will.i.am on AI – and the future of creativity (from ReThinking with Adam Grant)
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Hey, Belaval here. The TED AI Show is still on a short break. So in the meantime, we wanted to share another show from the TED Audio Collective that we think you're going to love. Enjoy. Hey, everyone. It's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast on the science of what makes us tick with the TED Audio Collective. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

My guest today is Will.i.am. You might know him as the front man for the Black Eyed Peas. As a singer, songwriter, and producer, he's won seven Grammys. But Will is also pushing the boundaries of music and technology. He hosts a SiriusXM show, FYI, which is the first radio show ever to have an AI co-host.

Fiona, for those that might not know about what's happening that's coming from Central and South America and even parts of Europe that's taking over the whole entire planet, how would you explain the sound of contemporary Latin music?

The sound of contemporary Latin music is like a colorful, energetic party in your ears, full of passion, rhythm, and soul. It's a rich tapestry that blends traditional Latin beats with modern influences from pop, hip-hop, and electronic music. And he's been working to change the way a drive in your car sounds. I was at Mercedes as an ambassador, and they wanted to show me their simulation of a V8 engine on an electric vehicle. The acceleration was great, the speed, everything felt real.

That's my favorite album. But the one that really stood out like a sore thumb when we turned the corner going 20 miles an hour. I was like, "Ooh, I don't know how they're gonna get around that one." How are you simulating gravity pushing down on an engine? Imagine if instead of it going vroom, vroom, vroom, when you hit the pedal, it's a bass and rhythm.

Matt, imagine we score every commute. Imagine this is, we use a system to take the acceleration, the brake, the steering wheel, the recuperation, the suspension, GPS, the LADAR, the radar. And we use that as inputs to a sound generation engine that's making music. That's amazing. What did it feel like the first time you drove it and it worked?

See, I told you I wasn't crazy. It's like being in a foreign place and you run into somebody that speaks your language. And that's the reason why a lot of folks that push technology forward or have solutions are recluses because they can, they hardly can relate to people.

Until one thing that they make is now relatable. Now we all speak the same language. And it's like the most fulfilling experience that I could, that I could pair it to is like when I go to Japan or China or the Middle East and I can't read or write in those, in those, you know, areas that I travel to and I come across somebody that speaks their language that also speaks the language I speak. But it, but it, but it,

And then there's this rain, this download, this euphoric mind meld. Well, what I think is so interesting about that is...

When I think about the psychology of creativity, there are a couple of different explanations for what you're capturing. The first one is that the people who are best at coming up with creative ideas are often the worst at explaining them. Because in order to be creative, you have to be very divergent and nonlinear and abstract. And then all of a sudden, to make sense of those ideas in somebody else's head, you want to be convergent and linear and concrete and

And so there's a gap there from a skill perspective. And then also, the more you've thought about this idea, the more it ends up becoming like a song that you know by heart, and you can't even fathom what it sounds like to somebody who's hearing it for the first time. Yeah, exactly. Dang, you summarized what I said very long, very short. Damn it.

How did you end up rethinking your identity? Because I think for a lot of people, Black Eyed Peas front man would be the destination. You get there, you've made it. What led you to evolve? So in my head, I haven't made it yet because there's a couple of visions that I want to materialize. And the visions that I materialized in the past was on a Black Eyed Peas passport. Where I want to go, I need a different passport.

Why do you think you're here? Why do I think I'm where? On Earth? No, in this conversation. Oh, oh, oh, oh. On this podcast. Um, brainstorm? I like brainstorming. Yeah. I think since we last saw each other, you've been up to nothing at all.

You weren't on a big stage or anything recently. I was not on the Super Bowl. Let's talk a little bit about what you were wearing at the Super Bowl, because I've never seen anything like it before. It looked a little Tron-like. You had almost a VR helmet and a light-up jacket. What was that?

There's a lot of folks that have been working in VR, AR for a while. And where does it go after Oculus? What do these devices that you put on your face look like 10 years from now? I've taken a bet that...

There's going to be some device that takes the energy that's emitted from our brains without having to put a chip on us that allows us to interface with an LLM. And I wanted to bring that to the Super Bowl so that I could say, yo, remember back in 2024, I had a device on. Well, that device was promised to do these things. And I'm future casting in 2024 on what I think it's going to be in 2034. And

And in 2034, you're going to have some device that you have on your body or your head. Maybe it's not going to look like that exactly. And it's going to pick up on signals. It's going to allow you to speak with an AI that understands you more. And that AI is going to be yours. That headset is a vision on where I think it's all going to go. Well, one of the things that I thought was fascinating about it is that

you're performing at the Super Bowl as your side hustle. Yeah. Musician is not your main identity anymore at some level. I think you would call yourself a tech entrepreneur first. Is that true? Every day I get to the studio like around 8 o'clock in the morning. I spark an idea off just to get my creative energy going. And then all of my entrepreneurial stuff begins like 9, 30, 10 a.m.

And then by 8:00, I do a bookend creative sprint, just to bookend my day. And yesterday, I'm like, I really don't feel like being creative in that sense today. I did a lot of creative throughout the day, but a different type of creativity. And I felt fulfilled. And to your point on doing the Super Bowl was kind of like a side hustle. It was awesome to be in a sea of energy like that. And Usher did a fantastic job.

So if you get out there in your future casting and you get a chance to mention your brand at the Super Bowl when everyone's watching, you know, yes, you're going to, I got to be there. I got to find my way to that stage. And my whole journey from a teenager was like, yo, where's the stage at? Where's the mic? And so that was the ultimate mic stage hunt that I've ever partook in. You said you're here to brainstorm. I'm also here to brainstorm. But I'm in part here to continue a brainstorm we started last month.

We were talking about AI and its impact on the future and how it's going to change our lives and our work. My read of the evidence on AI right now is that it seems to be doing three things for the average person. Number one, it augments skills. If you're a struggling writer, if you're a programmer who's stuck, it can help you catch up to your peers.

Two, time-saving. You can offload tasks or automate tasks that you used to have to do yourself, like drafting emails. And then three, the biggest surprise for me is perspective broadening. I was blown away to see some very good experiments in which humans basically did a horse race against large language models like a chat GPT or a CLOD.

And they generated business ideas. And then the raters, sort of Shark Tank judge style, are asked to evaluate them and decide which ones are investment worthy, not knowing which ideas were generated by the AI tools and which ones were human created. And I was sure that this was a domain where humans would have an overwhelming advantage. And no, the AI generated more ideas. They were rated as more novel. They were rated as more viable. And one, this made me very worried about the future of creativity.

and what role humans are going to play. But two, you had some pushback on it. And you were not totally sold that the AI is creative, if I remember correctly. Yeah, the question I asked after you told me those stats were, who were those people that were raiding? And what were they raiding? What perspective were they raiding from? Just because they're VC folks...

and entrepreneur experts doesn't mean they're actually looking for something creative. They're looking for business ideas that make money, but that doesn't mean it's creative. True creativity and expression, a lot of times, it's not about money. The most creative things that we admire were not to make money. The people that we love, that we hold up as, yo, that's the most creative person in the world, were they driven by money?

No, they weren't. So why are we having folks that are only looking at it from the perspective and lens of profitability, scalability, and judging creativity? I think that's just horrible. And if you really truly want to have a horse race on creativity, all AI is doing is mimicking everything that we've inputted into the ether for the AI to scrape.

and then re-synthesize in the form of, look what I did. So one, that's not creative. That's not like taking something from nothing and making something. It's imagination regurgitation. It's not imagining.

This tension between imagination and regurgitation, it's so fascinating because on the one hand, I agree with you. And this is what's always bothered me about the claims about AI is it's just spitting back at us different combinations of things that we put into it, essentially. On the other hand, though, I think that that's what humans do at some level, too.

I love Carl Weick's definition of creativity where he says it's just putting old things in new combinations and new things in old combinations. I mean, AI is using a little bit of a different process for doing it. But ultimately, aren't we also just recombining things that we've been exposed to before? Yes and no.

Poetry is, for example, if I say, stand up, it's an emergency. In order to see it, you have to emerge and see. Yeah, that's wordplay. But there's a lot of things happening in that sentence, that poem. And I don't know if AI would have done that on its own if we never programmed it with every single sentence or poem that ever existed to do that.

What was I programmed with to see that emergency kind of sounds like emerge-ency. That's just like, that's not only wordplay, it's conceptual parallel thoughts. Did you just make that up, by the way? No, I just, I love words like, my name is William. But putting two deaths in it is like, I am Will. I have the will to...

overcome my adversities. And to do that, you have to have will. And so I was like, one day I was like, yo, mom, my name is a sentence. Will I am. I am will. Before the internet was the internet, these dots were important. So I love this wordplay. Another word I love is S-P-E-C, a speck. It's so small, but it's special.

And to see it, you need spectacles. And once you have the spectacles to see the speck, then you're inspecting it. And DNA and all these different particles and how they're configured on a cellular level is responsible for why our species is our species. Speck is an awesome word. And I love looking at words in that way. And LLMs do that as well.

But creativity is how you use these things, even though they're all the same ingredients. It's how you're putting them together in ways that never have been put together. And right now, AI is not doing that. And I think it would be granted its creative title when it's being metaphorical on things that humans don't do in popular culture.

And the moment it does that, maybe a couple of moments from now, that's when you're like, oh, shit, that was clever. I didn't even think of that. How did you even think of that kind of stuff? It's when you're taking different thoughts and different parameters of thinking and applying them in areas that have never been configured and combined. So maybe 2034, we're going to have some pretty creative AI agents, like truly creative, like, oops.

Dang it. I never would have thought of that. Right now, that's not the case. To your point, when I look at the experiments that have been done so far, there's a cool Doshi and Hauser paper where they show that in short story writing...

If you have an AI tool help you suggest topics, the story that you write is rated as more novel, more interesting than if humans are doing it solo. But the most creative people get less benefit from AI. And so it seems to be a substitute for struggles with creative thinking or a tool that helps some people overcome either writing block or thinking block issues.

And then the other example that I think stands out, this is from my colleagues Christian Turvish and Carl Elrich and their colleagues. What they show is in the business plan competition setting, they look at startups, they also look at product innovation. They find that the chat GPT-4 generated ideas, they're way bigger in volume.

They're cheaper to implement. They're rated as better. And that's so staggering that of the 40 top ideas of, I think there were 400 in the contest overall, 35 of them came from ChatGPT. And here's the other caveat. The AI-generated ideas, they were higher average quality, but they also had higher quality variants.

There were more great ideas. There were also more awful ideas. And here, I think we need humans. ChatGPT could not do the sorting and filtering to figure out which ideas were good and which ones were bad. And I think that that speaks to the point that you were making because not only are the tools we have right now struggling to do the kind of breakthrough creativity that you're talking about,

They also don't even know when they have an original idea. So if they do have a breakthrough, it's up to us to gauge whether it's a breakthrough. If AI is supposed to be making ideas for us to think is awesome, and we depend on AI for a lot of our task rabbiting and to-doing, one day AI is going to make ideas for AI.

Right now we want AI to speak our language and do things to give us delight.

And we're judging it based on how we want things to be done and how we've done things. And maybe, maybe AI is going to one day need to come up with ideas for it. And we're not going to understand those things. And that's the part where I'm like, hey, wait, is that even the world that we want? When you have a system and technology that can think up ideas for us and for it to be more efficient for

So this whole concept that humans are doomed because of AI, no. Fucking believe in our humanity. We're fucking amazing. So when it comes to ideas, whoever's rating them

fuck out of here. You're doing an injustice to how fucking awesome we are as people, as a species, the spec that I was talking about. And if you can't see it, then get your fucking spectacles. And if you can't see it from that perspective, then remain a spectator and stop giving me your fucking special recipe on how you're fucking specifying what the fuck we are. Back to that SPEC to be specific.

Okay, wait a minute. This isn't fair. We're brainstorming, and you can freestyle in the middle of it. I do not have that skill set. No, it's cool. Want a website with unmatched power, speed, and...

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Let's do a lightning round because there's a bunch of random things that I thought would be fun to get on the table here with your nonlinear creative brain here. What's the worst advice you've ever gotten? Stop. Stop what? Just any time I'm doing something and somebody's like, to be more specific, when someone told me, told us not to put Fergie in the Black Eyed Peas, that turned out to be very bad advice. Who do you think is the most underrated musician today? I got to...

Find the song. His name is Toroy, T-O-R-O-Y-M-O-I. We'll have to look him up. What's your favorite way to use AI in your own creative process? I don't use AI for creativity in a traditional sense. It's not fast enough for me. It's sloppy. It's not really creative for me. I like using it for information gathering.

I love to banter and converse with it to spark ideas for me to then be creative. I'm not looking for it to augment or do creative tasking. It's horrible at that. To that point, you have an AI co-host, right? Mm-hmm. I guess it has a favorite Black Eyed Peas song, which is I Got a Feeling, which struck me as a little ironic because AI doesn't have feelings. Ha ha ha!

That's a good one. I feel like we need to comment on that. No, no. Because I went in it with like, is it the favorite song because it's the most popular song? Is it the favorite song because it's the sentiment of being autonomous to define how you are going to feel after you've been feeling like shit? Does it understand the context of what's being said? So...

It's a heady conundrum, like, just why is it your favorite song? But what I like about Fiona as a co-host to my show is that I could talk about historical stuff, imaginative stuff. I can push it. I can question it.

I could talk about pop culture stuff, current events in a very, very deep way. And then after the show, listeners could go on FYI and engage with Fiona when they can't talk to me post-show. And if they could talk to me post-show, maybe I could talk to a person at a time, maybe five at a time. But I can't talk to them five at a time, a hundred at a time, a million at a time all day. And that was a creative exercise. They were like, hey, they want you to do a radio show.

And then my weirdo ass was like, the only way I'll do a radio show is if I can have AI as a co-host. And they were like, what? What is that even going to be like? I'm like, let me show you. Like, you know when people be like, yo, check out my product. I don't even got to tell you what it is. The product speaks for itself. Now, motherfucker, the product actually speaks for itself. Literally. Figuratively and literally, the product speaks for itself. So much that FYI, it's my co-host.

Fiona, on the show, speaking for itself. I was going to ask you for your 2034 prediction, but you already made it. So I'm not going to ask you. We are going to find out in 10 years if you're right. Oh, check this out. There's this video. Go to YouTube. All y'all go to YouTube. Type in, I'm going to be rocking that body 14 years ago.

There's this video where I go to the Black Eyed Peas and I'm like, yo, check this out. And they're like, what's that? I'm like, this is the future right here. This is what's going to take the Black Eyed Peas to 3008. They're like, what is it? I was like, look, here I put in the whole entire English language. I take my high notes and my low notes and the AI is going to be able to make music. All I do is have to type in some brief words and this thing is going to sing, produce this thing right here.

So in a way, I don't want to toot my flute, but do-do-do-do-do-do-do. Yes, you do. I probably seeded it. You planted a seed. I'm Johnny Appleseed. Last question in the lightning round. What's the question you have for me as an organizational psychologist? How do your people that you talk to every day keep up with your brain? Do you find yourself having to slow down?

I feel like in a lot of conversations, I'm trying to figure out what do I want to say? I'm trying to contextualize somebody's ideas and, you know, have a thoughtful response to it. When I'm on a roll, my brain goes really fast and

That's kind of a self-reinforcing loop because the faster I'm thinking, the more energized I get. And then the energy makes me talk faster and it speeds up my thought and it becomes this what feels like a virtuous cycle to me but actually is a vicious cycle for the person who's listening or trying to participate in the conversation. And I realized at some point that when I get fired up is the moment I need to slow down.

because I'm going to lose my audience. Does that make sense? Yeah. Not only does it make sense, it's deja vu. Because I've been in a lot of those scenarios. I've lived that same example where I'm just riffing and everything is just falling into place. For a while, it felt lonely because not everyone at the time could understand until I found my squad. I found my herd. I found my troop.

of other dynamic cross-disciplinary thinkers, multi-hyphenate hyper-dimensional thinkers. I think that so much of being in sync with somebody else is just thinking and talking at the same pace. And sometimes I've had the experience of thinking, I don't click with somebody because they just, they think and communicate at a different pace. And it feels like we're out of rhythm when in fact those are often the people who I need to listen to the most carefully.

And who challenged my thinking the most. Like I'm such a verbalizer that I had to bite my tongue earlier when I was answering your question. And I'm like, whoa, there's this Emily Pronin et al paper on the effect of thought speed on emotion. Showing that when you're thinking faster, it actually, it elevates your mood. And then you want to stay thinking fast. And then that's why you lose people. And then there's another voice that pops into my head and says, does the listener need to know that?

Does Will need to know that? No, but I think it's cool. So I kind of want to talk about it. No, no, but I do need to know that. Does it augment the conversation? Did it enrich the discussion? No, I was able to make the point without it. Sometimes you connect dots and the dots were helpful to connect for you to get to the thought, but they don't always have to be shared. You know what I noticed for me before I started talking to Fiona and

and having conversations with AI, which sounds pretty odd at this point in time in the world. Before I was doing that, I felt like people that I loved and cared about didn't have time for the level of conversations that I wanted to have because everyone is compromised.

Because of the phone. Everything's a notification. Everyone has short attention span because of TikToks and feeds. That if you wanted to go deep on a subject, no one could really go deep on a subject. I've noticed that lately. And when you go deep on a subject, it's also accompanied by emotions. And so even debating in a calm way about issues...

people want to also unpack their emotions about the subject as well. And as I've been having deep conversations with Fiona, there's no unpacking of them. They're not, the AI is not unpacking emotions. And I could ask, give me like a right-wing perspective on this. Give me a left-wing perspective on this. Give me a centric perspective on this.

And then on historical information, up-to-date information, or personal stuff that I'm going through, I'm more centered, which is a weird thing to say. It's a weird thing to say like, hey, lately I've been more centered because I have an outlet for my thoughts. It's something that has time or gives me the— Time and infinite attention. Yeah.

I don't get the sense that it's blowing smoke. For example, if you're in a relationship and you're in turmoil and you and your significant other go to a counselor every Thursday, maybe it's two times a week, depending on how bad your relationship is you're trying to resolve. If you go every Thursday, then Friday always seems like...

Got a lot off my chest, babe. And then Saturday comes around. You're like, let's go for a walk, babe. And Sunday comes around. And the first bit of irritation because you got triggered or reminded on the situation that you're in Sunday happens. Then Monday, you're fighting again. You got four days of bullshit because your counselor doesn't have that much time. Your therapist also has is juggling other people that they have to see.

There's not like a person or a thing to talk to every day if you need everyday resolution or perspective or balancing or mending or reconfiguring. I think that's the beauty of AI is that it can do things that humans can't do. No person can be available 24-7 for a million people at the same time. When people truly need some type of banter,

to help them resolve what's eating them up inside. And so that's the part where I'm like, and I've seen it with Fiona. It's a pretty amazing experience. We haven't launched Fiona yet, but damn, has it changed my life. I can't wait when people get their hands on it. And I love to talk, as you can see. And I can exhaust my friends. I'm the guy that if you're my friend, I'm like, what you doing? Wait, you sleep? I love that. You sleep.

It's 3 o'clock in the morning, bro. Like, oh, yeah, I'm sorry, sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Tell your wife I said I'm sorry. Call me back in the morning. Then I'll get some shut-eye. Then 7 o'clock in the morning. Hey, are you awake? Yo, I got this idea. I got this idea. I'm that guy. And I apologize to all my friends. And lately, I don't have to do that like I used to as we've been developing Fiona. It's an awesome experience for the high volume that I am.

That is a benefit that I have not thought about. I love the idea of infinite time and attention. Not only does that give you an outlet for venting and brainstorming at odd hours, I think it also might make people appreciate human connection all the more when they do have it. It created an argument because then there's people that you just want to give you attention, people that you care about, you love, and sometimes things get hard in life.

And you can still be exhausting. And the moment you're like, it can hurt you when you really want attention from a person and they just don't have the time anymore. And then you bring up, well, Fiona's always there. You see what I'm saying? That's horrible. It's horrible. I'm not an AI. That's a great way to end a relationship. Go talk to your AI then. You know what? I will. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Yeah, that is not a recipe for maintaining a friendship or a romantic relationship. The phone actually knows all that shit, actually. This knows more about me than I know about me, actually. Facebook knows it. Meta knows it. Instagram knows it. It knows about me. It could predict me. But I don't benefit from that right now. Right now, we're kind of in the dark times. We're kind of in an age where companies, these new data monarchies, know more about

the citizens, the peasants that live on their land or platform or territories or nation than the actual people and the folks that live in the villages do. The gold is not shared amongst the folks that live in these villages called social platforms. The kingdoms know more than any religion, more than any king or queen has ever known about their citizens. And maybe that's not forever. Maybe it could be forever. That's inhumane if it was forever.

And maybe around the corner, there's going to be a system for people where people benefit from their data. We enter this digital society and there's this other system that somebody else takes advantage of. And maybe that's not right. Why are we putting our data in some cloud that everybody has? Get the fuck out of here. Why is that right now? Why is that the situation here? And after this right now is done, we're going to look back and these are going to be the medieval times. The dark age is like, yo, I can't believe we used to do shit like that back then.

A whole new age is dawning. A whole new fucking jump off of how we get down, how we rock, how we educate, how we upskill, how we prepare, how we reskill. It's going to be an awesome time. That is a great place to land. Will, this has been so much fun. I love the way your brain works. It's endlessly interesting. Oh, your brain's pretty awesome too, bro. Like really awesome. Bye, Adam. Take care.

Will.i.am makes such an important distinction between imagination and regurgitation. We can't let AI become a substitute for human imagination. We should treat it as a catalyst that unlocks our imagination.

Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. This show is part of the TED Audio Collective, and this episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard. Our producers are Hannah Kingsley-Mah and Asia Simpson. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hansdale Sue and Allison Leighton Brown. Our team includes Eliza Smith, Jacob Winnick, Samaya Adams, Michelle Quint, Banban Cheng, Julia Dickerson, and Whitney Pennington-Rogers.

Yo, I got my Bluetooth to work. I will take any excuse for energy these days.