Here are resources to help guide you and your team forward
I appreciate the opportunity to share insights and ideas, and hope you found my presentation useful. I gave you some homework—the following links will help, but I encourage you to use the tools (especially ChatGPT) to teach you further. To reiterate, never before in human history have we had tools which can teach us how to use the tool. I wish you lots of success as you and your team become empowered!
✏️ NEWSLETTERS
1️⃣ Curiosity+Courage is my personal newsletter. I write at least once per week - typically more, then publish a recap podcast (Apple, Spotify and Overcast) each weekend. It’s all free. Since 2022 I’ve written over 150 posts about AI creativity and strategy, AI culture and practice, as well as AI ethics and policy. Here are a few highlights:
Four AI culture questions for leaders [A recent coaching example]
Leaping to AI tactics, again [Rewriting Google’s “Dear Sydney” Olympics creative brief]
This story is actually about people changing [From my MCAD AI for Artists class]
I'm Tim, and I approve this generative message [Testing the early limits of video avatar generation]
The newsletter is an evolution of my blog, which I started in 2006. When I’m not researching and writing about AI, I’m focused on the business of creativity and its impacts and implications.
2️⃣ Wharton Professor Ethan Mollick’s One Useful Thing has been a keenly insightful resource for many of us. Mollick publishes periodically, discussing amazing research from his grad program, documenting lots of prompting tips and tricks, as well as strategic direction. As he puts it, “The only bad way to react to AI is to pretend it doesn’t change anything.”
3️⃣ Taylor Lorenz’s weekly User Mag is rich in AI, social and Internet detail. She was on-staff at The New York Times and Washington Post before starting her own publication. I pay for her perspective.
4️⃣ Ben Thompson’s Stratechery is another newsletter I pay for. He goes deep into more technical and strategic issues, which are very often rooted in AI.
5️⃣ Casey Newton’s Platformer frequently publishes AI-related technology news. Casey is ex-Vox Media, New York Times, et al. I pay for a subscription.
Product manager Nate Jones (ex-Amazon) writes Today’s Sharp Thought, which is most often focused on AI.
6️⃣ The Neuron Daily is a (daily) AI newsletter expertly curated with the latest insights. Free, fast and very useful.
7️⃣ AI Tool Report also offers daily content, easily organized for quick review.
8️⃣ AI Secret is a third option for much of the same.
9️⃣ Bot Eat Brain is another frequently published source of AI news and insights. I’ve found their curation useful.
🔟 Greg Swan’s Social Signals is a weekly publication with a wealth of insights. Greg frequently incorporates AI news, tips, tools and encouragement.
While the analyst Benedict Evans doesn’t write solely about AI, he writes about it often enough. Here’s his 2024 Summer of AI observations.
Noah Brier also writes about AI, and founded the BrXnd AI conference which hosted a very salient Tim Hwang talk.
💪🏽 TRAINING
🏎️ I offer a one-hour Zoom course for busy marketers and creatives to help get them up to speed. I can also provide a longer, in-person workshop to expand on that core curriculum. I’ve taught Generatively Better to dozens of c-suite teams, individuals, and middle level groups seeking to advance change across their organization.
There are lots of great courses on LinkedIn. I recommend Pinar Demirdag’s “What is Generative AI?” class. She breaks it all down and makes it accessible.
The Guardian offers a handy visual primer on the basics of text LLMs. This explanation helps frame how generative tools are pattern recognition and generation machines, not “thinking” or “reasoning” entities.
The Washington Post provides a similar primer for generative visuals, which explains how those models function. What’s great about their approach: You begin by editing a simple prompt, then see how it is parsed and generated.
⚒️ TOOLS & PLATFORMS
Anthropic Claude (it’s latest v3.5 Sonnet is my current favorite)
Adobe Firefly (here’s Adobe’s quick video tutorial, here’s Creative Bloq’s explainer)
Midjourney (you’ll have to create an account. There are free and premium levels.)
Seenapse AI (creativity and innovation platform; free but you have to register)
RunwayML is leading the way with text-to-video generation
HeyGen is the platform I use to create realistic video avatars of myself (here’s an example)
Suno and Udio are text-to-music generation platforms. Here’s my post on the lawsuits pending against them
Seth Godin’s AI (like ChatGPT but trained only on Seth’s dozens of books and thousands of blog posts)
Scott Galloway’s AI (like ChatGPT but trained only on Scott’s four books and all his blog posts)
I use AudioPen almost daily to synthesize and summarize my thinking. I speak, its AI makes my ramblings coherent
🤔 ADDITIONAL
Here’s the Toys “R” Us video from June 2024 supposedly made entirely by OpenAI’s Sora text-to-video platform.
Ethan Mollick’s book Co-Intelligence is, for the moment, the foundational text of this AI era. Strong recommend. If you’d rather listen, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein interviews Ethan Mollick for an hour about the book and its contents. My favorite highlight from Mollick’s book is the Boston Consulting Group test (read the research paper here), which is highlighted by the BCG Henderson Institute in an interview with Mollick.
I wrote about the Unilever Dove Really Beauty Prompting Playbook in mid April. (Here’s the 72-page PDF download.) Around the same time, Google released its own 43-page prompting guide.
The 2nd Annual Runway AI Film Festival occurred in early May 2024.
Casey Newton wrote an extensive review about Meta launching its generative AI model to billions of people across Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook this sprint—without any notice or training. My friend Greg Swan also wrote about this curious circumstance
Various consultant firms, from PwC to EY and BCG have useful perspectives on data policy, security and safety of GenAI applied to all manner of finance department functions.
This conversation around “GenAI in Hollywood” with Doug Shapiro, Robert Fishman and Michael Nathanson is definitely worth your time.
Derek Thompson’s piece for The Atlantic on “an array of tasks we’ve historically considered for humans only.”
Bill Gates says the age of AI “has begun.”
Chartr on Company Execs Can’t Stop Talking About AI + a related post on Marketing.
IPSOS study on Americans using AI, April 2023.
The Biden Administration’s Executive Order on AI has been released. Both Ben Thompson and Steven Sinofsky offer excellent and useful perspectives.
I’m digging the AI-generative animation from Julian Meyer of CryptidZoo (Instagram). He’s leveraging GPT, Midjourney, Firefly, ElevenLabs, Audacity and HeyGen to create distinctive work.
Also appreciating the AI generative-infused painting of Mark Smith (portfolio, Instagram). He’s using GPT, Midjourney, Firefly et al to conjure ideas which he then paints.
The AI Tool Report has lots of salient links and content.
Here’s a useful reference list of college and university landing pages for AI resources and policies.
NVIDIA explains a Transformer Model (i.e. GPT).
That federal case where a lawyer submitted a brief written by ChatGPT which had been hallucinated.
INSIDER published a survey of creators to evaluate their most used AI tools.
Nilay Patel, host of VergeCast on web-builder platform Wix’s AI announcement, i.e. “The canon of C+ content is here at massive scale.” (TikTok link)
Here’s the story of architects at Zaha Hadid using Midjourney to solve problems “as if they were Zaha Hadid.”
Adobe Photoshop Generative Fill - first time reaction from pro photographer (via TikTok). Here’s another example.
Roblox CEO David Baszucki on the timeline for “speaking things into existence” (i.e. generatively prompting video game worlds).
Synthetic Summer generative video from April 2023.
Deepfakes, explained (by MIT Sloan School faculty).
Jeff Carino’s The Museum Of Non-Existant Things is a glorious exploration of generative art.