The AI-powered tools supercharging your imagination
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There's a fine line between AI replacing us and AI serving as a tool to further elevate our work. So instead of asking AI to do our work for us, what if we took a step back and thought much more consciously about AI's capabilities and opportunities?

Content creators and technologists like Bilawu Sidhu don't see AI as a threat to our jobs or new tech limited to eliminating the mundane. In his view, it's more of a workhorse for unlocking our imaginations and setting our creativity on fire. In sentiments he shared in a tweet, Bilawu said, Don't worry, y'all. AI will do your laundry and your dishes so that you can do your art and writing, not just the other way around. ♪

I'm Sherelle Dorsey, and this is TED Tech. On the show today, Bilawu Sidhu takes to the TED stage to show us exactly how reimagining the world through AI might lead us into a much more exciting future. He reflects on the future of AI and his latest endeavors as the host of our new podcast, The TED AI Show. Take a listen and then stick around for my interview with Bilawu. Want a website with unmatched power, speed, and technology?

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All right, let's talk about blending reality and imagination. But first, let's take a step back in time to 2001. As an 11-year-old in India, I became obsessed with computer graphics and visual effects.

Of course, at that age, it meant making cheesy videos, but therein started a foundational theme in my life, the quest to blend reality and imagination. And that quest has stayed with me and permeated across my decade-long career in tech, working as a product manager at companies like Google and as a content creator on platforms like YouTube and TikTok.

So today, let's deconstruct this quest to blend reality and imagination and explore how it's getting supercharged, buzzword alert, by artificial intelligence. Let's start with the reality bit.

You probably heard about photogrammetry. It's the art and science of measuring stuff in the real world using photos and other sensors. What required massive data centers and teams of experts in the 2000s became increasingly democratized by the 2010s. Then, of course, machine learning came along and took things to a whole new level with techniques like neural radiance fields.

or nerfs. But unlike older techniques for reality capture, nerfs do a really good job of encapsulating the sheer complexity and nuance of reality, the vibe, if you will.

Twelve months later, you can do all of this stuff using the iPhone in your pocket, using apps like Luma. It's like 3D screenshots for the real world. Capture anything once and reframe it infinitely in post-production. So you can start building that collection of spaces, places, and objects that you truly care about and conjure them up in your future creations.

So that's the reality bit. As nerfs were popping off last year, the AI summer was also in full effect, with Midjourney, DALI 2, Stable Diffusion all hitting the market around the same time. But what I fell in love with was in-painting.

This technique allows you to take existing imagery and augment it with whatever you like, and the results are photorealistically fantastic. It blew my mind because stuff that would have taken me like three hours in classical workflows, I could pull off in just three minutes.

But I wanted more. Enter ControlNet, a game-changing technique by Stanford researchers that allows you to use various input conditions to guide and control the AI image generation process. So in my case, I could take the depth information and the texture detail from my 3D scans and use it to literally reskin reality.

Now, this isn't just cool video. There's a lot of useful use cases too. For example, I'm taking a 3D scan of my parents' drawing room, as my mother likes to call it, and rescanning it to different styles of Indian decor, and doing so while respecting the spatial context and the layout of the interior space.

You could take that 2016 scan of a Buddha statue and reskin it to be gloriously golden while pulling off these impossible camera moves you just couldn't do any other way. Or you could take that vacation footage from your trip to Tokyo and bring cherry blossoms to life in a whole new way. And let me tell you, cherry blossoms look really good during the day, but they look even better at night.

It's almost like this dreamlike quality where you can use AI to accentuate the best aspects of the real world. Natural landscapes look just as beautiful, but of course you could go over the hills and far away to the French Alps from another dimension. But it's not just static scenes. You can do this stuff with video too.

I can't wait till this technology is running at 30 frames per second, because it's going to transform augmented reality and 3D rendering. I mean, how soon until we're channel surfing realities layered on top of the real world?

Of course, just like RealityCapture got democratized, all these tools from last year are getting even easier. So instead of me spending hours weaving together a bunch of different tools, tools like Runaway and Kyber let you do exactly the same stuff with just a couple clicks. Want to go from day to night? No problemo. Want to get that retro 90s aesthetic from Full House? You can do that too.

But it goes beyond reality capture. Companies like Wonder Dynamics are turning video into this immaculate form of performance capture. So you can embody fantastical creatures using the phone into your pocket. This is stuff that James Cameron only dreamt about in the 2000s. And now you could do it with your iPhone? That's absolutely wild to me.

So when I look back at the past two decades and this ill-tailored tapestry of tools that I've had to learn, I feel a sense of optimism for what lays ahead for the next generation of creators.

The 11-year-olds of today don't have to worry about all of that crap. All they need to do is have a creative vision and a knack for working in concert with these AI models. These AI models that are truly a distillation of human knowledge and creativity. And that's a future I'm excited about. A future where you can blend reality and imagination with your trusty AI co-pilot. Thank you very much.

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That was creative technologist Bilal Usidu speaking at TED 2023. Bilal is also the host of our new podcast, The TED AI Show. And we are delighted to have him on the show today to talk more about this exciting technology. Bilal, it's so great to speak to you today. I love your show. I've loved your TED Talk. This is really exciting to have conversations about technologies transforming the creator economy. I know you've been in this game for a really, really long time. How are you doing today?

I'm doing great, Sherelle. Thank you so much for having me. So one of my first questions for you is, you know, how do you see some of these new tools that you've that you talk about all the time? I follow you online. It's amazing. How do you see these tools and technologies transforming the creator economy? I think if I had to put it in a pithy sentence, I would say indies will be able to rival the output of studios and then studios are going to set whole new standards altogether.

So movies will be made that wouldn't have been otherwise. Games will be made that wouldn't have been otherwise. Podcasts, TV shows, music, the list goes on. So we'll have this explosion of content that just would not have made it through the traditional greenlighting process. But this transformation will also impact how the work gets done. So I think like smaller teams and even solo creators will be able to punch way above their weight classes.

You know, a common story that you might relate with as well as like creatives as they grow their audience, they start building a business around it. They start adding people, processes. And the next thing you know is like you're managing all that overhead. You're looking at a freaking status report, sitting in a bunch of meetings. And so I think creatives who really enjoy making and creating will be able to do a lot more with less and retain that spark as they scale.

Now on the other end, I think big teams will be able to break boundaries. So every time we get these new creation superpowers...

We don't just pull a Tim Ferriss four-hour work week and sip pina coladas on the beach. No, like instead we're going to put more value on the screen. So can you imagine what Disney or Marvel will be able to do with their treasure trove of IP and really visual umami? They're going to raise the ceiling and set whole new standards altogether for what cinematic experiences can do.

I love that. I love that. And, you know, in your previous talks, you've also talked about how some of these technologies in the past have really been clunky and disjointed or limited. And now we're sort of in this space where AI is really allowing us to expand that creative imagination of new worlds. You spoke about, you know, the opportunities that, you know, folks like Disney and Pixar might be able to have. And now how much more frictionless some of these AI tools have become as they've advanced in

So I think for the big folks or the big guys, as well as those who are individual creators, you know, what skills will users need now to access and leverage these tools? Are they differing greatly from previous tools?

It's a great question. I think the skill that's going to be paramount in this new age is basically good taste and the ability to articulate your vision. I think that's going to become a lot more important. In other words, the craft of creation is absolutely changing. It's almost worth answering your second question first about how these tools differ from previous generations.

So taking a step back, thus far we've been creating at this lower level of abstraction. We're painting the pixels, we're wrangling the geometry, we're cutting the frames of video. And now with generative AI, we're describing what we want to create at this higher level of abstraction. So it's almost like going from playing every instrument in the orchestra to becoming the conductor of the symphony.

So in this world where we're creating at these progressively higher levels of abstraction, I think the ability to articulate what's in your head in different mediums like text, voice, visual, spatial, etc. I think that's going to be central. In many ways, this is not too dissimilar from how a creative director would prompt a group of humans to create something and then iterate with them to get to that final product.

I think the other big skill, which is probably cliche and like oversaid, but it's true, is adaptability. I think this era of having one specialized skill set and writing it for your whole career is gone. Everything will keep changing. So I think it's gonna be very important to cultivate this sort of relentless curiosity to keep learning in order to thrive in this new world. So I believe we're going from a world of specialization to a world where generalists will thrive.

So as long as creatives don't get too attached to the craft that gets us to that end, I think we'll have an amazing explosion in creativity and that'll only go up. I really love that. And that really begets my next question here because we've hyper-focused, I think, on the creator economy. But, you know, and that kind of immediately makes me think of, you know, entertainment and art or what have you. But what other industries do you see being transformed by better AI tools?

I think every industry that involves knowledge work or really doing anything on a freaking computer will be transformed. So I think it's the same with any industry relying on audiovisual creation, which is we're talking about entertainment. Now, whether you're an architect that's using Autodesk tools or creative that's using Adobe tools, a marketer that's using Canva, or heck, you're in finance and accounting and using Microsoft Excel, it really doesn't matter because...

Like AI capabilities are being infused to the tools that you use every single day. At the same time, alternatives are popping up that reimagine that entire workflow. So I think the impact is going to be pervasive. I spent four years leading 3D efforts on the Google Maps team. And we were basically building up this ground up 3D model of the world, sort of remapping the world, if you will, using all these very expensive, fancy sensors like satellites, the cameras on airplanes, street view cars, etc.

And now those technologies are far more democratized than ever before. And really even rivaling the precision and accuracy of those high-end modes of creating maps.

The speed is insane too. I mean, in my TED talk, I was featuring 3D scanning with your smartphone. And even a year ago, some of those techniques relied on data centers, like some Nvidia GPUs cranking on my scan and giving me back something. And now just 12 months later, it can literally happen on the iPhone in your pocket with apps like Scannerverse. So literally before I'm done uploading my scan to process in the cloud, it's done processing on my phone.

I think beyond that creativity and sort of art in play, why do you feel that these advanced technologies that are deepening our understanding and our ability to really reimagine, you know, that real world are necessary? Yeah.

Yeah, and it's an interesting question because when people hear a phrase like that, they think like a ready player one, right? So, I mean, I wouldn't even say it's about reimagining. It's almost like a reconnecting more deeply and intuitively with the world around us, the real world around us, the people within it, you know, the places, the spaces and communities we care about.

If we look at what we do today as humans, right now we spend a bunch of our time in the digital world and the physical world. Our identities and activities are kind of sharded. I think we finally have this technology to start connecting those bits and atoms and build a bridge between the physical and digital world.

And so why do I think this is important? I think this is important because tech thus far has been great, but it's also been a tremendous distraction. Like, you know, these slabs of glass in our pocket mediate our interactions with the real world. But with the rise of AI and spatial computing or AR/VR, I think we can start connecting the physical and digital worlds in a way in which computing can be there when you need it, but it can also get out of the way when you don't.

Something about that that's deeply exciting to me is that we've suddenly got technology that can adapt to us versus us adapting to it. I love your point about technology and distraction versus, you know, us allowing this technology to be adaptive to our needs.

And I think a lot of times we kind of get lost in the novelty of the actual tool itself versus now how do we leverage this to kind of enhance ourselves and really apply this to the work that we're doing, be it creative or knowledge work, which I think kind of goes back to some of your earlier points.

So Bilal, before we go, I'd like to get your thoughts on, you know, becoming a podcast host for a show all about AI. And as you've been making the TED AI show, what makes this show and your perspective on AI different from whatever else is out there now?

Yeah, you know, it's like I like to joke is, you know, what the world needs is another AI podcast. And so, I mean, what makes the show different? What has me excited? I would say, like, I'm coming at this from a couple of different lenses as a product builder, as a creator myself, as an early stage investor. And of course, it's like just an exceedingly curious person who wants to make sure tech to our previous point has the symbiotic relationship with humans and society at large.

And so there's a lot of dual use technologies that are being developed right now. And there's a lot of hard questions to be answered. And so I view this show as an opportunity to engage with the people that are building the future and are impacted by the future and asking those hard questions. So we can think about sort of the dual futures of AI, the desirable futures, the undesirable futures, and hopefully shift us towards a future that is largely or disproportionately positive for humanity. I don't think...

I'm not naive enough to think that it'll be perfect and we'll create this utopia. But I also think this whole space is moving so fast that it can be overwhelming. So think of this show as a weekly guide for you to live and thrive in a world where AI and really technology is changing everything. In other words, how do we navigate AI before it navigates us? I love that. I love that. I know for one...

explaining what's happening in AI to my friends and family is a daunting task. So I will definitely be pushing folks and our listeners as well to subscribe to the TED AI show. And I'm so grateful that you joined us here on TED Tech. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.

TED Tech is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced by Nina Lawrence, edited by Alejandra Salazar, and fact-checked by Julia Dickerson. Special thanks to Maria Larias, Ferde Grange, Corey Hajim, Daniela Balareso, and Michelle Quint. I'm Sherelle Dorsey. Thanks for listening, and talk to you again next week. ♪

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