Hey, everyone. I'm Caitlin Rossi. I'm the creative director at Storyblocks. Thank you all so much for joining today. For those of you who are new guests, Storyblocks is a stock media subscription service that, helps creatives by providing an award winning library of video, images, templates, and more. We are a subscription service, and we also offer the most comprehensive licensing coverage in the industry. I'm joined today by, two people that I'm very excited to introduce, Alejandro Manamalo Ortiz, who is the cofounder and chief design officer at Runway, and TJ Leonard, who is the CEO of Storyblocks. Alejandro, I'd love if you could start by introducing yourself and telling a little bit about your background and, what Runway does. Of course. Thank you, Caitlin. First of all, super happy and excited to to be here to be sharing the story of Runway and and talking about these topics. My name is Alejandro Matamala. I am from Chile. I am, the cofounder and chief design officer, at Runway. Runway is a research applied research company where we work, by creating different kind of, like, AI applications from research, from creating models to different kind of tools that are useful for, creative worlds. Our mission as a company is to empower creators from everywhere to tell the stories they they wanna they wanna tell. And we have been in business for six years already, and our mission has always been, powering creators, with tools and applications so they can enhance their creative workflow. Great. Thank you so much for joining us. And, TJ, can you talk a little bit about your time as the CEO of Storyblocks and how the creative industry has evolved during that time? Yes. For sure. Thank you, Caitlin. Thanks for joining us. Alejandro. We've got a chance to get to know the Runway team a little bit over the last couple months, visit them in New York. So I'm really excited to, have this conversation. Should do lots of fun stuff, about where storytelling is headed, what that means for creatives, what that means for artists. So looking forward to the discussion. So my background, I'm a marketer by by background. I was actually the first CMO at Storyblocks. I led the marketing team here for about two and a half years before becoming the CEO in the beginning of two thousand sixteen. And whenever I think about kind of our history here at Storyblocks, I always go back to our mission. You heard Alejandro share runways. But in the beginning for us, our our mission was creative content that everyone can afford. It was really about opening up access to these creative building blocks that professional creators had relied on for, many years. And, you know, that's still a big part about what we do, but our mission today is create more moving stories. And, you know, that has evolved over time really as we've just listened to our customers and and followed them. And I think what we hear today is, you know, hey. We're sold on video. We wanna have a better video strategy. We understand that video creates a stronger connection with our audience. It drives better results for the business, but we struggle to create enough content because of time, resources, and budget. So I think when we think about kinda how AI fits into the industry, you can you can really see how it will revolutionize the the the number of people who are able to create high quality content, to make the video creation process more efficient. Again, that very much aligns with with our mission, and I think that's what has us really leaning into, this new technology and opportunity. And then I would be remiss if I didn't also mention our contributors. We really have two customers. We have our creative end users who I just spoke about, but we also have our contributors. These are the creative heartbeat of the business. They provide all the content, that ultimately gets uploaded into the platform. So as we look ahead and think about a generative future and what that means, we see ourselves as important partners for our contributors to help, with education, but also to try and figure out new ways to, help them earn, help them monetize their creative work. So, looking forward to the conversation today. Great. Thank you, TJ. Yes. And that's exactly what we're here to talk about, how AI is revolutionizing visual storytelling and what that means for creative professionals. So from generative content to speed enhancing tools, AI is fundamentally changing, the way that the creative process works and the boundaries of what we can produce. This presents a lot of opportunities, but also questions. So we're gonna dive into that. Before we get in, just a few quick PSAs for the audience. You should see a q and a tab on the right of your screen. You can submit questions there at any point during the event. We're not gonna answer questions as we go, but please keep them coming, and we'll get to them during the q and a at the end. In the chat, we're also going to share out a link to a two minute survey about today's topic. If you haven't completed that yet, we would love to hear from you and how you all are thinking about AI in the creative industry. And then finally, we're gonna be sending out a recording of today's event afterwards, so you can revisit it at any time or share it with your colleagues. So moving into our first topic for today, we'd love to talk a little bit about the opportunities for innovation, in visual storytelling that AI presents. I wanna share a few quick stats from our survey that we've gotten so far. Forty two percent of sorry. Sorry. Forty two percent of respondents are already using generative AI to create visual content. So we've reached that early majority stage of adoption among creative professionals. And then when we asked what applications in of AI and visual storytelling most excite you, seventy five percent said the ability to create new images and video from text prompts, and sixty eight percent said the ability to edit faster. So, Alejandro, I would love to start with you. Can can you share some of the pain points that the last generation of creative tooling wasn't able to fully address that AI powered and generative tools, are able to solve? Yeah. Of course. I wanna add some some context of how we were seeing this a couple years ago, when we get started. So we founded the company in twenty eight late twenty eighteen, but around twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, we were seeing the first, we were exploring with the first, like, generative models of this last generation, for producing images. When we were looking at, at those models, and and I'm talking about models that were getting outputs of two fifty six by two fifty six pixels, image pic pixelated images with not too much of alignment between what you prompt or what you get back from from from the model. It didn't matter for us. There was a shocking moment for us. We we we were doing this at art school. I met my cofounders at at Tish at an in NYU, which we is a is the art school from from from my NYU. When we were looking at these outputs, we were like, woah. This is this is incredible. I can see a future. I cannot not see a future where I'll be using these kind of tools to power stories, to to be telling stories to others. So that inform a lot of how we were seeing these these tools being used in in production environment. So, that was something that we haven't seen we didn't seen that, at that moment from any other tool, like, the the capabilities of, like, getting feedback, immediate feedback in real time. Like, you have an idea. You have something that you wanna create, that you wanna visualize. And in a couple of minutes, you had something back that you can use to inform a narrative to to to draft a story or maybe to even use it to communicate something. Of course, since twenty seventeen to twenty, twenty four, quality has gotten better. We have we now have video models. We have other type of modalities. But one of the first things that, that it comes to mind to to your person is the ability to have real time feedback on an idea. With previous software, with previous previous tools, it it demanded, creators to perform many more tasks to get there. I went to film school. I for only one year when I was nineteen years old. One of the and I and I dropped off from film school. I I I switched to to to design. But one of the things that I that I found while studying film film direction was that I couldn't have tools for for quickly, exploring some ideas to to fail earlier on something that I wanna create and and to have that immediate, response from what I want to create. If you I guess, if you're a painter, you can start painting and you can start keep having immediate, response of what you're creating. But when you're thinking on a movie, when you're thinking on a on an ad, on or a story, you you you don't have that until you you perform some other processes. So one of the things that that that I believe again is, like, having that ability to to see things in real time. Other things are, different task are were very, like, time consuming, which I believe slowed down the process the creative process processes. One examples of of this is, for instance, like, rotoscopy, which is this process of segmenting, a foreground and and and a background to do, VFX or to create some some some kind of, like, applications on on on video. This is the process that for a very long time was a very tedious process of, like, going and masking frame by frame the subject that you want to, segment out. With tools, powered by AI, we saw the potential of reducing that the time of that tasks, significantly. An example of that is a tool that we have that is called green screen, which it takes, like, a few minutes, if not just seconds, to get a a a matte mask out of a out of a subject from from a video. That the response to that from from from our user has been that they they really never enjoyed doing a really tedious process of, like, masking frame by frame, but they really enjoy of, like, continue moving on on on on on their story, on their on their projects. So, getting those little processes or these these processes, like, reduced by by significant time has been super, powerful for for for for for the for our users. And lastly, I think accessibility. Learning previous tools, I think the previous the tools that we had until not very long ago has been great. We have created great things. We have created great movies. We have created great stories. We have created amazing things, and there are great tools. But, unfortunately, some of them are really complex to learn or understand. It requires a lot of time to get onboarded, to to master that tool, to being able to use it professionally, or even for something that you wanna, that you wanna share with the rest of the world. I think, the the affordances or the capabilities of maybe AI powered tools are that the barrier of entry is way lower for you to start producing some content. So as I said before, maybe you have an idea or something that you want to explore, and you are a a few, sentences away of getting immediate feedback of what you wanna complete. So just to summarize, I think, like, real time access I'm getting some some echo. Like, easily easy easy easy tools to learn and understand and also reducing a lot of, like, the, time consuming consuming processes. Yeah. And as someone who is I'm a video editor, very clunky in after effects, using things like the background remover tool to replace rotoscoping is just, like, a godsend. So yeah. I love those examples. TJ, as generative video becomes more prevalent, what does that mean for the future of something like stock media, and how does it fit into the broader landscape of content? Yeah. It's a question I think we're all wrestling with now. You know, the truth is we're all figuring it out in real time. And I know we'll talk a little later about the relationship between human generated content and and and AI generated content. But I think, you know, one of the things I loved about, what you just heard from Alejandro is, the the creator was kind of at the center of all the examples that he gave. So I think just like a where are we now in this new technology cycle. And I think in the beginning, the technology is the star, and it's all about the flashy PR releases. And it's all about these these new things that you can do using the technology. But they all, while spectacular visually, they are proof of concept in the sense that, it's really just a demonstration of what the technology is capable of. It feels like we're in this moment where we're shifting from, okay, the technology is the star to the customer is the star once again. And I think all those examples you heard Alejandro give, it really goes back to how can we apply this new technology to solve an existing customer problem. So I love that. When I think about kinda Storyblocks and our customers and what we hear from them, and how generative may be able to help, you know, it's really time consuming to early on in kind of the the storyboarding phase when you're trying to get to a rough cut. You're trying to show some concepts before you would ever license the actual content itself. Maybe you're using watermark comps, and you've got kinda three directions you could take things. You wanna get feedback on those to Alejandro's point. And that that process is hard. It takes time. And, you know, we're very close to a future where, again, with just a few keystrokes, you're able to get those kinda concepts that you can socialize with your teammates or with your clients, get feedback. So, that's one of those areas where I I really see generative shortening the overall video creation process. And, again, just the efficiency that that unlocks, the additional content that allows your team to create for a given budget or amount of time, I think can't be understated. Yeah. And I guess one other question. You know? So beyond creative tools, Alejandro, what are some of the opportunities for innovation that, you know, AI presents just to storytelling in general? Like, are there new mediums or new formats that, you know, we haven't anticipated yet that you see coming? Yeah. That's a super interesting topic to us because, we really believe that we are in, like, in a very early stage. We really like to discuss internally this the how other, technological breakthroughs had informed new ways of, creating different kind of mediums. One good example is when we created when we created the the camera, the film camera, we point the camera to shoot at a place to theater theater because that was an immediate response of, like, okay. Now we we we had theater. Now we have to record it, and we can we can broadcast that to many more peoples, and we don't have to perform the play all over again. But years later, we we saw the the born the the cinema cinema was born, and we have a complete different medium that, that is a very different, art form, that maybe we could not anticipate when the film camera was was created. I think we are in a very similar situation today. We are generating things that we already know that we're already using, where we're thinking on video generation or image generation. We're thinking on, okay, let's make movies or let's make let's make let's use this for the things that we are doing today. But, it takes time. It's gonna take time. It's still very early to understand the capabilities and the possibilities of this tool and what can it it un unlocks for creating perhaps new different mediums that similar as cinema we cannot yet anticipate. Yeah. That's super interesting. So for all the potential unlocked, you know, new tech doesn't come without its challenges. So another data point I wanna share, we asked the audience, you know, what keeps you up at night about the evolution of AI in the creative space? Seventy nine percent said concerns around content authenticity. Fifty one percent said the displacement of artistic individuality to generative AI, and fifty one percent said issues around copyright and intellectual property. So I wanna talk a little bit first about the artistic integrity side. So, Alejandro, you come from an arts background. I'm sure you can appreciate some of these concerns. Where do you see creatives and their craft continuing to play an essential role in a future where AI is heavily involved in visual content creation? Yeah. I think it all comes to me back to storytelling. That's the most important key thing thing here. This is just our these are tools, and and not because similar as the the camera, not because you have a camera, now you are a photographer, not because you have a film camera, you are now a filmmaker. It all counts down to creating meaningful stories and things that that people resonate with. So that's the core of what I believe leaders should be focusing on on, getting, like, the the the core thing of what you wanna create, which I believe is is is is the message and the story and how you wanna share with that with others. I think we're going to enter, era of, like, adaptation to multiple processes as well. Something that we are seeing here at Runway is we're seeing creators switching from one creative background to another. An example of this is that we're seeing, product designers turning animators or turning filmmakers. So we're seeing writers becoming a little bit closer to the process of actually, producing some content on their own. So I think we're seeing this kind of, like, overlap of creative disciplines because, as I said earlier, we have, the barrier of entry of star have, interacting with the systems to produce some kind of outputs is is is is lower. So we're seeing kind of like that that that switch of, like, not just, putting yourself on a box of you are this and you're only this and you only have been doing you have always been a writer or you have always been a photographer. I think, by using these tools, the is opening new creative avenues for for creators. So I think, of course, if you master some some kind of, like, skills, if you are a photographer or a filmmaker, you might have some skills, some taste that perhaps some others creators will not have on on on on on that end. So I believe, like, there's still a scenario where teams will make the best outputs, a combination of skills, a combination of, like, capabilities from different creators and working together for to pursuing a a a common a common story. And I, again, I think the other the other one is is start pushing the boundaries of of what this technology is capable of, again, with the purpose of, like, discovering what else can we do with this. Is is what we are doing today the answer of, like, the outcomes of this, applications and and tools? Or maybe can we explore, different ways of telling stories? And I think there's so many other things that are happening in the industry. There's immersive content. There is, gaming, game design or or kind of, like, a a mix of, like, game and movies that is happening lately a lot in different kind of shows that are super interesting to start exploring. So I think, one will be, like, focusing on the core of what we wanna wanna share with others, not not just on the tech, and also, start pushing for what are this, what what what are the possibilities of the capabilities of this new set of tools that we have in hand now. Yeah. And, really, you know, the people behind them will be the ones to determine how far we can push those. Yeah. So as we move more into generative video, you know, I think most would argue that it cannot or should not fully replace human captured content. TJ, can you talk a little bit about where you see, you know, real video, for lack of a better term, remaining in storytelling? Yeah. You know, I guess to skip to the punchline, I think that these two forms will certainly coexist as long as there are humans. Again, I kinda always go back to what are the limitations today that exist of, you know, real or human generated content where generative can really provide some incremental value. So Alejandro hinted at this, but there are, like, both mediums and subjects today that humans cannot create and cannot capture. So, I think about the metaverse, which was a thing a few years ago. Why did the metaverse ultimately fizzle out in that moment? Because we weren't able to create these immersive worlds fast enough or at at a level of personalization that was compelling to, you know, the individuals who were exploring them. Now imagine that, you know, to Alejandro's point is the lines blur between these different creative roles. I don't need to come with, any existing creative talents. If I can, type what I wanna see in front of me on a keyboard, then I can create my own virtual world. Like, that's incredibly powerful. That's not something that human generated content's ever gonna be able to do. If you look at a lot of the queries that have come out of these early text to video generators, for example, I mean, yes, you have some of the photorealism stuff, but a lot of it is, you know, show me Tokyo in twenty forty five with, like, a cyberpunk theme and, you know, MagRail, trains running through the city. Like, they're, they're again, we're in space. We've colonized Mars. Like, they're they're pushing. They're looking for visual concepts that we can't generate as humans today. And, again, I always go back to, like, what is the point of storytelling? You're communicating a message, but you're trying to elicit a response, an emotional response from your audience. And I think by being able to take people to places that human generated content can't take you, you're necessarily gonna, elicit a real emotional response from the audience. So that's one big way that I see gender day really adding to the creative universe. You know, Alejandra hinted at this a little earlier as well, but I actually draw some parallels. Kadin, you mentioned after effects with templates. So, like, ten years ago, like, you know, After Effects, Premiere Pro, new tooling, like DaVinci Resolve. Like, these weren't as big part of a lot of the upgraders toolkits. Today, it's about twenty percent of the downloads in our library. So what are these different templates? They've allowed people to, top grade the level of their creative productions without necessarily having to, develop their own, skills as much. It's it's it's a little bit of a shortcut. And, I think your your generative tooling will will very much do the same thing. It's gonna allow any individual to really upgrade the quality of their creative output. So, again, I feel like that is, an important role it will play alongside human generated content. And then I guess the last is just edge cases. So Caitlin knows this. We spend a lot of time understanding our customers, understanding their search trends, understanding creative trends. Like, where where are there gaps in the industry? Where are there gaps in our own library? How can we go fill those? You know, traditionally, we've had to go out. We've had to source it source it from our contributor community. We've had to go out and produce it on our own. Now, you know, again, with just a few keystrokes, you can pull those edge cases into the library that will dramatically shorten the time that it takes someone to, find all the content they need for a given project. So, again, all of those, I think, are very complimentary, to the the human created content. So, again, as I look ahead, I see these two formats coexisting and and ultimately solving very different problems for the customer. Great. Yeah. And I wanna I wanna shift gears a little bit to talk about kind of the other side of some of the concerns, and that's, you know, the concerns about the ethical usage of generative AI both from a consumer standpoint, you know, what are we seeing and can we trust that, and from an artist standpoint. So, TJ, I wanna start with you. How do you think, you know, that AI companies can ensure that content owners and creators are being compensated fairly for their contributions? Yeah. So a wonderful question, Caitlin, one that's near and dear to our heart. And, you know, I would start by saying, I think it's in the best interest of both, you know, the the original creators, the copyright holders, as well as AI companies to make sure, that that artists are fairly compensated for their original work. I think for, it's fairly obvious, why it's important for the artists. Again, they're out there putting in, the work. They're out there developing the, the original narratives, going out and hiring the models on location. They deserve, to be, again, compensated for all that energy that they've put in. And I and I would argue it benefits AI companies just as much. You know, there's this concept of a creative dream that some people are talking about. So one of the, I guess, attributes of these generative models is is they're necessarily derivative in nature. So you're taking a bunch of data, at any given moment in time. That data is representative of, you know, what exists today. Many of you may have gone on to chat GPT, one of the early versions, and said, like, hey. Who won the baseball game last night? Or or asking for something that's related to current events, and it'll say, sorry. I only understand the world through twenty twenty one. And so, again, they're they're necessarily derivative. They're necessarily, backwards looking. And so if you're only using an existing corpus of data to train these models and then you're using synthetic data or, like, to try and retrain these models, you're gonna get this effect where there's this, again, this creative drain. You're not going to be able to keep up with new creative trends. So, for these AI companies, having access to continual fresh trending content is gonna be critical to them creating better, more compelling, visual outputs, through the different generations of these models. Mhmm. And then, look, in the end, storytelling is is about, empathy and trust. It's about understanding your customers so that you can create a narrative that really connects with them and their needs. And it's about trust because if they don't believe what you're saying, it doesn't matter how compelling, your story may be. So when I think about, you know, what's the right way to approach the topic of generative, Again, if you want if you're in the storytelling business, it's one that has to start with empathy and trust, and, you know, consumers are smart. I look to, you know, what's happened with, like, free trade coffee and conflict diamonds. Like, when people understand that, there are individuals who are being marginalized and taken advantage of to to sell them a product, like, they're gonna run-in the other direction. And, I think we can all take cues from that. Clear labeling, transparency around the origin and provenance of the content, guarantees, again, that the original copyright holders are being fairly compensated. I think the businesses that really embrace that will end up being the ones that that that really win market share. Yeah. And, Alejandro, you know, what do you think that we should expect from the industry moving forward? And, you know, can you share a little bit about how runway is working, working, you know, with artists to kind of ensure that their voice is part of this conversation? Yes. So this is a very important topic to to us, and I think it's really crucial to to have an open debate and and seek together between the industry and and create an artist, to the the best ways to design standards of how we can work, how we can all work together. And I I just wanna reemphasize that this is pretty early stage. It's something that is just getting started. And and what we are doing at Runway, just our reminder, again, we come from the creative background. They all of the three of us founders met at art school. That's where we have been in in in the past fifteen fifteen years, is that we work very closely with with creative artists. We some of the things that that we are doing and you should expect continue seeing are different kind of, like, settings in which we, share and work together with artists in order to, anticipate what are their needs, what are their concerns, what are the the the things that they're how they are seeing this technology being used on their on their workloads. Again, we are producing tools for creative work workflows. So to us, this is a really important things to to to to keep the debate happening. One of these examples is that we have a very large team of creative partners, from different kind of industries, from, filmmaking, for advertising, from design, from different places that we, partnered with to to to share early access of some kind of research or or different applications to inform how they are seeing, using these tools in the future before we we put them into, we we product and I productize it and and put it in available to to everyone. We also have different kind of activities to, not just keep this conversation closed between them and us. We just want to expand. One of the things that we do is that we have, a a show where we invite artists to discuss this topic openly, between them and that we record and we share with with more people so we can have different perspectives of how different kind of artists are seeing, the use of these technologies. So, I think, overall, we should see more debate and more open to continue, working together, remembering that this is still pretty early, that we should pay, that we should be finding ways to to work to work closest and understanding what are the the needs from each type of of grids. And and, also, as I said again, potentially, we will see new different kind of artists emerge from using this technology that will be using the the the outcomes of this models to a new form of art. And, also, I believe we should incorporate this kind of, new artists in part as part of the conversations of how they're supposed to see this thing like being in use. Yeah. I love that. Well, we've got a few minutes before we're gonna shift to q and a, so I wanna get into one more topic before before we do that. You know, and that is where will generative video be a year from today? So, Alejandro, you know, from your perspective as kind of an insider, where, do you think generative video will be a year from now? It's really hard to anticipate and research in in long time, but I can I can give some some hints of what we have been working since day zero? We really understand how, creators wanna work and how they work. And we have learned that creators have many different ways of working. Each creator works in a very different way than than the other, but it all goes down to controllability. We we have understood we understood that the main key aspect of every creative workflow is having full control of what you wanna create. So, some of the things that we have been focusing on are adding different layers of, of, allowing that granularity of control of these generative outputs. With this, I mean tools like something that we released not long ago that is called motion brush that for an AI video generation output, you can, quickly sketch or draw some, in some parts of an initial frame to guide the model, on the motion that you want specific subject to to to go or or or to move. You can also, direct how you want the camera to move within a a a generation, or you can also guide, different kind of, like, editings control from your subjects or your or or your characters from a specific, output. I think those are the main keys. Again, control will will be continue adding more layers of control, and you should expect seeing more ways of of a lot of of of using these tools in a way that you want to use them and less of, like, getting an output back and just, like, relying on on on the model, decision. I think the decision should be from the creators, and we will do everything, that we can in order to provide that. I think some other things that you should also expect are higher fidelity and higher quality. This is something that we have seen it in images, the transformation from these past four years when it went from two fifty six pixels, really pixelated outputs to really high quality, like, almost perfect images. You should be seeing the same in in video. Video is way harder than than than than image, but you you could expect, that, we're gonna get to more photorealistic results pretty soon. And the last part is, like, longer generations. Today, we are generating up to, four seconds that you can extend to twenty seconds, but you can expect seeing, longer, videos generated completely from from these models. And this is super exciting to us. We just hosted our second annual AI film festival where we celebrate all the creations of the the the not just creators from Runway, creators, from everywhere using these these tools, are doing, and what are the stories they are creating. This year, we received, like, three thousand, short films ranging from two minutes to seven minutes. I think for version the next version, in twenty twenty five, I think we're gonna start seeing longer films being created with this technology. So I can, embedding on more, like, longer, generations. Love that. TJ, what can individual creators do to help push the industry towards, you know, an optimistic outcome for for all? Oh, TJ, I think your, audio's out. Alright. How's that? Better. Thank you. Sorry about that. I was switching microphones because I saw some, chat, about echoes, but we'll go back to the one that we know works. Anyway, I was just saying that, we've talked internally. Like, in some ways, this whole generative wave feels a little bit like climate change. We're like, alright. There are multiple versions of the future here. Some of the versions are really scary and I'd prefer to avoid. Some of them are really exciting, and we're, you know, dramatically, increasing participation in creative pursuits. We're telling stories in new formats. So, yeah, how can how can we as individuals try to nudge, you know, our collective future in a direction that excites us? So, again, I kinda go back to, you know, the best brands don't lead customers. They they follow them. They they understand them. They solve problems for them. So I think, you know, in the same way that you have a voice in a political process, through elections, like, I you have a chance here to communicate with brands and let them know what's important to you. You know, you vote with, your wallets. And so patronizing businesses that you think treat artists the right way that take, you know, copyright and compensation seriously, that give you transparency and an understanding about where this generative content is getting sourced from. I think that is an incredibly powerful way for, you to shape the future of our industry. And then the other is just experiment. You know, I think, like, most things, right, like, we're we're all, more nervous about what is unfamiliar or or uncertain, and so go use these tools. And I think as you do, you know, the the media, you know, has a tendency to, you know, drive clicks through certain tactics, and, like, they can play on our anxiousness. But I think once you get in there and you really start experimenting, you really start, you know, trying to think about how this can improve your own workflow to the point Alejandro made earlier. Like, the amount of, tedium that you can automate a way to free yourself up to do the creative work that really drives the narrative forward. Like, that's the exciting part of change that is also not, immediately observable on the surface. So those would be the big two ones. Like, don't underestimate the power that you have here to drive brands in the directions that you wanna go and, like, be a part of it. Go experiment, you know, because the the anxiety is always gonna be there anytime there's a a major shift or change, but I think the the opportunity and excitement is also there as well once you go get hands on. Great. Thank you. I wanna make sure that we have some time for our audience q and a. Quickly before we get into that, I want to plug our next webinar, which is gonna be on June twenty sixth. And it's should you be on Snapchat? We're gonna talk with Brooke Berry, who is the head of creator development. And it's gonna cover how Snap will has become sort of the antithesis to social media and what brands and creators, should know about Snapchat in twenty twenty four. Also, if you're interested in other content from Storyblocks, you can head on over to storyblocks dot com slash re slash resources. We have a ton of blog articles, recorded webinars, guides, and courses, so you can learn about video creation, editing, video marketing, the creator economy, and more. And this recording is gonna be available there tomorrow, after the event. Alright. So let's get into q and a. I'm gonna start with one question for Alejandro. What are the skills that content creators and videographers should develop to effectively work alongside AI technology? For example, at first, we heard that prompt engineering, was going to be an important skill. Now popping up that take care of that for us. So what are some of those skills that creators should develop to best work with AI? Yeah. This is a a great question. My my honest answer to this will be most of them is skill yet is to be curious of, like, jumping in and learning these tools. As as I said before, we're still in a very, very, very early phase of this technology. So, I wouldn't advise to focusing on prompting engineer where we don't know if the technology will remain as, like, just purely, like, prompting to get an an output back. That might change. The technology is advancing so fast that the processes of generating outputs might change, throughout the the process of creating more tools. So I will advise to, explore, to use, to be curious, to learn, to adapt it into workflow even though if you are not if you don't use it today on your work, on your project, I think it's another tool. It's another tool that will take time to to to for you to adapt within your workflow. It's not a overnight change. I'm going to be using this from one day to another. I think it's a matter of, like, you, learning how to use their tool on your own for for yourself. So I guess, again, my my my my my main advice my advice would be just explore and and take some time to to learn this new kind of, like, ways of working. Great. Yeah. And another question that sort of, tails off of this. So AI literacy is, you know, kind of becoming critical. And, this person is asking, you know, how do you communicate, the existence and sort of importance of incorporating some of these AI tools, into their workflows and to the creative teams, you know, so their company can stay at the forefront of AI literacy. So this person, for example, works at a science museum, but, you know, how would you kind of communicate, the possibilities within your organization? Is that for me? Mhmm. Yes. What, what we have seen is a lot from different kind of, customers and users and creators, again, is that we're still in a phase where we are exploring some of the capabilities of this technology, which, in some cases, exploration is is great to maybe discover new path of how you wanna work and how you wanna use it within your organizations or your or your team. But in some other cases, as, with the current state, we have also seen how it can improve different processes, internally for communicating ideas. As I said before, one of the main benefits of this thing is that you can get almost immediate feedback of anything that you want that you have in your head that you wanna share with others. So, show, don't tell is something that I really believe. Like, if you really have an idea, maybe you wanna pursue within your organization, maybe, by using these tools and maybe communicating that you use these tools to to share some idea. I'm talking about, like, a storyboard or maybe a a planning for a narrative that you wanna use for something internally, might help influence the adoption and use of how these tools can can improve some parts of the of of processes that you you are currently having in Internet. So I'll I'll throw one in there too because I think it's such a good question. You know, something we've done at Storyblocks is this concept of an unbooked club. So in a book club, everyone, there's one title. Everyone, you know, reads the first nine chapters. You come together. You discuss. In unbooked club is you have a topic. So we did this, for example, at the beginning of the pandemic. We were very much in an office culture. We're like, oh my gosh. How do we run this business virtually? And so we put together an unvote club about hybrid and remote work. And everyone picked a a book or a topic that was interesting to them. They went off from Reddit, and then they came back and they shared what they learned with the group with a with a focus on kind of practically applying what you learned to our situation here in Storyblocks. So we've kinda taken that unboke club model and applied it to AI tooling. So, you know, we've looked for in each of our departments who's passionate about AI, who's curious, who's already exploring. Okay. Let's pull that group together. We've got someone, within our sales development group. We have an engineer. We have someone on the creative team. Team. We have a marketer. Like, okay. Great. Let's let's take all the energy that already exists to bring it together, and let's just say, hey. You have carpoolange to go explore. Try and make your workflow better. Try and make, your customer lives better. Come back and tell us what you learned in a month, two months, a quarter, whatever it is. So, you know, so often that when whenever there's new tooling, like, the hardest part is just kinda getting started. So this is a neat way to, kinda take advantage of the existing energy that existed in some folks and then come back. And then once you've shared how you know, if you're in sales development, I used to be able to, you know, get through fifty leads a day. Now I'm getting through five hundred leads a day. Like, all of a sudden, the rest of the sales development team is really interesting. I love that. So this is a little bit of a shift, but I think it's an interesting one. We did ask about this in the survey. How Alejandro, I'll start with you. How do you think that we should deal with maybe the high energy consumption, you know, as people start to use generative AI more? Yeah. Also a great question. And, again, I wanna say that we are in very early phase of these technologies, so we should expect from these models to be more perform performatically reliable, like, consuming, way less of energy and and improving the architecture and the ways that these models are created. I think that's a phase that naturally will come after this first approach of of of of of implementing this tech. And secondly, I think something that we do at at Runway, also is partnering with, cloud providers that seek for, renewable energy, sources. So, I think that we should expect that, other other partners in the industry are adopting different ways of of or better ways or more sustainable ways of consuming energy. I think, you all froze. Didn't you hear? We got you. Yep. Awesome. TJ, anything you wanna add? No. I think, Alejandro covered it well. Again, I think it's a a legitimate concern, but, you know, this is true of other industries as well. Like, as the as you run into the limitations of what one source of power fossil fuels can give you, like, that actually pushes people more toward renewables, pushes you in new directions. So, yeah, never underestimate the power of human creativity, especially when you, again, you have this new technology that that solves real problems. Great. So, TJ, what AI tools is Storyblocks considering, incorporating that will help, you know, curate search, possibly edit, or adapt footage and images, you know, for people who wanna use stock footage in that way. Sure. And before you answer this, I'll also say, would love to hear from the audience. You know, what are things that you're interested in seeing? You know, we'd love to hear from you as TJ kind of talks through what we're thinking about. For sure. Yeah. Great question. And I hear our data science team, which has been part of Storyblocks for a long time, sitting on my shoulder. And so, you know, I would be remiss if I didn't start by saying that we're already using AI and a lot of our products today. It's not true you know, text input to generate a visual output. But we use a lot of, open source AI technology in our search engine, in our recommendations, within our maker tool to try and intelligently match different visual concepts with different audio concepts. So it's kind of under the hood, but we're we're we've been using this technology for a long time, again, to try and make it easier for you to find the content that you'll ultimately put into your projects. You know, going forward in terms of, in terms of content, I will say that for now, we have no plans to add generative content alongside our human created content in the actual library. You know, there are a whole host of reasons why. Alejandro got to a lot of them, but, you know, the big reasons are, like, one of the, frankly, the quality of the output isn't comparable just yet. And then the other is more, in terms of the, again, the ethical considerations. You know, we have we're focused on our existing contributor community. How can we find, new ways to partner with them as we transition to the generative age? So for now, no plans to add generative alongside human generated content. And an area that we're watching very closely is the tooling. You know, we have Maker, which is a sort of more traditional, When you're a video editor, it's designed to help you with those relatively simple day to day tasks that maybe, you know, Premiere Pro is over engineered to do quick, short form social media content, for example. So I think, again, going back to what is Storyblocks' mission, create more moving stories. Like, we wanna be your partner not just in helping you find the the content you need for your project, but also to shorten those project timelines. So, again, there's no, announcement or anything like that that we have ready for today, but but that is certainly a part of the industry that we're watching very closely. Thank you. Alejandro, what are some of the practical use cases that you're seeing from brands and professionals today that are really exciting? Yes. This is a good one. We are seeing, different a wide range of different kind of, like, use cases. One is, as I said before, the storyboarding and narrative planning is at current state is crucial. I think creating more ways of preparing for production, or anticipating, making sure that the intended story is going to be well executed is something that we are seeing pretty often, from our from our customers. Another one is stylization, and visual effects. We have tools like video to video where you can use an existing footage and, as an input, and you can pass a style, and you can convert some of the footage that you already have into a different kind of footage with some kind of, like, different styles or or or or or aesthetics. We're seeing a lot of that usage for optimizing some of the processes of, like, exploring different kind of, like, aesthetics and visual aspects from from from a project. We're seeing a stay stylist stylization of, like, three d models as well. With the same technology, with video to video, you can think of passing a three d model that is not has not a material supply, and you can use some kind of, like, visual input or text input to to get some style to these three d models. I think we're seeing a lot of these in complex scenes where you want to you want to create some of outputs from from different kind of models that are maybe sometimes hard to shoot outside or maybe you don't have budgets to to do that kind of of things. We're also seeing a lot of that in in in architecture and getting, b roll footage is also, something that we're seeing a lot. We're seeing how, some bits of pieces of this, outputs are being used in production projects, and in different super interesting applications. We have use cases as from, like, everything everywhere all at once, blockbuster award winning movie using some of our tools, to, like, amateur or indie filmmakers creating different kinds of, like, short films. We have a lot of, like, different artists producing, end to end, like, projects completely generated, videos, music videos, and different kinds of, like, promotional material that is is a mix of completely generated live action and different kinds of, like, processes for creating projects. Love that. Alright. We've got one more question here I wanna address. So would AI integration help adapt footage and images to make content accessible in other languages? So, you know, say, if something was available in English, could AI helps kind of translate that footage? Yeah. For sure. I think that this this is happening, and this has been this has been happening for a while already. I think the quality of the dubbing or maybe the translation is getting better and better and almost not recognizable that it was altered from one language to to another. But, yes, for sure, I think there is a lot of, like, research involved in making, content accessible to different audiences. So I I bet this will continue, getting better and better. Very cool. Alright. I think that is all we have time for today. Thank you both so much for participating in this. This is such a thrilling conversation. I feel like we could talk about it all day. But, yes, we have an hour. Thanks so much, to the audience for joining in, for asking questions. We hope to see you all again, and enjoy the rest of your day. Bye. Thank you so much. Appreciate you. Alright. Bye.
