Strands of Genius: What Was the TED Talk? Music & Memory, Career Identities & Decision Making
Plus, our thoughts on: DALL·E 2 and that
WRITING FROM | Toulouse, France
WORKING ON | Final touches on an insights workshop we’re running tomorrow
LOOKING AHEAD
Aug 27-Oct 14| Toulouse, France
Oct 14-21 | Provence, France - Cycling Tour!
Oct 21-24 | Arles, France
Oct 25-28 | Athens, Greece
Oct 28-31 | London, UK
Oct 31-Nov 19 | Isla Mujeres, MX
Nov 19-26 | Mexico City, MX
Nov 26-Dec 7 | Nashville, TN
Dec 7-15 | Beersheba Springs, TN
Dec 15-19 | Atlanta, GA
Dec 19-21 | Athens, GA
Dec 21-Dec 31 | Nashville, TN
:: WHAT’S NEW & WEEKLY GRATITUDE ::
This Friday, we’re headed on a cycling holiday and we couldn’t be more excited! When we were celebrating the marriage of our friends Billy and Camille, we were cycling between the houses in the South of France on bicycles and we were reminded just how much we enjoy cycling. And then it turned out that we had a week free between two gigs, and so we went ahead and booked.
Someone else is planning where we’ll go and where we’ll stay, all we have to do is turn up on Friday and collect a packet, and our bike equipment (including a gps thingie) and then bike to the next place on our agenda. We’ve never done anything like this before and relinquishing planning is both terrifying and the best gift I could have given myself, ha!
We’ll start in Vaison la Romaine on Friday and cycle through the country side of Provence for a week, ultimately ending in Saintes Maries de la Mer a week later. And then we’ll end up back in Arles to spend a weekend there before we’re off to Athens, Greece for our final in-person speaking engagement this year!
This week, we’re especially thankful for:
the canal, the weather, soundproof windows. bright yellow windbreakers, How To Build A Sex Room (Faris laughs through the show, while Rosie takes notes lol), Return to Monkey Island, sparkling water, Leffe Blonde, old school country music, smash burgers, Victor Hugo market, good books, all our friends & YOU.
:: THE LINKS ::
WHAT WAS THE TED TALK?
As we prepare for our final in-person speaking engagement at the end of October, we’ve been watching other presenters — mainly in the form of stand up comics and a few TED talks watched at 1.5x. I remembered TED talks to be inspiring… Monica Lewinsky on bullying, Brent Brown on vulnerability (an shame), that Kevin Kelly talk from back in the day. And then down the rabbit hole I went, and happened to stumble on a piece by Oscar Schwartz where he shared the same sentiment that I was feeling as I skipped from one video to the next: “I recently watched some of the talks from this conference on my laptop. They hit like parodies of a bygone era, so ridiculous that it made me almost nostalgic for a time when TED talks captivated me… With some distance, now, from a world in which TED seemed to offer a bright path forward, it’s time to ask: what exactly is TED? And what happened to the future it envisioned?” (Driftmag)
ONCE MOORE, WITH FEELING: ON MUSIC & MEMORY
Faris’ column looks at the power of music, what makes it catchy, a musical campaign for United from the 1960’s that led to legends of adultery, and how and why advertising uses music, with a shout out to “Queen Dolly P{arton}”. “Repetition is the key device in rhetoric and music, used to create emphasis and structure. “More than an illusive trick, repetition is the God particle of music”. (WARC)
WEIGH IN: HOW OUR CAREER IDENTITY AFFECTS OUR DECISION MAKING
Our friend Alex from Clear Hayes Consulting is running a session at Advertising Week NY and in preparation is running a survey which aims to look into ‘how our career identity affects our decision making’. We’re also interested in the same topic, and wanted to give our readers an opportunity to weigh in. We’ll be sure to share findings at a later date. Share your perspective using the survey here (desktop only). (Clear Hayes)
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:: WHAT WE’RE THINKING ABOUT: DALL-E 2 ::
For those unfamiliar, DALL·E 2 is an AI software designed to create images from your text prompts. It’s finally open to the public, and your first 50 queries - or “prompts” as they’re called - are free.
We’ve had a couple of observations between the two of us, that we wanted to share:
It’s so much fun. Seriously, it’s like having an artist in your back pocket to develop free comps for you with whatever you’ve got in your mind, no matter the illustration style. Here’s a: “cartoon pig standing at a kitchen island with ingredients to make a cocktail laid out in pop art style”
The more you know about what you want, the better off you are… maybe. Abstract queries are still tough. If you took art history, or have a passion for art, you probably have an upper hand here because the software does a great job when you give it a particular style. Here’s what I got back for: “angostura bitters in the style of 90s vaporwave”
and “stairs to sky filled with clouds and palm trees in the style of 90s vaporwave”
(Once I figured out that 90s vaporware was a style and that it involved pink and retro and pop art vibes, a lot of things got the vaporwave treatment.)
But then again, some styles the computer doesn’t know so well. Uga the UGA Bulldog in a throne, in the style of Kehinde Wiley was OK. It gave me some of KW’s vibes:
But a portrait of Dolly Parton in a trailer park in the style of Kehinde Wiley didn’t really come back as planned. I actually love the second piece of art, but it doesn’t feel very Kehinde Wiley to me, if ya know what I mean?
But Kehinde Wiley’s signature style involves patterns within the portraits, and the AI kinda understood that. It just put the patterns on top of fabric that already could have had patterns, rather than incorporating the pattern into the painting itself, as Wiley would:
(In general it seems like DALL·E 2 needs specific instructions about backgrounds, like everything - the more specific and concrete you can make your prompts the better)
It’s going to make comps/mock-ups so much easier. It’s hard to downplay just how much time is spent doing this, for many folks in advertising. But, it’s not taking away anyone’s job immediately - it will more likely allow agencies to improve ‘productivity’ and the bottom line, in the short to medium term at least. This was what I got for “illustration of plate of cookies on a hotel check-in counter with doubletree sign in background.” I’m sure if I had played around with the query more, we could have gotten to a better place — but it would likely still need some touch ups from a designer of some kind.
It feels a lot like learning to use Google before Google got smarter. Back in the day you would learn Boolean operators and generally try to work out how the google black box ‘thinks’ to get the best query. Power users quickly worked out that longer search strings provide better results. The black box doesn’t allow for fine graded modifications as yet.
It’s clearly the beginning of…something. Chris Dixon famously said the future starts out looking like a toy. Already text-to-video and -3D model demos have been revealed that sit on top of the natural language processing, image identification and generative systems that make DALL·E 2 & co work. How long until you can do re-touching, make highly specific composites, illustrations, or even design interfaces using these systems?
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faris & rosie & ashley | your friends over at geniussteals.co
@faris is always tweeting
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It's called Genius Steals because we believe ideas are new combinations and that nothing can come from nothing. But copying is lazy. We believe the best way to innovate is to look at the best of that which came before and combine those elements into new solutions.
Co-Founders Faris & Rosie are award-winning strategists and creative directors, writers, consultants and public speakers who have been living on the road/runway since March 2013, working with companies all over the world. Our Director of Operations is nomadic like us, our accounting team is based in Tennessee where our company is registered, our admin extraordinaire is based in Playa del Carmen, and our collaborators are all over the world. Being nomadic allows us to go wherever clients need us to be, and to be inspired by the world in between.
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