Aug. 7, 2024

The New Muse: Hobbyists and AI

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Hallway Chat

How would you design an AI product differently for a hobbyist vs prosumer vs professional? Using MidJourney as a case study in the passion economy, they delve into how AI tools can help build communities and support semi-professional creators. They explore how these tools can democratize creativity, the role of art vs craft, the role of grit in skill building, cheating vs copiloting, the missing middle of the creative markets, and more. They also touch on the broader implications of AI in different creative fields from music, writing and podcasts. It's an exploration of how AI can help users maintain creative flow and the underserved opportunity for AI to help unleash the hobbyist. 


00:00 Intro

00:52 AI in Creative Endeavors

01:58 Market Expansion

03:01 The underexplored customer in AI

08:23 Finding other AI hobbiest opportunities

11:31 If they AI made it, are we building skill?

13:36 Difference between art and craft

14:40 Homework Helpers vs Writing Copilots

16:07 Hobbiests are not quite the creator economy

17:47 Product for hobbists

21:03 The missing middle of creative markets

26:42 AI's potential in the education of craft

  • (00:00) - Intro
  • (00:52) - AI in Creative Endeavors
  • (02:00) - Market Expansion
  • (03:02) - The underexplored customer in AI
  • (08:25) - Finding other AI hobbiest opportunities
  • (11:32) - If they AI made it, are we building skill?
  • (13:38) - Difference between art and craft
  • (14:42) - Homework Helpers vs Writing Copilots
  • (16:09) - Hobbiests are not quite the creator economy
  • (17:49) - Product for hobbists
  • (21:04) - The missing middle of creative markets
  • (26:44) - AI's potential in the education of craft
Chapters

00:00 - Intro

00:52 - AI in Creative Endeavors

02:00 - Market Expansion

03:02 - The underexplored customer in AI

08:25 - Finding other AI hobbiest opportunities

11:32 - If they AI made it, are we building skill?

13:38 - Difference between art and craft

14:42 - Homework Helpers vs Writing Copilots

16:09 - Hobbiests are not quite the creator economy

17:49 - Product for hobbists

21:04 - The missing middle of creative markets

26:44 - AI's potential in the education of craft

Transcript

The New Muse: AI's Role in Everyday Creativity

 

[00:00:00] Intro

 

[00:00:00] Nabeel Hyatt: You have to keep users in flow and anyone who's coded or anyone's who's gotten into drawing or knows what it feels like to be in flow. Can an AI help you stay in flow? And then the last bit is that you don't quite know everything that you want. You're still developing your taste as well.

 

[00:00:15] And so the kind of. Building a community for hobbyists versus for professionals. Right. You are still developing your own taste and you want to do with like minded peers.

 

[00:00:25] Fraser Kelton: Yeah, you got to it on the last part. You want to, you want to do it with the people who, who are like minded. I mean, the internet, that's the thing that's been the best on the internet for two decades now, right? Welcome to Hallway Chat.

 

[00:00:38] It is Fraser. I'm Nabeel. We are going to talk today about what was literally a hallway conversation throughout this past week. Let me set things up a little bit, and bear with me because it might take a couple of moments.

 

[00:00:52] AI in Creative Endeavors

 

[00:00:52] Fraser Kelton: We had a company come in, we won't mention the name , and they were doing really interesting things with AI.

 

[00:00:59] A wonderful pitch and then a very rewarding conversation with the team afterward. It was using AI to basically enable a creative endeavor and it was stitching together a bunch of different models and modalities to make things dramatically easier for people to be able to create And let's just leave it at that.

 

[00:01:20] Nabeel Hyatt: Think of it, tools for thought, creator economy, like generally in the ilk of make things. And have a co pilot to help you and agents to help you make things.

 

[00:01:29] Fraser Kelton: That's right. That's right. And it was taking the very common thing that's been discussed over the past year.

 

[00:01:34] It was taking things that were inaccessible. to many and making it a lot easier for those who wanted to get through it. Yeah. And you know what our conclusion was it's a good product, a great use of this technology. And then we got really hung up on how to think about the product size. And I think that this is the part that was most interesting to me and then led to the conversation.

 

[00:01:56] And you had a whole bunch of thoughts on it.

 

[00:01:58] Market Expansion

 

[00:01:58] Fraser Kelton: And it was your question of like, well, what leads to the larger market? How, how do you grow the market beyond, beyond like prosumer edge expansion? And, and where did you end up with that? Yeah, I mean, what I love

 

[00:02:12] Nabeel Hyatt: about this discussion is that it's exactly what's ongoing.

 

[00:02:15] Like, I, like, there's, we're not at the conclusion yet. We're using this as a way to kind of navigate and make sense of the world around us. And I love it when we have one of those moments to have that discussion. To back up, the kind of general way that people think about these markets is, is separating it between, you know, Professionals and, and prosumers .

 

[00:02:33] You have more individual professional people who can pay and the kind of like large enterprises. Basically, bottoms up versus top down sales motion. . And in that, in that particular market, it just all felt too small. It all felt too much of a tiny wedge. It's going to make everybody 8 percent efficient and like, just not that interesting. And ultimately helping some large companies, profit margins go up by 1 percent when they're not even that big of a company.

 

[00:02:58] Like you're not changing the world. You're not really doing anything differently.

 

[00:03:01] The underexplored customer in AI

 

[00:03:01] Nabeel Hyatt: So my example was MidJourney as a lens with which to look at this problem. And as we started to unpack this, it just felt like there were a whole lot more MidJourneys around us that, that were under, underexplored in AI. And that's, I think when we started to really pull away things at it.

 

[00:03:16] Fraser Kelton: But wait a second, like MidJourney is a prosumer tool for illustrators, isn't it? Like it's allowing people on Fiverr to create imagery for their slide deck, for their workplace. Isn't that what MidJourney is? Isn't that what these text to in models are? First of all, I'd argue that if you want a cheesy

 

[00:03:33] Nabeel Hyatt: slide, a clip art slide, you should go to Dalle, not MidJourney.

 

[00:03:38] Come on. Sorry. Sorry. How dare you? How dare you? Oh, I think it is. There are competitors that are focused on those markets. There's lots of competitors in the image diffusion model market. MidJourney is. Focused on net new creators. I think we should just remember that there's some very unique things about Midjourney.

 

[00:03:59] People mostly talk about the, how it got to scale at Discord, which we can talk about another time. I think the most important thing is that he thought, David thought their original customer was going to be like, 14 year old meme maker artists that were going to grow up and be the next wonderful AI artists of the world.

 

[00:04:16] And that's not what it's turned out to be. It's 30 and 40 year olds that are semi professional, non professional, who are doing this because they love it. They have a new comic book that they're going to get to build for the first time. They're exploring new architectural designs.

 

[00:04:31] They're trying to put up their own pieces of work for their own love. Like, it's It's less close to Activision and EA making concept art for a blockbuster video game and much closer to scrapbooking, which is like a three, 4 billion market, or gardening or knitting or amateur indie video game builders. It is people who love the craft and are exploring it for its own love.

 

[00:04:58] It's the hobbyist market. It's hobbyists, right? Yeah. Yeah. Like I think often listen to the loudest customer in the room when we are trying to do customer development in 2024, uh, as a good product builder, as a good founder, and the loudest customer in the room is almost always on the professional side, the large enterprise side.

 

[00:05:18] And then we kind of started to learn about the prosumers, especially in the B2B SaaS. Bottoms up Canva style world, eight, nine years ago, move everything in the cloud. You get to reach people with Figma or Canva that are inside of the organization, but you're selling bottoms up, not top down. Maybe the solution is like, if AI is really going to enable a thousand X more people to create.

 

[00:05:40] Then where you start from is the people who want to create, that aren't creating today. And the best way to think about those people is the hobbyist market .

 

[00:05:49] Fraser Kelton: Yep. On the, on the text to M side, it's, it's interesting, maybe the, a year ago there was a lot of, I don't know, dinner table conversation is, is Adobe at risk?

 

[00:06:00] Who's going There will be entirely new professional tools in it. It may just turn out that the professional tool for text to im and these image models is actually Adobe and it's just a sustaining technology that gets added into the super complex palette. And it may be that the prosumer market here is actually Canva, right?

 

[00:06:19] It's like, hey, if you, you want to make a slide for your presentation or what have you, you go to Canva. And, I don't think many people were talking about this behavior last year that there's an entirely new market, which is massive. Like, I don't know. I was stunned when you shared how many.

 

[00:06:36] Mid journey images you've created on your account. How many is it?

 

[00:06:40] Nabeel Hyatt: Yeah, I'm well over, I don't know what the number is, but 30 or 40 thousand mid journey images. And that's not even I love it. That's not even counting the Leonardo AI or ideogram or all the other images that I've been working on just trying this product.

 

[00:06:51] It's like, yeah, I have side projects. And I have started to learn that particular language. And I certainly wasn't going to do a year of mid journey coursework to become a mid journey artist, uh, the way I might have had to learn how to do figure drawing or learn coding or anything like that.

 

[00:07:07] It was, uh, it's a situation where you get control over the model, over iterating on it and working over time, but the floor is quite easy. It's, it's the easy to learn, hard to master kind of arc that you really want when you're trying to build a new skill. And it's just important to recognize two things.

 

[00:07:24] One, that to give David credit, he recognized that audience early enough, and adjusted his vision to try and meet that audience where they were. And secondly, or overarchingly, he internalized how different that product would be for a hobbiest type of customer.

 

[00:07:39] And you can only think about if I'm a very casual user, and I just want clip art in two seconds, and I have no expertise at all, then Mid Journey is a terrible product for me.

 

[00:07:50] I should be using, frankly, something like Dalle. And if I'm a prosumer user who maybe has used Adobe SUM and understand that interface, then maybe something like Leonardo AI is the right interface. Sure enough, I think Leonardo AI was acquired by Canva recently because it nailed it for

 

[00:08:07] but If I've never used Adobe, Leonardo feels way overwhelming as a user interface. And if I don't quite know what my style is yet, then the MidJourney Discord server, where I'm seeing everything else going around, we're trading prompts and it feels like a little community there, that becomes a feature.

 

[00:08:23] Finding other AI hobbiest opportunities

 

[00:08:23] Nabeel Hyatt: But hobbiest users are not the same as consumers. If I'm a super casual user, just trying to very quickly get something in a PowerPoint, suddenly all this community stuff is a bug. And we could see the same thing happen in many other categories, which is, look, if I'm going to make music, We have this memetic very casual music product , which is like, I want to type in a prompt. That's sort of, that's kind of served by the Suno, Udio, and Riffusion and those companies use cases.

 

[00:08:48] That's kind of a similar to the Dalle use case. I wonder what the mid journey product for music kind of say the same thing podcasting or many other things we make. . I think everybody should make, and you should make it easier.

 

[00:08:59] For me, it's also just like an interesting puzzle to try and unlock because we have less of a product playbook and a go to market playbook when it comes to the hobbyist use case. And yet that might be an area where AI might have the most effect.

 

[00:09:16] Fraser Kelton: I think what you just said there is really insightful and it's worth us spending a couple of minutes on, because this is a market where it is, What you create rather than how you do it, in my mind, in terms of where the joy is sparked for people.

 

[00:09:32] If you wanted to be a musician previously, you learned the fundamentals of music, you learn how to read sheet music, you had to learn scales, and then you'd like slowly build up on how to do it to the point where you can then create the music. Similar with like visual art, right? Like you have to learn brush techniques and color theory and everything else.

 

[00:09:53] The opportunity is much more emphasis on the conceptualization rather than like the craft of, of doing, if that makes sense.

 

[00:10:03] Nabeel Hyatt: So let's assume that if we're trying to, if we're a founder and we're trying to find new other markets where this is going to occur, is you start from the place that people spend time in their hobbies already.

 

[00:10:12] And you basically, you, you find the places where people go for their own joy. You start from the places that it's uneconomic. Right. And some people will end up doing it forever for uneconomic reasons, which is wonderful. And then some of those amateurs We'll turn into the next professionals, you know, like I, I often think we have like a mass professionalization problem, by the way, this is kind of a little bit of a side, but like, I was reading Robert Morris is the power broker, and he talks about the shift in politics.

 

[00:10:41] We're not gonna talk about politics here too much, but he talks about how, like, It used to be that like something like half of the house of representatives and three quarters of the Senate or something along those lines didn't even have a college degree. And, and like, that's just completely impossible to happen right now.

 

[00:10:58] And, and like, you know, the transitioning is a little bit like home cook meals turning into restaurant dining, which is like, it can seem more polished, but we're losing some of the. authenticity and some of the diversity of perspectives that leads to better innovation over time. So I think it's an incredible fertile field.

 

[00:11:15] This can feel like a different founder skill, because if I start from joy and I get to things like people make their own video games, whether it's uneconomic or not, that used to be a sign of a negative because you're like, Oh, it's a red ocean market. And there's a ton of competitors and, and one more video game. What does that do?

 

[00:11:31] If they AI made it, are we building skill?

 

[00:11:31] Nabeel Hyatt: And instead that becomes an opportunity to enable people, if you can find a way, you know, the number of people make it.

 

[00:11:37] Video games, board games, knitting, gardening. Not all of these are convertible to AI just yet, but like, uh, but those are the fertile ground, right? The pushback is, well, if, and this is a, maybe a proverbial straw man, if the AI is making it, then am I actually getting good at it? Am I actually building taste in it?

 

[00:11:59] Or am I not doing grit work and so I will never become world class because I didn't actually learn to draw our code.

 

[00:12:05] Fraser Kelton: I think that's so that's the proverbial straw man. And it is so like inane even be asking that, right? Like,

 

[00:12:15] Nabeel Hyatt: I feel like it's a perspective, you know, me, and I know you're looking at me like I'm like ridiculous for you because you know me.

 

[00:12:21] But, but I think it's worth, it is a worthy subject to spend 60 seconds on it. 'cause it would be a common conversational worry. Oh,

 

[00:12:28] Fraser Kelton: a hundred percent.

 

[00:12:30] Nabeel Hyatt: If somebody's doing all your AI writing for you, you're not gonna get an amazing author.

 

[00:12:34] Fraser Kelton: I, I put that in the bucket of the people who were like, actually Frankenstein's monster was the author or whatever. Like that pedantic bullshit

 

[00:12:42] Nabeel Hyatt: is .

 

[00:12:43] Fraser Kelton: No, because you, you are not learning the how, like you don't know anything about brushstrokes. You don't know anything about like color theory when you're grinding on your 27, 000th mid journey image.

 

[00:12:59] But you are certainly appreciating and having joy in what it is that you're creating. And I assume that you have learned how to speak about what it is that you like and what you dislike in, in imagery in, in a way that you hadn't before. You're probably learning to critique things, even if you're self taught.

 

[00:13:20] Like it's just, I think, I think it's just so different. From what you had to do that that conversation and that question that you asked is completely fair But the answer is just it's no longer about the process traditionally of how you got there like

 

[00:13:36] Difference between art and craft

 

[00:13:36] Nabeel Hyatt: yeah there's a difference between art and craft and they have been merged together because they involve them, each other, but they are separate things.

 

[00:13:47] And we are separating those things now. And learning to make imagery images is similar to learning to play an instrument or learning to write. The more you practice it, the better you become. And the more you develop your unique style, the more you build your own sense of your own voice and all of that stuff still happens.

 

[00:14:03] And in fact, I would argue that the fact that you can do it a hundred times or a thousand times faster should give you those proverbial 10, 000 hours of practice. Even faster, which was not about becoming a good guitar player. Although the 10, 000 hours thing from Malcolm Gladwell's Fives is provably bullshit.

 

[00:14:21] But the general theme of practicing more helps you build your own sense of taste and your own sense of taste and the voice you want in the world is actually the goal, right? In whatever way it is.

 

[00:14:31] Fraser Kelton: Yeah, for sure. Maybe there's a really simple way to look at two different product categories to like really firm up how, how we think about it.

 

[00:14:39] And

 

[00:14:40] Homework Helpers vs Writing Copilots

 

[00:14:40] Fraser Kelton: . There, there is broadly a discussion around AI writing tools. But if you like go below the surface, there are tools that are clear homework helpers, and we'll talk about that in a moment. And then there are tools that are created for writers. And let's put some space between those two.

 

[00:15:00] Where Homework Helper with air quotes around it, you write the essay topic, you hit tab, tab, tab, tab, tab. And it just auto completes paragraph after paragraph, including now cited references as if it's like you you've written it. There, there's no, there's little to no thought in, in that type of a product for the person writing and it's not, it's clearly not being built for somebody who wants to lower the activation energy of writing a, like, let's say a manuscript or a novel.

 

[00:15:28] Nabeel Hyatt: It's trying to finish the work for you.

 

[00:15:30] Fraser Kelton: That's right. That's right. And then there's stuff like Sudewrite where, uh, it's saying, hey, writing is, is a creative outlet. And there's now new tools that can help you overcome some of the challenges that are present when you want to write a, a book, a, a play, or what have you.

 

[00:15:48] And that this like clearly crafted in that, in that direction.

 

[00:15:52] Nabeel Hyatt: I agree. And that is a good example of a thing that people do for joy. Like my, my, yeah. Father has been writing his memoir for the last couple of years. I don't think he's. Going to be a best selling author. That's the goal. He's doing it because he loves the process and he loves the work.

 

[00:16:07] Hobbiests are not quite the creator economy

 

[00:16:07] Nabeel Hyatt: A third of all Amazon Kindle sales are to self publish work at this point. So it is a big business in aggregate. It is still a large market in aggregate. But it's very influencer process, right? The kind of like creator economy influencer market is, I'm gonna go do this thing and I'm gonna stream on Twitch.

 

[00:16:27] But I'm mostly doing that to see if I can be a big star later on. Like it's, it's, I'm, I'm going to Hollywood to see if I can become a great actor and that's remarkably different from these markets that are hobbyist markets where the output is largely for its own reward. Yes, you want , feedback from peers, everybody loves good respect and love and, and accolades, but there isn't.

 

[00:16:49] Except for in the most fleeting, tiny way, an expectation of stardom or expectation of trying to be the 1%. You were doing it for the joy of doing it.

 

[00:16:57] Fraser Kelton: Right. And in that case, if you've written your autobiography or what have you with one of these tools, you, you might not have.

 

[00:17:04] appreciated the, the how as much as if you like grinded through all of the books on how to write well and everything else along those lines.

 

[00:17:12] Nabeel Hyatt: I think there are challenges and opportunities to the products when you're trying to build for hobbyists.

 

[00:17:16] And one of the reasons why it's important, of course, to focus on a specific customer is you just build different things for different customers. They're just loud about different things. Right. And when we talk about, um, Making, writing is, is one of these categories, but, but music for sure with companies like Suno and Udio and Refusion and others, music is a thing that people do just for the love of it.

 

[00:17:36] Design, there's Canva and Fig, podcasting, there's Descript and Captions, and, and all of these over time are going to separate out, ideally into finding niches of their own customer and then do very different things.

 

[00:17:47] Product for hobbists

 

[00:17:47] Nabeel Hyatt: I think for hobbyists. The benefit is that to building and doing is you have a permission to fail with relatively low stakes when you're building in it.

 

[00:17:56] Right. That gives you a capacity for risk and innovation, which is the thing I love about it, that you maybe wouldn't have had when you're like, life depends on it tomorrow. And that presents In a way, a hint to what these people bump into, which is that nobody's making you do this tomorrow. So any friction, any problem can derail you completely.

 

[00:18:20] And that doesn't mean you have to gamify it. It absolutely doesn't mean you need badges. But it does mean that, that You start from an activation energy situation. You have a blank page problem. Instead of having to stare at the blank page and think about where I'm going to start, can I just sketch out the characters that I might think about or how I want an ending to happen if I'm writing and work my way back?

 

[00:18:42] I think the second bit is you have to keep users in flow. Every time you fall out of flow. Uh, from, and, and anyone who's coded or anyone who's gotten into drawing or knows what it feels like to be in flow. Can an AI help you stay in flow? Like, I, I, a great example is writing music can be torturous. I think there is a product out there in AI music for somebody that helps you keep you in the music writing, music authoring flow the whole time.

 

[00:19:08] And then the last bit is like, this is what I think Discord was the unlock for mid journey. Which is that you don't quite know everything that you want. You're still developing your taste as well. And so the kind of building a community for hobbyists versus for professionals. Right. You're you, you want to see tons and tons of real time examples because you're still very open to input.

 

[00:19:31] You're not a pro that's been doing it for 30 years. That knows your thing is just trying to get published. And just, just show me marketing tools. Get me a, get me a publisher or whatever it is. Go find me a studio gallery to put my thing in. You are still developing your own taste and you want to do with like minded peers. You got to it on the last part, I think there is another

 

[00:19:49] Fraser Kelton: piece of it, and that is like minded peers. Like, sure, yes, it like teaches you, you can explore, you can refine, you can learn, but it's with people who are hobbyists, who share your passion. I want to go to the knitting club down the street. I want to go to the garden tours and, and appreciate the joy of other people who share this passion.

 

[00:20:09] That's like built into the product. That's so insightful. I used to think that music I thought that there was going to be AI generated music that would reach the top of the charts. I still think that, right? I still think that. I looked at, we met with a whole bunch of different music companies, and oftentimes the pitch was basically that.

 

[00:20:30] And you're like, I don't know, like, how is that? I don't know. Is prosumers? Sure. I'm not really sure what's going on here. And we saw one where somebody pitched it as like a music social network. And you saw, like, I, I was struggling with it in the moment. Now I get it. I get it. If you're lowering the activation energy and helping people, you know, find joy.

 

[00:20:51] In this as an outlet, you do, you want to, you want to do it with the people who are like minded. I mean the internet, that's the thing that's been the best on the internet for two decades now, right?

 

[00:21:03] The missing middle of creative markets

 

[00:21:03] Nabeel Hyatt: Yeah, it also fits into this broad broader picture which frankly I see it across all these economies in any market that develops over Time which is eventually the middle drops out of most markets like you think about Hollywood movies and like the hundred million dollar rom com is just completely gone away you get You know, a billion dollar spent Avengers sequel, the 56th sequel, or you get long tail YouTube creators and, and that middle goes away.

 

[00:21:27] I think it's happening in venture capital as well. Quite frankly, I think it's going to happen across most markets. I think you're certainly seeing it in music like that. Kind of like, can I be a career musician who makes a million dollars a year, but not 50 million. I'm not trying to be Taylor Swift and I'm not just trying to be a YouTuber.

 

[00:21:42] Like that's. That market is very, very tough when markets get efficient. We can lament that middle of the market going away, but it is just a fact. It's a fact of the way that all of these markets trend. And that's going to happen. With or without ai, you can look at, again, you can look at most creative endeavors and in video games, in music, in movies, like they're all trending towards that middle of the market dissolving, and you're either in long tail or in in the peak.

 

[00:22:11] I think there's a lot of effort and time that's been spent on trying to make the long tail. Chase stardom when and think about instead how they should be doing it for their own love of the work and whether they can make enough money to keep doing it for the love of the work and good things will come out of that.

 

[00:22:30] I think you build very different products. You don't worry as much about marketing distribution and making you a star and you don't create feedback loops to train that you want stardom. And I think a major competitor . is not your job.

 

[00:22:44] The major competitor is what else you might do in the evening or on weekends. Like, this is fighting with Netflix and Fortnite. That's your major competitor. You want them to sit down and make art in mid journey so that they're at least making something instead of watching yet another Netflix show.

 

[00:22:59] That's the goal. We, like, if we can make more people who are making things out in the world and pushing out their voice, starting another podcast, writing another book. It doesn't mean it has to be for you. It doesn't mean it has to make you a billionaire, but it will help us like move the whole conversation of culture and society forward.

 

[00:23:19] Fraser Kelton: Yeah. Super interesting. Cause it's not that you're. Mid journey use is coming at the expense of Canva. It's like, or like you're not, you're not saying, Hey, I'm not going to go to, to like that 5 marketplace to get my, my needs served here. Or even my Spark job. Like it's,

 

[00:23:36] Nabeel Hyatt: it's like, it's like, it doesn't eat into my time with founders or my time talking to you, right?

 

[00:23:42] Fraser Kelton: Yeah. You're not, your aspirations is not to become a very well regarded illustrator or artist. You're doing it purely for, for like the fun and the joy and the escape that it offers you.

 

[00:23:52] Nabeel Hyatt: That's why I love it for my kids too. I am thinking about their time and I would much rather they can make a board game or a video game or make art in mid journey or do any of these activities, than, I don't know, play Fortnite for longer.

 

[00:24:06] Fraser Kelton: Right, for sure. I get it. How interesting, right? All of a sudden these technologies are allowing, I mean. creative endeavors through the computer with an audience that never would have been able to turn to it like any of it. That is so inspiring.

 

[00:24:23] Nabeel Hyatt: Yeah, it is inspiring. It is the opportunity for many more people to have their voice heard in a way that reminds me a little bit of the kind of like,

 

[00:24:32] Fraser Kelton: no, you know, you know, no, because I mean, I'm sure you share some of your mid journey imagery with some people.

 

[00:24:40] But you don't, you don't do it to be heard or seen or discovered. Like, that's fair. That's fair. That's fair feedback. It is okay to do it for its implicit joy. The people who, who turn wood and do carving or build furniture for themselves or paint, like the, the people who are completely, you know, exposed to these creative outlets are doing it for themselves for the most part.

 

[00:25:02] And now. AI is allowing creative endeavors en masse through, through software. That's

 

[00:25:12] Nabeel Hyatt: right. Yeah. You don't have to worry about the how anymore. It's an important part and a macro sense of like, how I mentioned how we innovate, but it's also, it's an important part of how we live.

 

[00:25:21] Let's not skip over the fact that, yeah, feeling like you are making something and then, and feeling like you are executing on something and putting something out there in the world that you feel pride in the making of, when you look at it, it's just a part of living a good life, you know, you're not going to get this analogy, but it's, it makes it like bees wiggle to transmit to other bees, like paths and so on and so forth.

 

[00:25:44] That's their language. And then 30 percent of the time, apparently, according to science, like bees wiggle for no. evolutionary reason at all?

 

[00:25:52] Fraser Kelton: Yeah, you see, you're just wiggling. You're just wiggling. I did not anticipate me getting here, but I feel so optimistic about all of this now in the sense that before to reach creative expression really required mastery of the how.

 

[00:26:09] And I know that I keep coming back to this. Yes, that art and craft is, was a merged thing. That's right. That's hidden. Like it was hidden behind the how. And I would love to create music, I've never invested into the how in a way that is, you know, rewarding enough to then have the output be something that I feel good with.

 

[00:26:31] It would never be, it would never be like, I don't have any aspirations to have other people enjoy it. Like, I just want to, I want to be creative. And there's now opportunity across so many different mediums for that.

 

[00:26:42] AI's potential in the education of craft

 

[00:26:42] Nabeel Hyatt: By the way, this is an interesting, another orthogonal dimension to talk about this, which we can maybe end on, which is like, this is not to say that craft doesn't have its own sense of merit, too.

 

[00:26:52] No, not at all. Right? And in fact, there's a whole other AI product set. which is about being your tutor, which is about making you good at the craft. Go try Simply Draw which just launched. There's a whole set of like how to play guitar, or how to become a good writer, or how to solve a math equation that is, that is about the craft of the work.

 

[00:27:14] Um, but that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about a hobbyist who is already has a vision of the thing they want to make, and they just haven't learned how to craft it yet. And can you help them along the way?

 

[00:27:26] Fraser Kelton: Oh, that feels so good. Actually, what you said earlier feels, feels so great.

 

[00:27:31] It's that historically that the creative outlet is meshed with the craft and the how to do it. And certainly some people love that component of it. But not everybody and now, now they've been, they've been separated and you can choose, you can choose to be creative without having to master the traditional how and that feels so good.

 

[00:27:54] Yeah,

 

[00:27:54] Nabeel Hyatt: I agree. It will not be universal. Not every category of AI products is going to have this. It's almost three categories now that we're talking about. Which is first , where's your customer sit? Are they prosumer? Are they consumer? Are they hobbyist? And, and it's just really talking about that maybe the larger opportunity in some categories, although not every category is hobbyist.

 

[00:28:14] And then second, in in those categories, particularly for hobbyists, the art of it, the expressiveness of it is probably the most important thing versus the craft. And then, and then lastly, like there's probably a whole nother conversation that we can do on people that are helping with the craft.

 

[00:28:30] Fraser Kelton: For sure. For sure.

 

[00:28:31] So great. Well, thank you for this. Yeah, no problem. Let's be done for today. Talk to you later. See ya.