upset they are the first to suffer what's called creative destruction old jobs are eliminated by new technologies and ideas resulting in Lost livelihoods and real pain when you look at that widget and you see the future I look at that thing I see 10 guys on an unemployment however this also leads to increased productivity and fresh growth automation is now expanding beyond the domain of muscles and entering the domain of the mind but actually this isn't quite new
• 52:00 - 52:30 either Specialists have been getting replaced for decades without AI let's go back to hip-hop with the birth of rap music suddenly you didn't need to play an instrument didn't need to know anything about music didn't even need to sing if you had a turntable a drum machine and a microphone you can make the most exciting music around and this trend has only accelerated anybody with a laptop and some music software has tools that would have seemed like science fiction to early DJs
• 52:30 - 53:00 like Grandmaster Flash and this is more than just music anyone can now easily build a website or build an app or launch a shop or shoot gorgeous photos or shoot gorgeous videos art has been getting cheaper faster and easier since the printing press which creatively destroyed an entire class of monks who painstakingly hand copied books with quill and parchment if machines can make images as well as we can then why shouldn't they what's
• 53:00 - 53:30 the issue the issue is how the machines learn to create images so let's put image generation on trial and determine if it's guilty or not guilty of crimes against creativity here's the evidence the simple version of what the AIS did is this it studied countless images without permission then it emulated them and created its own versions so yes this is like you the entirety of this series demonstrates that this is how we all create but it's
• 53:30 - 54:00 more complicated than this let's zoom in image generation has three steps I'll explain each and all of these need to be ethical step one tons and tons of images were scraped from the internet these images are called a training set it looks like a mountain of junk if you found a folder of this stuff on your hard drive you would immediately throw it out anyway step one is just obtaining a zillion images from the internet Step One is ethical search engines do the
• 54:00 - 54:30 same thing and you can go download as many images as you want right now step two the AI processes the images and creates a model this is like their version of studying the images and learning from them you know what step two is complicated I'll come back to it step 3 is open and shut the AI processes requests from users which are written prompts and creates images if someone just wrote a program that can draw that would obviously be fine step 3 is indisputably ethical it all comes down
• 54:30 - 55:00 to step two this is the tricky bit what the AIS did with copyrighted images is called diffusion noise was added to the images over many steps until they're just noise then it runs this process in Reverse with the goal of creating a new image with the same meaning the cat should be a cat not necessarily an identical cat but a cat I have no idea why this works either but somehow it does if diffusion is copying then AI image generation is copyright infringement is diffusion copying on the
• 55:00 - 55:30 one hand it's kind of like copying because it reproduces watermarks from stock photos on the other hand it's pretty bad at it so it sort of made something new the clear conclusion is that it is unclear that's why this topic is so controversial it is truly ambiguous this is like the dress controversy all over again except on fire my guess is that this ambiguity will result in diffusion being considered fair use it will be hard to
• 55:30 - 56:00 definitively prove that it's copying because this stuff is complicated this is going to multiple courts we'll learn a lot and we will get an answer let's just assume for now that diffusion is kind of like copying but not totally copying then we can take a swing at the most important question of all is it ethically right or at least acceptable that these artists images were used without consent it's it's pretty General consensus in our
• 56:00 - 56:30 community that we do not want our work to be used to train AI models I am sympathetic to how artists are feeling but it does seem acceptable to me for starters most of the training images are pretty generic and in this context they seem public domain sure this might be your photo of a pretty girl or a dog or a quesadilla but it's very similar to thousands of others nobody owns the idea of these images and that's really what's
• 56:30 - 57:00 getting emulated the biggest controversy is over a small minority of the images these are artwork by professional artists and serious amateurs let's get this clear up front no artist owns their art entirely if you don't believe me here's the artist Scott Christian Saba saying the same thing my art is a mosaic an amalgamation of the art and artist that inspired me on my journey to become the artist I am today the collective achievements of art belong to everyone they are as free as the Air 2 many
• 57:00 - 57:30 artists are getting overly possessive about what they believe is theirs this artist went viral claiming that their art was used to train an AI model AI artist theft it is an awful awful way to just like steal from artists it's evil and if you use AI art you are dead to me they base this on images like these but the only similarities are the color palette and the basic composition they're otherwise very different like
• 57:30 - 58:00 for instance this is trash and this is good yes there is some piracy going on in AI image generation there's some piracy going on everywhere I'm doing piracy right now and you're watching me there are plenty of caveats training AIS on individual artists work does seem wrong everyone should be able to opt out of all training sets and maybe AIS should simply not train on images from
• 58:00 - 58:30 active art communities also some companies should make an image generator trained on public domain and licensed images which would avoid this Hornet's Nest entirely somebody please do this but overall I don't see any deep Injustice here in closing AI image generation seems not guilty how disruptive AI art will actually be is not yet clear but it will definitely have some sort of role and artists are
• 58:30 - 59:00 going to have to adapt and the rest of us should take note if you think what's happening to a bunch of illustrators doesn't concern you think again the fear and anxiety the art community feels is going to spread many of us will have to adapt any mind work that can get automated will get automated blue-collar workers have been living this for decades now it's white collar workers turn [Music]
• 59:00 - 59:30 [Music] of all Humanity's technological advances artificial intelligence is the most morally ambiguous from inception it has the potential to create either a Utopia or a dystopia which reality will we get
• 59:30 - 60:00 just like everybody else I do not know what's coming but it seems likely that in coming decades these visions of our imminent demise will seem campy and naive because our imaginings of the future always become Champion naive [Music] AIS will not be dominating creativity because AIS do not innovate they synthesize what we already know
• 60:00 - 60:30 AI is derivative by Design and inventive by chance computers can now create but they are not creative to be creative you need to have some awareness some understanding of what you've done AIS know nothing whatsoever about the images and words they generate most crucially AIS have no comprehension of the essence of art living AIS don't know what it's
• 60:30 - 61:00 like to be a child to grow up to fall in love to fall in lust to be angry to fight to forgive to be a parent to age to lose your parents to get sick to face death this is what human expression is about art and creativity are bound to living to feeling art is the voice of a person and whenever AI art is anything
• 61:00 - 61:30 more than aesthetically pleasing it's not because of what the AI did it's because of what a person did Art Is by humans for humans in some videos about AI the big reveal is that this video was actually made by AI but this video and this series is the opposite nothing has been AI except where I cited AI art this is entirely
• 61:30 - 62:00 human made the words are all mine but they're merged from the thoughts of countless people everything you've seen and heard is from real filmmakers and musicians and game developers and other artists all these thoughts and all this media were remixed by me into something new and yes I did it all without permission everything is a remix is a testament to the Brilliance and beauty of human creativity in particular it's a
• 62:00 - 62:30 testament to Collective creativity human genius is not individual it is shared you my dear viewer are a human the best technology there is with no success or Insight the future is ours and it will be won or lost by us brilliant stupid horrible beautiful humans there is only one complete certainty
• 62:30 - 63:00 about what's coming AI will not stop and we need the help that artificial intelligence can potentially bring to the complex problems of the 21st century we are saying goodbye to the old world and entering a new one but we are not obligated to accept this new world as is our duty is to make it the best we can to make this revolution better than the last one are launching into the unimaginable as
• 63:00 - 63:30 we always are we are always hurtling into some inconceivable future there is no other way to move forward so here we go
• 63:30 - 64:00 [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music]