PJ Pereira of Pereira O’Dell
CAN YOU IMAGINE?
"FEARLESS CREATIVE LEADERSHIP" PODCAST - TRANSCRIPT
Episode 255: PJ Pereira
Here’s a question. Can you imagine?
I’m Charles Day. I work with creative and innovative companies. I’m asked to help their leaders discover what they’re capable of. And then to maximize their impact. Helping them to unlock their own creativity, as well as the creativity of the people around them.
Welcome to the intersection of strategy and humanity.
This episode is the second in a series of conversations I’m having in partnership with the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.
For the weeks leading up to Cannes, we’re focusing our study of leadership through a single lens. The impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Creative Industries.
Are we moving fast enough? Are we going far enough? Is this an opportunity to fundamentally redesign the creative industries? Do we follow the puck or skate to where it’s going? There are opportunities and risks around every corner.
This episode is a conversation with PJ Pereira, the Founder and Creative Chairman at Pereira O’Dell.
PJ is also a published author and an artist in his own right. We talk about a piece of animation that he recently created for his latest novel in which he used AI, and and we’ve included a link in the show notes for this episode.
One of the themes that’s emerging from the conversations and background research I’ve been doing, is one of those realizations that is both surprising while striking me immediately as unquestionably true.
As a species, human beings are particularly bad at recognizing the speed, scale and impact of exponential growth.
Let me share an example I heard on a New York Times podcast recently, that uses cases of COVID to illustrate this.
If you start with a single case, and cases double every three days, then after 30 days, you have about a thousand cases. We can all wrap our heads around that.
But then go 30 days longer.
Now, you have a million. Wait another 30 days? Now, you have a billion.
AI is moving with the speed of a virus, and we are struggling to recognize the implications in ways that we can relate to.
We don’t have to go back too far to see how quickly our understanding of “normal” can change.
On March 1st, 2020, society was operating pretty normally. Chris and I actually took a plane to Chicago on the 2nd, and we flew back to New York on the 5th.
Five days later, five days, that idea was unimaginable, and it remained that way for a year.
But speed of change is not the only measurement that we should be conscious of.
The enormity of the gap between the normal, as we understand it today, and what we will demand as normal tomorrow, is usually beyond our imagination to see or to predict or to project.
PJ brings those limitations of our imagination to life through a vivid and unforgettable example.
“We are humans and we can only see a few degrees from where we are. It's like we are that first caveman that realize that red spirit, that burns forests, can be carried on the end of a stick. I can try to imagine that that is going to cook food. I cannot imagine that it's going to melt rocks. Can you imagine explaining to that caveman that one day, that super hot thing he has on the end of a stick is going to produce ice cream? It makes no sense. Yet it did.
AI is that fire, that flame on the end of the stick. We have no idea what the compounded effect of that is going to cause and how it's going to change society in any industry, including ours.”
At the end of the series, I’ll offer some thoughts on what we’ve heard and learned, and where we might go from here.
In the meantime, thanks for joining us.
Her’s PJ Pereira.
Charles (04:08):
PJ, welcome to Fearless. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
PJ Pereira (04:12):
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Charles (04:14):
What's your relationship with AI?
PJ Pereira (04:18):
So I started to study the subject and kind of go to events and read about it about nine years ago, nine, 10 years ago, because I was writing a book with AI characters that I needed to get, really geek out on it and have things that were possible, that were in the way of being possible. So I've been studying for a long time. And when the book was about to launch—
Charles (04:43):
The Girl from Wudan.
PJ Pereira (04:43):
—The Girl from Wudan. So, and when the book was about to launch, the theme suddenly became popular. You know, when I started to study, it was like, oh, this fringe thing that maybe 30 years from now, 20 years from now, then became 10, then five, then two, then what is it, now it's happening. So it happened exactly at the same time. I got really lucky with it in that when the book launched, the theme was out there and generative AI became a big deal. And I started to play with it, to do marketing for the book, using AI. And I think that one of my biggest aha moments in these field was that the more you use, the more you have glimpses of the future. This is going to transform everything. It's going to make a big impact on this. So a year and a half ago, we started to play with the agency, and get more people to experiment, and started to do these weekly experiments. And then all of a sudden, we have a unit, kind of a separate company that is an AI lab that combines brands with startups, and thought, okay, this is the future and we want to be operating at the highest speed on that right now.
Charles (05:52):
So do you see it as a friend, an ally, an asset? Is it a tool, a resource, a threat? How do you describe your relationship with it?
PJ Pereira (06:03):
The best way for me to describe is that it’s a tiger at a safe distance. If the tiger decides to eat you, it will eat you. But for now, it's far enough that I can hide. I don't know, it's kind of there. It's dangerous, but friendly, and not threatening enough until it decides to be.
Charles (06:27):
That's such a good description. To your point about how long it's been around, but how fast it suddenly has shown up, do you think people in the industry, by which I mean the marketing, communications industries—agencies, marketing, tech, media—do you think people are behaving in a way that reflects the speed of exponential growth in AI? I mean, it felt like for those of us that weren't paying that close attention, in January, it was kind of a thing, and then suddenly in February, it was real, in a really dramatic way, and it's got exponentially more real almost every day since then. Do you think people are taking it seriously enough? Are they, are they behaving in a way that reflects how fast it's emerging?
PJ Pereira (07:06):
No, no way. I think that everyone wants to talk about it, everyone wants to read about it, everyone wants to discuss, but every, few people actually want to roll up their sleeves and do it to understand. The level of change is so dramatic and that is hard for us to contemplate what's happening and what's about to happen even more. So the only way to understand what's going on is to actually do it. I'll say that, in the past, we all grew up learning that our skills are developed by, first you learn, and then you commit to doing it, and then you go do it, right? This world of AI operates in the opposite direction. You have to do, and then you're going to fail, and you have to commit to doing it anyway, and then you learn. If you don't understand that the learning comes from doing not from reading, at least for the first few years, you're not taking it seriously. If you have your intern send you emails about things are happening right now, you're not going to get anywhere. So the best you can do is brag about the size of your, let's say your wand.
Charles (08:26):
And that's where I think the first major tension point with the industry happens, isn't it? Because you've got companies who are nervous, in some cases, more than nervous, afraid, of the implications of AI. You've got trademark issues, legal, potential legal issues. You've got agencies trying to create their own version of AI by ring fencing stuff around it. And to your point, you understand the business decision making behind it, but the other reality is they're not really fully embracing and exploring what's possible. And it feels like three to six months from now, they're going to look around and go, how did everybody go past us so quickly?
PJ Pereira (09:05):
I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that you're more interested in talking than doing. You need to do first, and then understand. The decision cannot be, I need to decide if I'm going to do it or not. We don't have a choice. We will use it. The question is how. And you can only understand how, if we use, if we understand what the danger is, so we can play around it. One of the things, you know, one of the typical things, for example, that I see is that all the IP and data governance parts of the discussion, yeah, it is an issue and it is something that you can only understand if you try to play with it. You understand what is coming out of it.
Like I cannot use it, but maybe I can use another tool, another set of tools and, and safeguard it enough, but it's not as good as the other ones, but what can I do? You know, one of the things that we've been talking to clients a lot is that between the magical simplicity that the tools, tools like Midjourney, offer to individuals, they have no responsibility with for what they're creating. And the daunting pressures that companies and brands have to consider if they're doing now. It cannot be just a matter of, am I going to be simple and magical? Or just go create super complicated things are not very operational and not fast enough, and not modern enough. That's a dichotomy that does not work.
You need to come to another level. What we are doing, there are other players out there in the world that are actually investing on creating custom solutions that takes the best of both worlds and can bring to a client. Not a tool, but a custom workflow, for example, that will get you, okay, what are the things that you do over and over? Can I take an idea and decompose that into multiple parts so you can prompt the background, and you can prompt the food that this person is going to be eating, so the background is fully prompted. The person eating the food is a photo of a real person that I took hundreds of photos. Now AI is just going to adjust to a position that I'm going to draw. I'm going to take a photo of myself and put it there, and then it will take that model and put it there. So it's a model that I connected. But the food itself, I don't want AI touching the food, because the food, only the chef will touch it. So I'll make all the photos and then that food is going to be totally controlled. So there are solutions to create these machines that can make an incredible impact on what we do, that allow us to spend more time on the ideas, that allow us to explore more ideas. But you have to be doing it. You cannot just, you have to stop talking about things.
Charles (11:59):
So to your point, this is all about exploration, and exploration comes with risk, and risk can be expensive. Do you think part of the way that companies should approach this is to build the risk of AI into their business model? By which I mean, should they build the direct line item expense of, we're going to screw this up, we're going to be sued for copyright infringement, we need to build in a way to pay for that. Because the risk of not participating, not experimenting, not using it, is too expensive. We can't be out of this. We have to be in it. We have to find a way to pay for that.
PJ Pereira (12:29):
I don't think it's that risky, to be honest. I think you just need to start. It's the opposite. You need to start small. I see like these, all these big interviews with big networks. “We are investing $300 million.” “We investing $600 million.” “Oh no, I'm investing $900 million.” They're just, it's just a man competing for size, right? And it's all silly, because $900 million is peanuts, is still peanuts in this world of artificial intelligence, and the level of billions of dollars, multiple billions, maybe even trillions of dollars. There are companies out there, they're raising trillions. $300 million doesn't mean anything. You're not going to change the landscape with that. What you can do is change, is to get your culture, your people, to start to look and start small.
There was an event recently. There was the union of writers in Hollywood, got the pitchforks to fight against AI and everything, but there was kind of little, for me it was, okay, I hope that they paid attention, they kind of spent some time understanding instead of just reacting to so much fear. Because it is a problem, right? It's a very legit cause that they're working on, but I don't think that they spent enough time understanding the issue.
Then the next wave, the music artists started to look into what was there for them. And they published a letter that was very way more thoughtful. And they're saying, oh, proceed with caution. This is going to happen, but I want you industry leaders to proceed with caution to really think about what you're doing.
Start small. Let's see the implications as we're going. That's what we need to do. We need to start to play with things. We need to start to experiment with things, at small scale. And then we see how they're happening. We don't have the mental capacity, the brain ability to really understand what we are up against. We are humans and we can only see a few degrees from where we are. It's like we are that first caveman that realize that red spirits, that burns forests, can be carried on the end of a stick. I can try to imagine that that is going to cook food.
I cannot imagine that it’s going to melt rocks. Can you imagine explaining to that caveman that one day, that super hot thing he has on the end of a stick is going to produce ice cream? It makes no sense. Yet it did. AI is that fire, that flame on the end of the stick. We have no idea what the compounded effect of that is going to cause and how it's going to change society in any industry, including ours.
Charles (15:17):
And it's that capability on steroids over days and weeks as opposed to millennia.
PJ Pereira (15:23):
Yeah. It's happening in a speed that we have never seen. And the only way that we have to visualize what's happening, what's around the corner, what's next, or what maybe two degrees from where we are, is by trying to do. It's incredible. I had a conversation with the guy, Kevin Rose, from the New York Times last year at Cannes. And he was telling me that the reporters are very upset about this in general, of course, for kind of obvious reasons. But to say that what he realized that AI is a very experiential technology. He can’t understand by reading and talk about it, but once you use it, it's different. It feels different in your gut.
And I was in a meeting with a bunch of people that are developing the equivalent of Midjourney for music. Some of these new generation that is coming now, and they're like behind the fuck. Yeah, if you talk to the musicians, to the music producers and everything, they would tell us that they would go out and officially and say, oh, that's going to destroy everything, that is very dangerous. Then you go back home and call him, say, hey, help me figure this out because I'm really excited about this. So it's a mix. That's that story about the tiger. It's exciting and scary at the same time.
Charles (16:41):
One of the things that I've found in my experience with it so far is that, maybe for the first time, I was doing something on Midjourney, and creating a series of images. And I got to a point in that process, where I suddenly realized that for the first time ever, my frustration was not with the technology in front of me, but with my inability to broaden my imagination enough to actually ask it better questions. That suddenly I was faced with a dynamic that said, you are capable of having this thing produce anything. There is no limitation. Why can you not stretch your imagination far enough to fill that gap? Stop being restrictive, stop being limited in your thinking about this, be more expansive. And that to me felt like an important realization and an important moment. How does AI impact human creativity from your perspective, based on your experience?
PJ Pereira (17:39):
I think there's a two-way street there. It will allow people with big imaginations, but not a lot of skill, to express their ideas in levels that they have never been able to. You know, I'm not an animator. I'm a writer. But I can produce trailers for my books using Midjourney and Runway in ways that I never measured, that in ways that would have cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars two years ago. I can do that by myself in bed with my phone. Three hours, it's done. But I am a professional creative, so I'm trained to do this, which leads to the other side of that, that is fascinating, as well. I see people talking, the panic talking. I hear the panic conversations about how this is going to destroy the industry because it's so cheap, so easy that we are all going to be jobless.
I would say that it's actually the opposite. Because, hear me out. Brands and big media companies and anyone that has a financial investment on standing out, need to stand out. You cannot afford to do things just like everyone else does. So the need to stand out is still the same. You just have to put that money on different things. Today, you can just put the money on special effects, and that alone differentiates you from what an influencer can do on his own TikTok channel. Now it's getting more parity on the resources, the visual resources that we have. The special effects that a TikTok creator and a big brand can use are very similar. The difference is, who has the better idea? Who has the better vision? Who has the best creative spark? And maybe it'll be the influencer. Maybe it'll be the creator. Maybe it'll be the agency person. Maybe it'll be the brand. But someone needs to do it, and that is going to be incredibly valuable. You know, we are discussing this in the context of Cannes, the biggest festival of creativity in the world. That is important and more important than ever, because creativity itself is going to become the real and the most important elements, the most weighted elements of this equation.
Charles (20:15):
Yeah, I think what's interesting about it is, it feels to me as though it will start to create a delineation between human creativity and other forms of creativity, for want of a better description, AI creativity. And what I wonder coming out of that, is whether the business model, and I think it's reasonable to say that this industry has the worst business model in the world. The idea of selling original thinking by the hour is absurd, based on the value creation that it provides. I wonder whether, and if you take that a step further, the challenge to the industry is existential of AI. Not simply because it will be able to do things that many people can currently do under the current structure of the industry. But even more existentially threatening to the industry in its current form, is the fact that the industry right now is powered by a business model that says, we will sell you labor on an hourly rate basis. That's the model, right?
PJ Pereira (21:16):
Yeah.
Charles (21:17):
We hire somebody, we'll mark it up a bit and we'll sell that person onto you. If AI creates the ability for companies to run with fewer people, under most business models, that's a way to increase profitability. There's lots of industries right now that are benefiting from AI because it allows them to hire fewer people and be more productive. In the advertising and marketing industry, that's a problem because fewer people means less revenue, less income to advertising agencies. Do you think we create the possibility here where we can actually separate the value proposition of human creativity? The making a difference point that you were just emphasizing and highlighting? Do you think it allows us to actually restructure the industry at a fundamental level in terms of how the economics work?
PJ Pereira (21:59):
I think this is the crossroads that we are right now. And this is a decision that we need to make now before the reality runs over our head. You know, in one, to one side, we have the beautiful world that I was describing, and I honestly think we're going to get there. That is, once the whole world can produce beautiful things that look incredible, everyone understood—my son, my 17-year-old son can build images as pretty as mine. The only advantage that I have as a creative professional or as a brand is to have the most powerful creatives on their heads to have ideas that he's not trained to have. And that is what is going to make a brand stand out. The need to stand out, I think, is our safety net, I think is what's going to save us.
It's not brilliance, it is not the good spirit. It is not the business model. I think it's the absolute need for the brand to stand out, that is the essence of what we do, which I think ultimately is going to save us. But there's a chance that we may f*ck up really bad before we get to that point. That is, if we let this journey lead us to an optimization-only side, because the damage could be so bad that all the creative minds that could help people stand out may just say, you know what? Screw that. I'm out of here.
I grew up in Rio and in Rio, when you're a kid in Rio, you learn something very quickly. When a wave comes, you either lean in and surf it or you run for the sand. You don't stop a wave.
Waves are not stoppable. They're bigger than you. Try, you know what's going to happen, right? This wave is coming and it's really big. You need decide if you're going to lean in and surf it or run for the mountains. There's a big chance that some of the most talented people in our industry may just say, fuck that. I'm running for the mountains and I'm going to retire. I'm going to do something else. I don't want to have to deal with this. The humiliation of developing my work devalued. But that's not because of AI. It’s because of the economics of the industry being worsened by the AI, and not because AI is killing creativity. The economics that is, make your creativity. I don't think it's going to happen. I think we're better than that. But that's the risk. That's the one possibility that we have to collectively cause a massive f*ck up.
Charles (24:41):
Where does the coalition come from that creates that new future? Who are the people that have to get together to make sure that we surf the wave as opposed to heading for the hills?
PJ Pereira (24:54):
It needs to be a combination of client and agencies and production companies to rethink if, like, let's get to a new agreement. It cannot be just one of those parts. If it's not all three of them, we won't have it.
Charles (25:11):
And do you see a body being the driving force behind that? Do you see that being individuals deciding—
PJ Pereira (25:17):
No. That is, that's what makes me nervous is that there's… Our industry is way too competitive to have a leadership. We don't have leadership. We don't have leaders that move the entire industry. Because every time one stands up, “I can, I can try to do that.” There'll be seven other rounds, like, “Yeah, you don't have the authority. I'm better than you.” “How many Lions have you have you won in the last few years? I have one more.” “Oh, no, but I have won four more,” because the discussion is so silly.
But if I had to make a bet, if a coalition of clients start this process, we may be able to go further.
Charles (25:59):
Yeah, that's going to be the interesting and important catalyzing moment, isn't it? Whether a group of influential people are willing to come together and see what's inevitable.
PJ Pereira (26:09):
It needs to be the ones with the powers. The coalition of the hundred biggest clients in the world get together, say, okay, let's save marketing, so we don't spend the next decade trying to catch up. Let's plan, so the next generation of marketers, the next CMOs are going to come right after us, are going to inherit an incredible market, they only need to surf the waves that we are creating instead of try to fix the problems, fix the doom that we left behind.
Charles (26:37):
And it probably doesn't even need to be a hundred, right? I mean, you might be able to do it with the right 10 clients at the same time.
PJ Pereira (26:41):
The right 10, you're right, yeah. It's just easier to get the hundred because less discussion than if it's just 10, then there'll be like 10, after the next standard. Like no, but we have no authority. And then there's the question arises, as well.
Charles (26:58):
Given all of that, let's assume that we get through this moment, this meeting, this moment of meeting the wave and, and as an industry decides to ride it and find a way to ride it, how do you build the organizations of the future that allow for the right partnership between human creative talent and artificial intelligence talent? What does that organizational structure look like?
PJ Pereira (27:24):
I think there are two questions that I keep making myself, and I'm trying to find the answer. I'm not rushed, but I think that those are the answers that we have to figure as an industry, right? Question number one is, what is creativity in this new world? The question number two is, what exactly is creativity? So let's talk about, what is creativity? I think the fundamental question that no forum is better than Cannes, how do you think, when you think about creativity is of a creative person, your nephew, or when you were a kid and you're like, ah, yeah. I remember when I was a kid, my, my uncle said, yeah, he's so creative. Pretty cool. It's funny, it's cool, interesting, always kind of an idea. There are a couple of things there that we mean by that.
Now first is, I can understand the patterns of the world. Two, when I see those patterns, my instinct is to break them, not to continue them. And three, I'm completely unafraid of making a fool of myself and suggesting or saying something that is a horrible idea. Those three things is how we recognize a creative person. That's what we tend to call in a very basic level, we call creativity. It is a very inefficient way, but also very brave way of thinking, is have ideas and try it, and then one of them, you're going to, oh, this is really good. That's why we brainstorm, right?
Here's the problem. Computers are better at that than us.
Computers can understand patterns. If they're told to break the patterns, that's easy, and they can have millions of ideas, million times faster than us. The problem that we have when a computer is being creative are twofold. One is that, someone is going to look at these infinite number of monkeys with typewriters and see who, which one of them wrote the Shakespeare. Someone's going to need to do that. And there's another element, I cannot totally put my finger on it, that is, the person behind an idea is actually an intrinsic part of what that idea is. If I tell you that Beyonce composed this song, it has a value. If I tell you that that same song was composed by AI pretending to be Beyonce, it's a different, you are going to react to it in a different way, no matter who actually created it.
What you think is behind that, impacts that. And that's important. Because the attribution of a history, the, knowing that there's a real feeling behind that kind of matters for us humans. So I think that that is going to impact how we operate.
And then, the consequence of that is that we need to think about how, now that we are thinking what creativity is, is how do we collaborate with a tool that actually has these ideas? It's like evolving from a bike to a horse. A bike, I have all the power, I have total control, but I'm all the power is for my legs. Now I have this beast, that is way more powerful than my legs can ever be. But if you decide to stop drink water, it will. And you have to have a different relationship with the tool, because the tool will learn, will evolve, will change, and will change rapidly, faster than you can track. And that is going to transform the way we operate. And this is something that we're going to need to get used to, because it's a wave. It's bigger than us, and you know, we cannot stop it.
Charles (31:08):
Do you think AI will get to the point where it can create content that we can't discern between whether it created it or a human being created it? Or is there always going to be some element of human soul, for want of a better description, involved in—
PJ Pereira (31:20):
I think it may get close enough that we may not notice, but again, the problem with that is that it will create a lot of things that we won’t know exactly which one is the best. So there's, I think, the need for a human to see what no one else is seeing, to feel like this is important, I think this is special, is still going to be there. And the need for the audience to know that there is a person involved, to know that that came, that is being described on that song, that joy that is being described on that photo, that agony that is being described, that is being painted on that canvas, knowing that that's real pain behind that, that's real agony, there's real joy behind those things, will matter. So those tools can, I believe that those tools are going to be an incredible way for us to express what we are doing and to experiment with more.
But the world will still require, for the important things, we'll still expect that that pain is real pain, that the joy is real joy, and all those feelings are real feelings, even if it's by a feeling about the person who noticed and picked that one. This is special, from these million things generated by computers, this one is special because it matches my story, I remember feeling, I remember that day that something similar happened to me. That's when you bring humanity back, the warmth back into it. And I think that that is what will keep making our jobs important, but it's going to be less based on the junior creative team that is generating the ideas, and more weight on the creative director that spots the right idea, right? Not that the junior creative team is not going to matter. They will be there, they'll be playing with those tools, but the the weight is going to move more to the experience because our value is more on choosing than generating.
Charles (33:24):
So at our heart, we still will always yearn for human to human connection.
PJ Pereira (33:29):
Yeah. You know, I think we, you know, think about this. If you, take your favorite artist and you hear a song and someone tells you that that song was created by an AI, you're going to feel you're going to dismiss it.
Charles (33:43):
Or at least hold it at bay.
PJ Pereira (33:45):
This is not new. This is not new. If you see a painting in a museum, it's like, oh my God, this is a Chagal, it's so beautiful. And then someone just comes, you know what, this is a copy that someone made. The real one is in a locker room, is in a safe room somewhere else. This is just a copy. Immediately that feels more pale. Immediately you go there, i doesn't look as beautiful as it did before. Just because you know that that's the copy.
So there's an intrinsic value of the human connection, the human touch to things that I don't think it's going to disappear. It hadn't disappeared. It had always been important. And I think it will continue to be, because we want to make sure that that thing causing us a feeling is authentic. It has nothing to do with the technique. It's just that we don't want to be, the feeling that we have that something's creating on us is real. We want to know that that real feeling that we are feeling is not being manipulated by a machine, is coming from someone that somehow understand, what was going through what we are going through.
Charles (34:54):
I mean, I, on a personal basis, I feel that, too. I've also heard enough over the last few weeks about what AI is capable of, and maybe more specifically, what different generations of human beings are interested in, in terms of their relationship to AI, to wonder whether that is a sustained, what you are describing as a sustained sensibility or a transient one. For instance, it's entirely possible, according to a lot of experts, that people of the age of your kids will have relationships with entirely AI generated entities, right? They'll be friends, part of their social circle will be AI generated, and they will trust them and like them and engage with them, and in some cases, feel more supportive and protective of them, because those AI characters will understand your kids better than anybody that they've ever been around. And that kind of feeling of belonging is fundamental to the human experience. So do you think it's possible that while you and I have exactly the relationship that you've described, do you think it's possible that generations behind us will actually be entirely comfortable with evaluating a piece of work purely based on how it makes them feel, and that if it comes from an AI, that's not going to have any discernible difference to them versus a human creator?
PJ Pereira (36:11):
It is possible, but I think it's first, is a gradual transition. I don't know how fast is that gradualness. And it comes not from being okay with the content coming from AI. It comes from how human we see the AI. You know, if we get to a point that our kids or our grandkids look at an AI and feel like, okay, that deserves the same respect that a human being deserves, that deserves the same kindness, the same attention, that a human being deserves, at that point, what that creature, that digital creature creates is going to be seen as the same way that what we create as individuals, as human beings. Until then, I think that we are still going to be looking for, if we can recognize the feelings of that digital being, that's when things cross. And listen, we as a species are not very good at that.
We tend to believe that only the people like us have feelings, have souls, have rights, and we just keep slowly expanding what that limits is. But I'm pretty sure that our kids and our grandkids are going to look at how we look at the world and living beings around us and think that we're absolutely barbaric. Maybe the next generation after them are going to look at the way that they treat digital beings, and think that they're barbaric, as well. I don't know if you follow that story that went viral a couple months ago, was the story of this engineer at Google that posted, kind of made some, raised some flags with internally, and because he asked if the algorithm was alive and the algorithm was alive, and he told people about it, and just blogged about it, kind of posted about it and got fired.
I know people who know the situation from the inside. It's like what the news world reported was that there was this cuckoo engineer that believed that the algorithm was alive. That wasn't the issue. The issue that he was trying to raise, that he asked, and the algorithm, the computer, the program said, I am alive. He knew that it wasn't, that the computer was just saying what he thought that he wanted to hear, so the conversation will continue. But at what point, it will be alive. And we are going to be operating on that being, without knowing, we're going to take that program, we're going to turn it off, we're going to change its code. I mean, we're, at some point, if that thing ever becomes alive, we are going to be killing it, operating on it, putting different lens, bring it back to life. And that it, that being had no choice of saying anything about it because we didn't recognize that it was alive. Eventually we will, but that transition is going to be barbaric. And how do we know? That was the entire point of that discussion. I think it's a very valid one. It starts to go deep into sci-fi, a sci-fi landscape. But guess what? We are in sci-fi landscape already.
Charles (39:37):
Completely. I mean, and to your point earlier, we will operate on it and affect it, providing it allows us to, right? Because at some point, the power base will shift in this relationship. I mean, it’s hard to imagine a day at which that does not happen, in which it does become more powerful. Elon Musk was quoted a couple of weeks ago as saying he thinks within a year and a half, AI will be smarter than all human knowledge. Now, there's no way to know whether he's going to be right. But the pace of development suggests that it's not impossible to believe that that's true.
PJ Pereira (40:07):
There's enough research out there pointing at between 20 and 30 years, but it may be less than 20, that there's another wave of technology that is going to be as important as artificial intelligence, but it's going to be potentialize by that, that is the brain implants, that starts with brain to computer. You know, seeing, I remember seeing like 10 years ago at Cannes a guy who couldn't see colors and had a camera that their brain that connected directly to his brain, he could see colors. Those things are coming, you know, there are companies that are experimenting, that got their FDA approval. They're doing that. And like Elon Musk has some, so as a company that operates in that field, but there are lots of other ones. Brain implants are 30, 40 years old already, as a technology. But the technology is getting better and smaller enough that brain, connection between brain and computers are going to come soon, in a wider range. And then from that point, from brain to brain, it becomes even bigger. And then we really are in sci-fi world. This is why sci-fi is so important. Why fiction is so important. Because it helps us start to see the possible, and probable, but possible scenarios. But yeah, we may not have an alien race in invaded planet, but we may be a few decades away, that we may actually see people connecting brain to brain. And what is, what's that going to, how is that going to change us as human beings, as groups, as a society? And will advertising even make any sense at that point?
Charles (41:50):
So against the context of all of that, and all of what might be, how do you think we need to adapt our leadership of creative talent, as we meet this next phase of the evolution of both the species and of the industry?
PJ Pereira (42:04):
I think we need to give the keys of the castle to people who like to explore. People who are, when they hear that there are no rules for this, and no one knows how to do, they smile. There are lots of people, and some of the most brilliant people in our industry, there are people who's like, “Okay, give me the brief, give me exactly what I need to do, and I'm going to blow your freaking mind. I'm going to bring you the best idea. But I need to know what I'm doing. I need to know the limits. I need to know what direction.” There's a generation, and I can tell that the generation that was very influential was very big on the beginning of the digital revolution 25 years ago. These are the people that are most, my generation is more excited than people who are younger than us, because we are the kinds who figured that out, and we got excited, and that determined our path.
I think that this next wave of change is going to come from either people of, like, my crowd, people, not because it's me, but people who have, people who come from a digital background and had to figure things out and be given the answer, find the answer instead of being given them. Or people like us in this current… at somewhere out in the world, in the streets of Brooklyn, in the streets of London, the street of Mumbai, there's a young Bob Greenberg that is going to blow our minds, and is going to change the way everything works because she will see that, oh, this is different. Because I think that, this is the ultimate question for me in the next, for the next 10 years, this is the biggest challenge that we have, and what keeps me, makes me smile, it makes me get out of bed with a big smile.
25 years ago, we were asked same question, the variation of question that people that 30 years before, 25, 30 years before and had to answer. So some, at some point, the madman generation had to look at, okay, advertising is an idea on a page. Now we have this TV that moves. So what is an idea that moves? And it took them a while, but they understood, and that's still mostly what we see as advertising, is an idea that moves. Then, my generation came out and thought, okay, now we have a computer that our TV, our device, where these ideas are going, they are interactive. What is an interactive idea? And I was the president of jury at Cannes years ago, and we were discussing, the big debate that we had, when we were discussing who the Grand Prix was, was between a video that was interactive that responded to why you entered, and a series of video that just was just funny and played on demand.
And the jury was split in the middle. And they say, no, yes, videos is just video. That's not what the future of the internet is. And we end up giving the Grand Prix to the interactive video. Look at the world today. Video on demand is actually, like, six months after that YouTube was born, and video on demand, then Netflix and video on demand, the interactivity of, I want to watch it now, became a big part of our society. So we cannot just lock ourselves too hard into definitions that we have today because the world is going to change them, is going to play these things in a different way. And the one that we have right now, the one question we have in our hands is, what is an intelligence idea? If intelligence is no longer something that we see as belonging to humans, but belonging, is an attribute of anything, if we give intelligence to an idea, what will that be that will make it different from the generations of ideas before? I have no idea.
But every day when I wake up, like, maybe today's the day that I'm going to see it. Maybe this year at the Palais, that's what we're going to figure out. Or maybe that's what someone is going to have a glimpse of what that future is, because she was doing it, and they're going to try something, right when they come back to the agency and they're going to blow everyone's minds. That's what I'm hoping for, I'm looking forward to watching.
Charles (46:27):
And that's a critical building block in the evolution of leadership, a practice and a discipline that used to require that you knew all the answers now has to be able to acknowledge, I don't know any of the answers. So I have to bring other things to the table. I have to create an environment in which everybody can go out and find answers that can help us figure out what this puzzle’s, picture's supposed to look like. And within all of that, how does that change the kind of talent that you recruit and look for? What kind of people do you need to bring into the industry who are going to be able to succeed and thrive in this kind of environment?
PJ Pereira (46:57):
This is a temporary problem. I don't know the exact answer, but it's a temporary problem, because I think that this only matters now that there, most people don't understand it. We haven't lived enough with it. And there are a few people that have experimented with it. In, I'll say, three years, everyone will have lived it enough to understand kind of where this is going to be able to work with that more natural way, without calling it, without being a tourist to this new world that we are, that is being open in front of us. So I think at the agency level, I'm trying to find people who are curious, people who were not afraid of being given a brief that is only 30% filled.
People don't panic if they're not given specific directions. That's all I can hope for. And then in three, five, 10 years, there'll be enough of these people out there. And the world will have have seen enough that we can bring the majority. There are people that, okay, I can be brilliant, as long as you give me the constraints, then you do that. There are waves on it. Creativity comes in waves. There are waves of innovators and waves of perfectors. I come from a generation of innovators. And from under my wings and the wings of people like me, came a generation of perfectors. They're making the craft incredible. And I have tremendous respect for them. Now we are at a point that I think we need another generation of people like me, that will look at this and feel like, okay, we don't know. There's a tiger there. Cool.
Charles (48:45):
And last question for you. If you roll the clock forward two years, and if we have successfully ridden the wave, to use your analogy, what will the industry look like having successfully integrated AI?
PJ Pereira (48:59):
I think we are going to have more smaller agencies. It's not less jobs. The importance of big structures are going to be less important. Because the importance of that big eureka in the head of one person is going to be more important than the structure to serve the business. Because a lot of the service is going to be automated, and I think that that will change a lot. So I'm an eternal optimist. I think that this is going to transform the weight and the importance of creativity in our world.
Charles (49:40):
And actually, I'm going to ask you one final, final question. As you look at the future, what are you afraid of?
PJ Pereira (49:47):
I'm afraid of that f*ck up that I was telling you of. Of us, instead of investing on the future of a bigger creative potential, investing on, in letting this current discussion of optimization dominate the situation until so late that we don't have chance to rebuild. My fear is that the industry may not notice that quick enough.
Charles (50:19):
PJ, I want to thank you for coming on the show. Your capacity to be able to look at this at scale and at really intimate courses, I think is the balancing act that we all have to find as we grapple with these fundamental changes that are clearly coming to the industry. And I think that your sensibility is a true creator and an artist, and your ability to be able to explore how the technology works and how you can express yourself through it, is an immensely powerful reference point too. So thank you for coming on the show. Thank you for coming on the series. And I look forward to seeing you down in the south of France in a couple of weeks.
PJ Pereira (50:53):
See you there.
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